I try not to react to every dumbass thing some celebrity says on a podcast or in an interview because ranting about stupidity could become a full-time, rather soul-sucking job.
But there are times when someone says something so monumentally clueless and tone-deaf that I can't control my urge to crank out a few hundred snarky words in response.
This brings us to the recent Jerry Seinfeld interview in the New Yorker, in which the mega-millionaire comedian with a new high-profile Netflix movie on the way complains that the "Extreme Left" and "P.C. Culture" have ruined TV comedy:
“Nothing really affects comedy. People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it,” Seinfeld said. “It used to be, you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, “Cheers” is on. Oh, “MASH” 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.”
But the great one does note that audiences can still see their favorite edgy comedy in clubs, where comics are cranking out George Floyd jokes and sophisticated anti-trans bits without fear of the Left's gatekeepers:
Seinfeld noted that comedy fans are “now going to see stand-up 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.”
What is this "we" you are talking about, Jerry? No one ever had to police Jerry Seinfeld's act because his act was famously non-controversial. His observational comedic styling was so familiar and safe that it became a comedy trope that other edgier comics mocked in the same way local bar bands in the early aughts used to make fun of Nickelback.
I can almost guarantee that no audience member ever complained "You're comparing white and wheat bread? Woah, slow down, you Fascist."
As for the "going through a committee" complaint, that is literally the nature of television comedy. And all of those shows that Seinfeld mentions as bastions of comedic freedom had their own battles with executives over content and humor. During the run of The Dick Van Dyke Show, there were a number of battles over what might be permissible and even convincing the network to allow Mary Tyler Moore to wear her iconic Capri pants instead of a dress led to a showdown with the actress.
All In The Family barely got on the air at all, as CBS executives worried about some of the humor:
In the opening scene, Archie and Edith arrive home early from church and catch Mike kissing Gloria amorously as he carries her toward the bedroom. Archie is scandalized: “11:10 on a Sunday morning,” he grumbles in his thick Queens patois.
This was all a bit much for CBS, especially the “Sunday morning” line—which clearly suggested that the young couple was on their way to have sex (during daylight, no less). The network insisted that Lear take it out; he refused. Wood offered a compromise: The line could stay in if Lear agreed to push the pilot episode back to the second week and run the projected second show first. Lear refused again. He believed the pilot episode presented “Archie in full,” with all his prejudices and animosities on open display. Airing it was like jumping into the deep end of a pool; CBS and Lear together would “get fully wet the first time out,” as Lear later described it. In what would become a common occurrence, Lear told Wood he would quit if CBS started with the second episode.
And even Seinfeld had its own content problems with NBC executives, who reportedly pushed back hard when confronted by things such as an episode that centered around having a contest about masturbation. Strangely, Jerry Seinfeld doesn't seem to recall any of those problems in 2024.
And that is the thing that perhaps most annoys me about Seinfeld's comments. Yes, 2024 is not a great time for broadcast TV comedies. But honestly, it's not a great time for any kind of broadcast TV show.
The popularity of TV comedies ebbs and flows. Before NBC launched The Cosby Show, the network sitcom was seen as an almost dead TV format. Ten years later, comedies were once again an endangered species as audiences grew tired of endless variations of the same show.
It's instructive that if you look at social media today, some of the biggest pushback over Seinfeld's comments comes from people in the TV trenches, who are trying to get shows on the air in 2024. They don't seem to agree with his premise and I trust their take over someone who in a recent interview also argued "the movie business is over." Although the movie business seems to have enough life in it to allow him the opportunity to direct his first film. And no, I'm not adding screenshots of their tweets in this piece, because I'm not one of those publications.
One last thought about this comment from Seinfeld:
“We did an episode of the [‘Seinfeld’] in the nineties where Kramer decides to start a business of having homeless people pull rickshaws because, as he says, ‘They’re outside anyway,'” he continued. “Do you think I could get that episode on the air today?…We would write a different joke with Kramer and the rickshaw today. We wouldn’t do that joke. We’d come up with another joke. 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.”
Well...there might be another reason you'd have to rewrite the Kramer bit today, given that Michael Richards has essentially been self-exiled from stand-up comedy since a tape surfaced in 2006 showing him having a racist meltdown on the stage of The Laugh Factory.
But Seinfeld has a point when he says comedic tastes change. However, they change for a lot of different reasons - people get tired of certain jokes, and society changes in a way that renders some jokes pointless and without context.
One thing about comedy that apparently doesn't change is that old white guys are gonna be cranky and forgetful about how they got to be where they are now.
