When Fred Armisen played an Orthodox Jew in a Yom Kippur episode

Justice for "Difficult People!"

Every time I rewatch an episode of the Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner show “Difficult People,” I get mournful and giddy all at once. Mournful because the show, which aired between 2015 and 2017, should have gotten more than three seasons, and giddy because of the reason it should never have been canceled — every line is so funny and brilliant it deserves to be framed (or made into a stylish wallpaper to adorn a Julie Kessler-like apartment).

If you’ve never watched the show, the “Billy on the Street” star and the Joan Rivers writer (yes, Klausner worked as a writer on the late comedian’s reality shows; you can hear them gab here) star in “Difficult People” as their own id-led alter egos, two aspiring actors and comedians: Billy Epstein, who currently works as a waiter, and Julie Kessler, who channels her comedy writing skills mostly into a blog of TV episode recaps. Both are guided by (mostly) their worst impulses. It’s a bit of “Seinfeld” and “Curb” if those shows were queer and fabulous, but it’s also a marvelous magical creature all of its own.

Aside from Klausner and Eichner, it also featured “Precious” star Gabourey Sidibe as Billy’s boss at the cafe where he works, Cole Escola before they became a Broadway sensation in “Oh, Mary!” as Billy’s beyond quirky co-worker, Matthew, who engages in constant, vicious verbal sparring with Billy, and James Urbaniak as Julie’s WASP-y husband Arthur, who works for PBS and is wonderfully straight-laced and adoring while also bringing some of the funniest lines of the show. Lucy Liu, Amy Sedaris, John Cho and many other incredible actors also guest star.

This show, whose two protagonists are Jewish actors playing overtly Jewish characters, is also one of the reasons I struggle with arguments about authentic Jewish casting — the non-Jewish actors who play Jews in this show just destroy me. Especially Andrea Martin as Julie’s overbearing therapist mom who manages to subvert the tired Jewish mother stereotype by being a gorgeous badass. And then there’s Billy’s Orthodox brother, Garry (yes, with two Rs, as Billy laments), played by the straightest of straight men, Fred Armisen, who has this adorable, innocent and slightly disturbing quality to him.

We first meet Garry in episode four of the show, “The Courage of the Soldier” (there’s a disturbingly hilarious storyline about veterans), a Yom Kippur episode in which Billy gives in and agrees to spend the “holiest day of the year,” as Garry calls it, with his brother, his cranky wife Rucchel, played by the very Jewish Jackie Hoffman (most recently “Only Murders in the Building,” and basically almost every show you’ve ever watched) and their two daughters, including Tal who tells her uncle that her bat mitzvah theme is “it gets better.”

“Are you gay?” Billy asks her, to which she replies, “I wish, just chubby.”

In the episode we do see Rucchel criticize Tal for her eating, which unfortunately is a lived experience for many a teen girl, but her uncle, who is supposed to play the worst version of himself in the show, tells her that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the way she looks. It’s one of the little moments that remind me, not usually a fan of shows about unlikeable people, why I love “Difficult People” so much. At its heart, it is about two somewhat horrid kvetchers, yes, but it’s also full of love — Billy and Julie are genuinely wonderful friends to each other, and despite his struggles with his family, he does try his best to show up for his brother, as much as he can bear. If I can be a little maudlin for a moment, this show is a kind of TV tikkun olam, showing a diverse cast of characters whose minority status is never a central part of their role. And even though humor is at the center of “Difficult People,’’ it does offer poignant social critique and examinations for those willing to see them.

Anyway, back to Yom Kippur. The break fast meal opens with Garry telling Billy that before he starts with the blessings, he’d love him to know that he is absolutely OK with him being gay, to which a kippah-clad Billy reponds by telling his brother that he is still coming to terms with the fact that Garry is a Billy Joel fan. The dinner soon devolves into a cacophony of Jewish “cooperative overlapping” (i.e. interrupting) with the family bickering at each other, as Garry asks his brother why he is so uncomfortable visiting him and his family. Billy breaks down by yelling that he doesn’t understand ״when everything got so Jewish.״

When they were kids, Billy claims, they didn’t even fast on Yom Kippur (which, to be fair, kids aren’t supposed to fast on Yom Kippur!) to which a shaken Garry responds with, “It’s the holiest Jewish day of the year,” prompting Billy to tell him about his holiest night of the year: the Golden Globes.

“I don’t care about the blessings,” he tells his brother. “I care about the SAG awards, and no one cares about those. Show business, Garry. That’s what I care about.” (Honestly, can you tell me you wouldn’t frame this line??)

A stunned silence echoes through the Suffolk County home, tackily decorated with an industrial amount of wooden trim and basic Judaica. But only for a moment, because Tal then rightly asserts that “that’s the most Jewish thing I’ve ever heard.”

We later find out that pop culture is what the Epstein brothers connected on, through movie nights in which Billy loved watching “Mannequin” and “Big Business” (in real life, Eichner would go on to star and write his own rom-com, “Bros,” so there’s some foreshadowing here, maybe??) and Garry became obsessed with “Shoah” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” Something about having Billy respond with, “You always had a soft spot for Topol” really gets me.

I have complex feelings about Fred Armisen, but in this particular case I think casting him as Garry and dressing him in button-up shirts covered with cable knit sweaters is lowkey genius. It really takes away all the possibility of portraying Orthodox Jews in a stereotypical way. Does he throw in a Yiddish word here and there? Sure, but it’s all understated. Judaism is never the butt of the joke, and somehow this episode warmly explores what it means to have a sibling that has a very different life than you, one that you just can’t relate to. And at the end of it? Garry really pulls through for his brother.

Jackie Hoffman, who is very much Jewish (she plays the reigning Jewish matchmaker in “Maisel”) as Rucchel is a different story. She’s a constantly cranky Jewish mom, critical of everything. But you can’t avoid stereotypes sometimes, especially when they’re based in truth. She’s also part of an honestly enchanting side-plot of “Blade Stallion,” a season two episode that Julie dubs “the porn episode,” in which she graduates from a continuing ed course about Yiddish poetry and winds up reading one such poem at an impromptu open mic at the cafe Billy works at. The poem is 90% the word dybbuk, and yet somehow I love it. The worst thing about the episode is that Andrea Martin’s Marylin Kessler then takes the mic and tells us she is going to sing “Send in the Clowns” with no musical accompaniment and yet we don’t get to see that marvel.

Have you watched “Difficult People”? Are you going to tell your family “I don’t care about the blessings, I care about the SAG Awards” at your High Holiday celebration this year? Let me know in the comments.