Seinfeld: Classic or Dud

As for the specifics of the holiday, Frank had an aluminum pole because he appreciated the “very high strength-to-weight ratio” and found tinsel to be distracting. The O’Keefe family had something slightly more… unusual. “The reality of the holiday was too peculiar to show on television,” O’Keefe says. “The real symbol of the holiday was a clock inside a bag nailed to the wall and nearby a sign that says, ‘F*ck Fascism.’ That doesn’t fly on network TV. Either Alec or Jeff came up with the idea of the pole and the strength to weight ratio.”

caught the last 5 minutes of the backwards episode "the betrayal" last night and for some reason id never seen it! i can literally recite most Seinfeld episodes, had a torrent of the complete series on my computer from my late teens to late twenties that I watched like crazy, have watched it regularly in syndication for a decade, and most notably i said to my wife like a week ago "i wish somehow there were some Seinfeld episodes i hadn't seen because ive seen them all too many times". my mind is blown.

― trickle-down ergonomics (jim in glasgow), Friday, April 8, 2016 10:23 AM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've just realised why I've not seen this episode on tv : the depiction of India is kind of terrible and George says that he should be able to have sex with Elaine as reparations for jerry having had sex with his current girlfriend before they met. It's an egregiously gross Seinfeld episode. Also not very funny

it's pretty memorable imo. had the reverse time gimmick, elaine telling the truth on schnopps, susan coming back for a bizarre cameo with "you can stuff your sorries in a sack, mister!"

the Kramer / Jerry relationship origin story that closes it out is pretty classic

well his netflix stand up special is about 50% hokum and not very funny. you'd think with all the time he's had he would have thought up some better jokes than 'men like to fix things' shit.

yeah i said elsewhere it's muppet level jokes - mileage may vary

The guy was only ever worth a laugh when he was playing a humanized Larry David. Now they’re both obsolete.

i know most comedians come off like assholes and probably are assholes in real life, but seinfeld seems like such an asshole

i think that mighta helped the sitcom tbqh

I think you're both right

I would like to add that thinking back on Seinfeld and saying to oneself “it wasn’t THAT funny, and Jerry is an asshole” is hopefully a lagging, rather than leading, indicator that we are living in Peak Cynicism

ill buy Seinfeld himself being obsolete but ppl still love Larry David and actively await his new stuff

you'd think with all the time he's had he would have thought up some better jokes than 'men like to fix things' shit

isn't the premise that he's doing his bits form the late 70s?

The Seinfeld stand up was pretty enjoyable..and yeah he's doing bits from the late 70s

the show has def become a period piece in a lot of ways. not just the hair and the shirts and the decor, but, as happens to much comedy, what it thinks is funny. a ton of it still connects and is just as spectacularly well-timed and delivered as always, but a lot of the dating and sex stuff has struck me as kinda cringey in more recent viewings, and the racial typing will probably someday get us to a point where certain episodes quietly disappear from syndication, like with looney tunes.

George is timeless. The rest is dated, yeah, to the point where I mainly watch the show to get that fuzzy feeling of how good we had it in the 90's

this show is chicken soup for my soul, desert island tv. it also takes me back to my parents pre-divorce show the show is intrinsically tied to my idyllic youth. its pretty much impossible to look at it subjectively for me.

i enjoy how the leads are mostly making fun of each other for being jerks. lots of shows do this now but are LOOK WHAT WE ARE DOING AREN'T WE CLEVER while Seinfeld was way more artful about it. the cast was Marx brothers level unbeatable.

Seinfeld the TV show and Curb Your Enthusiasm are still v. popular amongst the 20-30 somethings I associate with so yeah obsolete is a stretch. That said I don't think any of them really give a damn about Jerry Seinfeld the Comedian.

Hey, guys: The Marriage Ref. Just thought you'd appreciate being reminded of that.

I think I get more enjoyment out of modern-day Jerry being an asshole than trying to be funny.

Seinfeld is still awesome. I think it holds up better than any other sitcom from the 90's. I think the fact that Jerry is basically unlikeable was a huge reason why the show worked.

Yeah they def pushed the "they're all assholes" angle, less & less subtly as it went on (George's self-centredness literally got someone killed!) I'm def in the it's still great camp; the sex and dating stuff almost never came from a planet I recognise and the racism was always off the charts even for a 90s show imo

Thinking about Seinfeld the standup is just depressing. I remember a couple of years back when he had that appalling joke(?) about those transgenders they have now and it was like, not only is this a shitty thing to say but just on a comedic level you're thinking "this is maybe the most successful standup alive and he has all day every day to come up with this shit". The casual bigotry sucks most obviously but the laziness is pretty sad on its own

i don't think i understood how astronomically selfish all the characters were (probably because i was busy being an astronomically selfish teen/20-something)

jerry's standup act had occasional moments of brilliance (why don't dogs carry money? no pockets) but in general was pretty standard - which is why it worked so well as the basis for a sitcom character imo

wrt to Seinfeld's stand-up being pretty standard/unremarkable, isn't this to some extent a case of him being a victim of his own success? "what's the deal with [banal thing]" is a cliche in comedy now, but the line I generally hear is that he pioneered it (in that particular form at least)?

Seinfeld the series was psychological realism to anyone who's lived in NYC for at least 3 months

things are much worse now

Have we really reached Seinfeld challops now? The show will always be classic

Some of the bits in the show are really good but I assume the writers had some input into that? It's obvious he's skilled even when the material is tepid xps

fwiw when I said he was obsolete I meant as a comedian

then again based on world events I could probably have just taken the challops one step further and said "comedians: obsolete"

I'm finally digging into Broad City and getting my own NYC-life-recognition buzz off that. Seinfeld for me was more like trying to grasp what adults did and how they lived. Hard to really reset my brain and read the characters as "like me" even though I'm now pretty much the same age or older than they were when the show started, and it's just as much a show about people being young-adult screwups getting into often-childish situations while more conventional grownups look on in horror at their failure to have mastered normative social behavior. Jason Alexander was barely thirty for season one! Bizarre. I think the outfits, Real Jobs, and the notion that they all had one-bedroom apartments do a lot to keep me from really seeing them as peers - Kramer is a bohemian "hipster doofus" but this makes him a figure of fun and ultimately it seems hard to understand why he's hanging out with these comparative squares.

my roommate was watching the Chinese restaurant episode (sort of starring Lo Pan himself James Hong) and it was just non-stop solid lines like George screaming "You know we're LIVING in a SOCIETY!" so utterly classic at capturing the surreal absurdities of everyday life (waiting for a tale at a restaurant as microcosm of the human element vs unfeeling beauracracy) that are at the heart of David's comedy. Seinfeld himself seems like a doofus at times but i get the sense from interviews he realized this as well.

the final season def got more cartoony, they ended it right before it started to suck. best move ever, and the Curb reunion was brilliant!

Seinfeld chollops cos there is a generation that didn't grow up w it and i remember older tv shows from before i was born always looked like crap when i was a kid so i get that. also tbf many chollops are from people that may not have ever watched it.

i lived in NYC for a year during peak Seinfeld times (1995-1996) and Morbius is otm.

it was probably i think for a lot of people their first exposure to everyday Jewish culture, not the more strict religious upbringing but just it being around the margins, like how going to church as a child or certain ceremonies from my youth must seem second nature for me and i don't even notice them, even as they are part of my life today.

my wife and i often have this conversations where we attempt to explain certain aspects of our religion to each other and it's a comedy act over here. "so wait you've got a realistic model of a dead body with blood streaming from it hanging on a cross on a wall and you stare at it for an hour?" etc etc.

This site is a goldmine:

Seinfeld Scripts

I would like to add that thinking back on Seinfeld and saying to oneself “it wasn’t THAT funny, and Jerry is an asshole” is hopefully a lagging, rather than leading, indicator that we are living in Peak Cynicism

i still think old seinfeld is funny! but it's not cynical to point out that show was pretty much about them being weird assholes, or at least it evolved into that by the end.

Jason Alexander was barely thirty for season one!

And Julia Louis-Dreyfus was two years younger than Ilana Glazer is now

they ended it right before it started to suck

One of my all-time favorite shows, but I've gotta disagree with that -- final two seasons sucked. I haven't watched those episodes enough to tell how much of it is the acting and how much is the writing, but the drop in quality was pretty dramatic.

the cast was Marx brothers level unbeatable.

you have a lot of insane opinions but this is next level

Everyone in old movies and tv shows look 15+ years older than they actually were.

I marvel at how I am the age of the Walshes and the other kids' parents in 90210, they look like they come from a different planet.

I think the hardest thing to identify with about Seinfeld the show is how often attention is drawn to Seinfeld the character needing to spend lots of money, but never ever enough to affect him negatively.

"oh well guess I gotta buy new washing machines for the laundromat"
"installed this new kitchen but it sucks, rip it all out"
"I've got to fly to Florida like 4 times this week! Yeesh"

I mean they did have that one scene where Kramer is shocked by how well Jerry is doing, but I always was distracted by how much money Jerry was comically forced to spend in the background and foreground most episodes without any financial consequence.

It definitely got weaker or less consistent in the last couple seasons, and the canonical classic eps are pretty much all in seasons 1-5. There's lots of good stuff later on but it got goofier, more surreal, and more aware that any little thing they included was practically a catchphrase already. Also the ground-level parking-garage observational stuff and comedy-of-manners material started taking a back seat to high-concept hijinks. The latter were still pretty well-done and I don't think it ever hit anything like the lows the Simpsons found after its peak, but it was definitely good that it wrapped when it did.

i still like the last couple seasons a lot, though any further move in that direction would have been lame. i actually think the first few seasons are the weak spot.

my recollection of Seinfeld's run was that like the Simpsons, the first couple seasons are fine, but it really peaks for those five seasons in the middle. it seemed like for awhile there every single episode was outstanding, pretty much.

it definitely dipped a bit towards the end but i think unlike the Simpsons it did trend back up a bit as it finished.

Season 8 is great, I think that's when the show was at peak surreal humor. There's a scene in "The Yada Yada" which is I think is brilliant, Jerry's in the confessional booth and George just randomly bursts in at the end and says, "Jerry I've got to talk to you". Always found that hilarious. Plus the Bizarro Jerry episode. Season 9 doesn't quite hold up as well but I think they're still plenty funny. I mean I definitely don't think the show should've ended sooner than it did.

and yeah if you haven't seen it the Curb/Seinfeld reunion season is amazing. I actually wish there was more fanservice stuff there, it's odd to bring back so many characters and only give them like one line. but the amount of meta-referencing that goes on there is incredible, beyond anything Seinfeld attempted even in its "fake pilot" days

I still think season 4 (where Jerry and George are working on the pilot for Jerry's show) is one of the best seasons of television ever.

I still think season 4 (where Jerry and George are working on the pilot for Jerry's show) is one of the best seasons of television ever.

― this is ridcolus (Old Lunch), Wednesday, September 27, 2017 11:29 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i find season 4 a weird outlier. they've fully established the characters and they're now perfectly formed, which took at least a couple of seasons to really happen. but the narrative arc throughout the season seems odd to me, it's not really what I'm looking for out of Seinfeld. also the joe davola stuff is too scary lol

and by ever you mean since 1980

xp

I'm finally digging into Broad City and getting my own NYC-life-recognition buzz off that. Seinfeld for me was more like trying to grasp what adults did and how they lived.

thank god seinfeld doesn't have weed smoking dubstep montages