When baby boomer comedian Larry David incorporated “Gee, Officer Krupke” into a 2009 episode of his TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm, he showed more than his age. David’s “Krupke” renaissance exposed how juvenile delinquency has gone upscale during the five decades following the release of the movie of West Side Story.
The song “Gee, Officer Krupke” pits showbiz against all of the other liberal institutions of post-World War II America. Like improvising comedians working out a performance, the street-corner hoodlums of West Side Story adopt the attitudes and viewpoints of middle-class authority’s mouthpieces (the helping professions) regarding the “social disease” of juvenile delinquency.
The kids know that Krupke, the beat cop they see nightly, is just the figurehead for a system that is, despite its complexity, united with him in cluelessness and impotence—so they end the song with a curse too prosaic even to be profane: “Gee, Officer Krupke, krup you!” “Krupke” epitomizes how Jewish sophisticates Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim fused empathy with social critique.
In Curb Your Enthusiasm, David is delighted to come across a uniformed cop named Krupke (who doesn’t know from West Side Story) and grabs the chance to explain “krup you” his way: “They wanted to say ‘Fuck you,’ but in the ’50s on Broadway, Sondheim couldn’t.” Does David consider his HBO prerogative to work blue the fulfillment of previous generations’ vulgar showbiz dreams? Later in the episode, he drives around L.A. while rousingly singing his new favorite song as if it were a personal anthem.
The joke is funny, its point unmistakable: David’s narcissistic, almost autistic disregard for others, which gives Curb its bite, also makes him TV’s oldest, wealthiest juvenile delinquent. The less funny undercurrent of this “Krupke” rendition, however, suggests that David has updated the song’s defiant defensiveness to suit his privileged circumstances.
David’s “Krupke” indicates the extent of our cultural descent since 1961, echoing social critic Christopher Lasch’s white-flight insights in the book The Revolt of the Elites (1994). It helps explain why even Sondheim eventually lost the common touch. Over time, those middle-class authorities mocked in Sondheim’s lyrics responded with their own imitation of delinquency: upwardly mobile fecklessness, with cluelessness intact. And David was right. In 2009: The combination of elitism and delinquency should provoke us to profanity. It’s unworthy of the complexity contained in Sondheim and Bernstein’s perfect (not timid) “krup you.”
For all West Side Story articles, please go to:
To the Curb
Dance as Narrative (and More)
Street Signs
Utopian Variations
A Landmark Soundtrack
Robbins’ Road to Hollywood
