The fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s HBO comedy series, is over, but people are still talking about its second-to-last episode, “The Survivor,” which upends traditional views of everything from adultery to the afterlife. The episode’s centerpiece is a dinner party celebrating the renewal of Larry and Cheryl’s wedding vows. Colby Donaldson, one of the stars of the reality series Survivor and a friend of Larry’s rabbi, captures the attention of family and friends with his stories of deadly snakebites in the Australian outback. Suddenly, a withered man with a glass eye interrupts. “Let me tell you, I was in a concentration camp. You never even suffered one minute in your life compared to what I went through,” says Solly, a friend of Larry’s father. The conversation quickly devolves into a competition:
COLBY: We had very little rations, no snacks.
SOLLY: Snacks, what are you talking snacks? We didn’t eat, sometimes for a week, for a month….
COLBY: Have you even seen the show?
SOLLY: Did you ever see our show? It was called the Holocaust!