Awkwardness Or, the Cultural Logic of Larry David

Awkwardness or, The Cultural Logic of Larry David University of Amsterdam Research Master Media Studies Graduate School of Humanities Peter Gigg Student Number: 10396462 [email protected] Supervisor: dr. A.M. Geil Peter Gigg Awkwardness 2 Abstract Awkwardness is something we are all familiar with. We recognise it when we experience it and identify it in other people or situations, but the question of what awkwardness is remains crucially unanswered. This thesis will take the contemporary prevalence of ‘Awkward Comedy’ in popular culture as impetus for a theoretical and philosophical study of awkwardness’ structures and effects. With HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm as its chief case study, this project asks what awkwardness tells us about the contemporary world. It shows that feelings such as awkwardness are not ‘natural’ occurrences – rather, they are informed by particular social and political movements, reflecting the logics and assumptions of their moment in history. Awkwardness as read through Curb both evidences its socio-political context and offers a means of critique, interrogating the standards of normativity through which it comports itself. It demonstrates the determinism inherent to our ‘free’ society, and affords a means of emancipation, through the active pursuit and embrace of our awkwardness. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 3 Contents Introduction ............................................................................................... 4 Chapter 1 – Existential Awkwardness ...................................... 13 Chapter 2 - Awkward Comedy .................................................. 29 Chapter 3 – An Awkward Politics ........................................ 45 Some Awkward Conclusions .............................................. 59 Bibliography .......................................................................... 64 Peter Gigg Awkwardness 4 Introduction – “it was kind of an awkward moment…” Awkwardness seems to both precede Larry David and follow in his wake. As the creator, lead writer, and star of the quasi-biographical HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, David has a knack for identifying and constructing locus-points of the awkward – uncomfortable or ‘difficult’ social situations which he is forced to navigate with vary degrees of non-success. This awkwardness is a slippery concept, somehow both a feeling unto itself, a modifier of other feelings, and a reaction to a broader, societal, ‘feeling.’ And yet, despite this elusivity, Larry discloses its critical potentials quite succinctly; when a stranger accuses him of being a “self-loathing Jew” for whistling a Wagner melody, he deadpans, “I may hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish.” Indeed, his self-loathing has everything to do with everything else. Aside from its talented ensemble cast and brilliant improvisatory dialogue, the show’s enduring success resides in this deceptively sophisticated oscillation between self-hatred and societal-hatred, a railing against one’s own inadequacies and the failings of our contemporary milieu. In this tension, Curb discloses the means by which the human subject is produced, through the essential incompatibility of the individual and the collective. To be awkward is to experience oneself as lacking, but also to experience the society which produces the self as inherently lacking. In this light, my thesis shall consider the essential structures and generative potentials of awkwardness, as read through Curb Your Enthusiasm. Awkwardness can only exist relative to its context, the guiding terms of ‘normality’ which stipulate the standard from which awkwardness deviates. Could the essential awkwardness of Curb then advance a vital critique of the conditions of western society? In its very existence, awkwardness problematises the logic of everyday conduct, demonstrating the ‘failings’ of conventional ideology. But in doing so, awkwardness problematises its own logic, discrediting the existential basis of normativity through which it comports itself. Establishing a workable definition of awkwardness evidences some of these Peter Gigg Awkwardness 5 cyclical processes. It is clearly a defining ‘mood’ of this contemporary moment – the prevailing notion that things don’t quite make sense, that one is constantly struggling to keep up with an ever-advancing schema of societal codes and ‘norms’ – but it is hard to specify exactly what awkwardness is. Colloquial attempts at definition often approach basic tautology: awkwardness is simply that which is awkward. Official definitions hardly fare any better. Merriam- Webster variously stipulates the awkward as: - lacking dexterity or skill - lacking ease or grace - lacking social grace and assurance - not easy to handle or deal with Is awkwardness then to be understood purely as a negative concept, a fundamental lack in the subject’s social ‘being,’ or something that they are not doing? This seems somewhat discordant with the endemic scale of modern awkwardness; if awkwardness is so widely felt, then doesn’t this fundamentally challenge the ‘standard-ness’ of the standard from which it deviates? Likewise, these various definitions are only relevant when read in relation to a single subject; if an entire generation is principally “lacking social grace and assurance,” then this calls into question our normative criteria of social grace and assurance. This last notion of “not easy to handle or deal with” ironically also speaks of any attempt to grasp the concept in its entirety – a further tautology. Rather appropriately, it would appear that awkwardness can be quite awkward. As if to support this, Merriam-Webster offers something of an awkward sub- definition – “showing the result of a lack of expertness.” What is this expertness to which the awkward pertains? In staging the hypothetical questions awkwardness necessitates, we are beginning to consider awkwardness as reflecting and commenting on its particular societal context. However, in turn, this reduces awkwardness to a mere “result” of some other condition. I think it is more productive to think of it as both result of a pre-existing circumstance, and a specific circumstance in its own right. Or rather, awkwardness on a societal level Peter Gigg Awkwardness 6 produces awkwardness on a social level, which then cyclically informs the principles of a society. Similarly, we can think of awkwardness as a feeling or mood in its own right (“Well, that was awkward…”), and as a modifier of other feelings - one can experience awkward joy, awkward tears, and indeed awkward laughter. Perhaps then, it is better to think of it as something of a ‘meta-mood’, somehow both general and particular at the same time, and in the same movement. A cursory look at the etymology of awkward is useful. In his pop-philosophy essay Awkwardness, Adam Kotsko proffers the following: The -ward of awkward is the selfsame -ward as in forward or backward. As for the first syllable, it comes from the Middle English awke, which designated something turned in the wrong direction. (13) Here we have an integral element of movement, which will recur frequently in the theory I later address. More pertinent at this stage is the directional quotient, implying a subject (whether consciously or not) specifically turning away from normative ‘being’. I think it is crucial to state that this ‘wrong’ direction is not a binary opposite of the ‘rightward’ movement, but can be a myriad of counter- normative positions and directions, such that the mere existence of awkwardness repudiates our basic societal conceptions of right and wrong. To be awkward is a movement perennially out of step with received practices, but one which requires at least a basic knowledge of societal customs so as to keep it from the realm of blissful ignorance. To be awkward is to understand one’s own deviance, but to be somehow unable (or unwilling) to assume the ‘correct’ stance. Quite tellingly, little social theory addresses the phenomenon of awkwardness. This is maybe a product of its very contemporaneity, with theorists having not yet 'caught up' with a condition still in development. Alternately, this speaks of a sociopolitical environment in which awkwardness has become effectively naturalised, assumed as something which simply 'is', a necessary condition of Peter Gigg Awkwardness 7 our being, rather than an emergent category of experience in its own right. If we understand awkwardness in terms of its essential deviation from the standards a society ordains, it can be wielded as a flexible means of societal critique, pointing to the means by which ‘standards’ are produced and standard-ised. Similarly, the self-consciousness engendered in the awkward moment affords a remarkably capable means to examine our own subject position from an ‘exterior perspective,’ since “awkward moments have a way of pitting ourselves against our own history” (Batuman). Awkwardness then allows the subject to assume a critical distance from their self and selfhood. In unpicking awkwardness, and establishing its essential structure, we can critique internal and external processes of governmentality and self-regulation as integral to our normative, hegemonic, society. Furthermore, the difficulty in establishing a fixed definition or model for awkwardness should not necessarily be considered a hindrance. Feelings that are in flux, or a state of development, can inform a more nuanced understanding of societal determinism than a dependence on established models of behavior. In the chapter “Structures of Feeling,”

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