On the Seinfeld backlash
Um, Jerry Seinfeld was never funny? Get the hell outta here.
I wrote about the Seinfeld backlash at The Rubesletter…
Excerpt below:
It used to be that if you didn't like a person, you didn't consume interviews with them. That was, uh, helpful. Now, thanks to the algorithm, we surf a constant wave of "I hate this person...so tell me what they said!"
The latest target in the crosshairs is Jerry Seinfeld. His media tour is surfacing my least favorite aspect of dunk culture: the whole “Actually, I never thought he was [funny, interesting, talented]” thing.
Um, Jerry Seinfeld was never funny? Get the hell outta here.
For the full Seinfeld standup experience, get on YouTube and watch the dozens (hundreds!?) of TV sets he did in the 80’s on Carson, Letterman, etc. Bulletproof stuff. The man is a master craftsman.
He’s not about specials like other comics. No one did the whole “new hour special every two years” thing back then. Just do some digging though – there’s so much gold to discover.
Jerry’s standup provides a master class in rhythm, word choice, clever observations, distinctive pov, and flawless delivery. If you say he was never funny, that’s just letting the rest of us know your opinion on comedy can safely be ignored.
“His standup is just observations – there’s no personal vulnerability.” There’s no personal life stuff in the comedy of Mitch Hedberg, George Carlin, or Rodney Dangerfield. Still, you know exactly who all of them are as artists and no one else could duplicate them. That’s a form of being personal too…
“I’m tired of these old comedians complaining about cancel culture.” Me too. But that’s not what he’s doing anymore. (Admittedly, he’s veered that way in the past.)
I wanna tell the sensitive types attacking him on social media that, nowadays, he seems way more on their side than they think. He’s always comparing comedy to skiing and says, “They move the gates like in the slalom. Culture — the gates are moving. Your job is to be agile and clever enough that, wherever they put the gates, I’m going to make the gate.”
In his Bari Weiss interview, she keeps trying to bait him into saying woke folks are ruining comedy and cancel culture is a big problem. Over and over, his reply is "No, it's not." He’s constantly advocating that comedians need to change with the times.
[Read the rest/subscribe to the Rubesletter here.]
Yeah, I’m with you on this. I recall catching a comedy special of his in high school, years before the sitcom, and becoming an instant fan. I also recall thinking there was no way a sitcom with him would preserve what I liked about him; at the time there was little precedent for a TV comedy actually giving us the essence of a comic. It was usually a comic doing a bunch of dialogue written by some shitty tv writer and giving us at best a smudgy xerox of the comic’s sensibility.
His standup was great, and his show an endless source of entertainment that alternated my comedy DNA, which means it altered me as an artist and as a person. I feel sorry for people who literally don’t think he’s funny. I guess they find joy in life somehow, but I’d prefer not to know.