Is Seinfeld On to Something or Is He Just an Old Man Barking at the Kids in His Yard?
”It used to be you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on,” he said in the interview. “’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 PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people. 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.”—Jerry Seinfeld
The headlines make it sound like Seinfeld is railing against the Woke Kids being offended but I don’t think that’s where he leads us. It isn’t the offended that stymies him; it’s the committees of producers and gatekeepers that are bending over for the perception of possible offense that gets in the way of comedy.
Certainly, his referencing is dated. Network ‘Must See’ TV has been a dinosaur for at least a decade and streaming television is in a golden age of incredibly good shows. The sudden democratization that came with intense demand for more and more TV for an increasing number of streaming platforms has garnered us some of the best television in the history of the medium (although, like the term ‘film,’ the moniker ‘television’ is becoming a poor substitute for what it actually is).
For as long as I've been alive there have groups dictating what we can and cannot express. In the 80's it was the religious right creating warning stickers on album covers. In the 90's, Bill Maher jumped hoops for nine years with his Politically Incorrect talk show until he expressed what some thought was an anti-American sentiment regarding 9/11 and he was summarily canned for it. Today, we have the right screaming about gay-friendly books and the left fainting over words they deem hate speech.
The thing Seinfeld seems to miss is that without those factions telling us all what to say and think, there is no need for the subversive comic. Without the rabid transgender activists, Chapelle would move on to other topics. Without Trump, Stephen Colbert would be Jimmy Fallon. Without the right, there would no Hannah Gadsby. Without the left, Bill Burr would just be an angry sports nut.
Sure, Jerry complains that comedy has taken a hit from the DEI units installed in Hollywood but he's loaded for beyond life and, if he wanted to do Seinfeld 90's humor today, no one could stop him.
The comedy that sticks, that makes people think, that is both funny andprovocative, is that which bucks the system of the cultural day, risks offending folks, and is wise cracked across the cultural divide. That was never Seinfeld's schtick so the argument has less weight than people would like it to have.
