Jerry Seinfeld Must Be Joking
His latest comments show his ignorance about both his industry and his craft.
Jerry Seinfeld’s “brand” is someone who loves the art of comedy. In addition to co-creating and starring in one of the most successful sitcoms of all time, Seinfeld has packed houses as a stand-up, and the show itself was bookended by his stand-up bits. In 2002, he starred in the documentary Comedian, which looked at his behind-the-scenes work as a stand-up comedian compared to an up-and-comer in the business. In 2011, Seinfeld co-starred in the one-hour HBO special Talking Funny alongside Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais, and Louis CK about the comedy industry (it has aged poorly). For seven years, Seinfeld has hosted the interview series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which further showcases how much Seinfeld loves comedy and his fellow comedians (or at least the ones he invites into his fancy cars).
While out promoting his new movie Unfrosted (a Netflix film about the battle for toaster pastry supremacy, and which is largely a massive whiff), Seinfeld bemoaned the current state of the sitcom. In an interview with The New Yorker titled “The Scholar of Comedy” (there’s that brand again), Seinfeld says:
Nothing really affects comedy. People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it. It used to be, you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, “Oh, ‘Cheers’ is on. Oh, ‘m*a*s*h’ is on. Oh, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is on. ‘All in the Family’ is on.” You just expected, There’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well, guess what—where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people. Now they’re going to see standup comics because we are not policed by anyone. The audience polices us. We know when we’re off track. We know instantly and we adjust to it instantly. But when you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups—“Here’s our thought about this joke.” Well, that’s the end of your comedy.
When the interviewer mentions how Seinfeld co-creator Larry David just finished a successful 24-year run on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld brushes it off by saying David was “grandfathered in.” When it comes to the fact that there are no sitcoms being picked up on network television, Seinfeld puts the blame on studio executives too scared of liberal blowback:
If Larry was thirty-five, he couldn’t get away with the watermelon stuff and Palestinian chicken . . . and HBO knows that’s what people come here for, but they’re not smart enough to figure out, How do we do this now? Do we take the heat, or just not be funny? And what they’ve decided to be is, Well, we’re not going to do comedies anymore. There were no sitcoms picked up on the fall season of all four networks. Not one. No new sitcoms.
Seinfeld is talking about two different things, and they’re both wrong. The first is talking about the television business, and the other is what people are allowed to make jokes about. When it comes to network television, it’s kind of remarkable that Seinfeld is just completely eliding the business realities that he must know are there. Network television as a whole is dying because it’s wedded to a media environment that’s quickly fading. Viewers don’t make time for a sitcom because they don’t have to. They’ll catch it on streaming. Furthermore, if “grumble grumble kids today don’t like sitcoms” was true, then why were Friends and The Office such streaming staples? If Seinfeld’s argument were true and it was a matter of content rather than business model driving network decisions, then shouldn’t there be a new hit network drama we’re all talking about?
Seinfeld’s argument feels like it has to be circumscribed just to the network realm because once he starts venturing into cable or streaming, his claim falls apart completely. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been on the air for 16 seasons with a devoted following throughout that time. It’s also a show where they named their first episode (airing in 2005) “The Gang Gets Racist,” and frequently make light of how the main characters are some of the worst people on the planet. And what about shows like Silicon Valley? or Veep? Were they also “grandfathered in” in the mid-2010s? What about Hacks?
Furthermore, the fact that Seinfeld would romanticize the days of M*A*S*H and All in the Family when those shows were groundbreaking for their era only shows that he’s completely unwilling to engage with the idea that comedy changes over time. While there are certainly timeless comedies, comedy is also a moving target, something that Seinfeld says in the same interview. “Culture—the gates are moving,” Seinfeld says in comparing how the gates get moved in competitive skiing. “Your job is to be agile and clever enough that, wherever they put the gates, I’m going to make the gate.” I agree that you need to be agile enough to stay relevant, but that has nothing to do with concerns that the audience is now too sensitive to take a joke.
The grand irony of all of this is that Seinfeld, heralded as one of the great observational comedians of all time, seems unable to look in the mirror. He can’t seem to wrap his head around the fact that a guy who has been extremely wealthy for the last few decades may not have the deepest insights about today’s culture and why it’s shifting. If anything, it seems like Seinfeld is seeking to flatter himself as someone who came in at the end, and produced one of the last great sitcoms before all the youngsters got too offended to laugh at comedy.
Seinfeld’s not wrong that the environment shifted. If he had argued that the half-hour comedy now belongs more to dramatic skewing shows like The Bear and Barry, and the idea of the multi-camera sitcom has died off, then that’s a fair appraisal. There’s no shame in saying that your kind of comedy would have a difficult time finding an audience because tastes change and so do viewing habits. But to whine about the kids these days are too sensitive shows that Seinfeld isn’t a “scholar of comedy” but rather a remedial student, and one who is still struggling to grasp the material.