Seinfeld: Classic or Dud

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujVDvbz3s7c

With Jerry it seems more like deliberate avoidance -- he seems emotionally incapable of hugging or learning (unless it's learning "the craft").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3_L8z2uw4

lol

its funny because he's a guy who not only can separate comedy from comedian (see: the fact that he *still* brings up how much he likes Bill Cosby) but seems baffled when others can't. its like there's no empathy center in his brain.

Watch the Garry Shandling episode of Comedians Getting Coffee. Specifically at 9:30. It's awesome how Shandling calls him out on something along those lines.

one of the best running jokes in the show is that Jerry is a hack comedian who nobody really likes

false. his closest friends don’t like his act, but his character on the show is offered a major network sitcom, his a regular guest on the tonight show, and kramer is shocked when he finds out how much money he makes. jerry plays a very successful comedian, similar to the level of success jerry himself had in the late 80s

re: curb being grandfathered in, i don’t think it’s always sunny is a good counterexample. the first season of its always sunny was only 5 years after the first season of curb, and 2005 wasn’t much more politically correct than 2000. curious if anyone itt can come up with a counterexample that debuted in the last 10 years.

michael mcintyre is a hack comedian who no one really likes but he's very successful. lots of other examples

he acknowledges that though, whenever he talks about the show's success (including in this very interview) he mentions that it was maybe a decent fringe thing that only got elevated into what it was thanks to the other 3 leads

i’ve definitely seen or read interviews where he unmodestly says that he and larry david were writing the funniest material ever and that their high standards and perfectionism made the show what it was. the fact that neither jason alexander or michael were never funny in anything ever again supports this (and julia louis-dreyfus wasn’t funny until veep)

michael mcintyre is a hack comedian who no one really likes but he's very successful. lots of other examples

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 1 May 2024 6:31 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

nearly every episode of the tv show seinfeld starts and ends with clips of jerry performing at comedy clubs and killing. everyone in the audience is laughing, and the jokes are indeed very funny. the theory that the character in the show is a bad comedian is idiotic

it's less that he's a bad comic and more that his friends and relatives don't hold the profession in very high regard

they have the Kenny Bania character who clearly is supposed to be a stand-in for Jerry, a guy whose entire life is like a bad stand-up act. and of course Jerry hates him.

― frogbs, Tuesday, 30 April 2024 9:44 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i really don’t get this at all.. thought bania was just a hack comedian who jerry dislikes but who gains some success

false. his closest friends don’t like his act, but his character on the show is offered a major network sitcom, his a regular guest on the tonight show, and kramer is shocked when he finds out how much money he makes. jerry plays a very successful comedian, similar to the level of success jerry himself had in the late 80s

one of the big jokes during the NBC sitcom season is that Jerry pitches the execs a version of the real life Seinfeld show (which at that point was very successful) and they don't really get it. they only buy in once he pitches them the stupid "butler" plot which George made up on the fly.

i really don’t get this at all.. thought bania was just a hack comedian who jerry dislikes but who gains some success

I always thought his jokes and personality were an exaggerated version of Jerry, hence why Jerry dislikes him. at the end of S7 he proposes to a woman who's basically just a female Jerry (played by Janeane Garafalo) which he breaks off once he realizes he actually hates himself.

i think inferring from this evidence that jerry-in-the-show is an unsuccessful and/or hack comedian is a stretch. but i’ll keep it in mind next time i rewatch the series

one thing i find amusing about the current backlash to jerry’s comments in the new yorker interview is how much of it comes from his repugnant late-career public image. larry david has made almost identical statements several times but it doesn’t stick, because unlike jerry he comes off as a likeable (if curmudgeonly) guy

I have a couple buddies who make Seinfeld references constantly, it really does pigeonhole you as a GenXer

he's not unsuccessful, but I think he's definitely supposed to be a hack. even in the episode where he gets that big check he winds up getting his father impeached from the condo association since the other members couldn't believe he made enough money to buy him a Cadillac, because "we've seen his act"

Bania was originally supposed to be more of a comedic rival but the actor played it more like he liked and looked up to Jerry in the rehearsals and they thought that more funny.

he's not unsuccessful, but I think he's definitely supposed to be a hack. even in the episode where he gets that big check he winds up getting his father impeached from the condo association since the other members couldn't believe he made enough money to buy him a Cadillac, because "we've seen his act"

― frogbs, Wednesday, 1 May 2024 9:17 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

that’s a better example, but I don’t buy that the residents of del boca vista are being presented as arbiters of good comedy

Can't find a clip, but Gary Shandling's Larry Sanders (and maybe Shandling in real life, I don't know) was also a near-phobic no-hugger.

It's awesome how Shandling calls him out on something along those lines.

that clip is great.

maybe you’re right about all that flopson i guess it is just hard to square with how terrible the jokes in the standup bits are. even compared with jerry’s real-life routines. but sometimes this stuff ages badly. i remember laughing at a lot of it when i was a teenager.

I think comedy ages the worst of all, like herring left on the kitchen counter. "Humor" i.e. Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Tom Lehrer is almost evergreen, but the standup stuff we found funny as kids is sometimes really tiresome and often offensive

i think jerry appealed to the insecure teenage boy part of my brain in that here was this guy totally sure of himself and of how stupid everybody else was. the actual jokes were maybe secondary

maybe you’re right about all that flopson i guess it is just hard to square with how terrible the jokes in the standup bits are

i find them funny 🤷🏻‍♂️

isn't Seinfeld kind of a victim of his own success to some extent, that kind of "what's the deal with [banal thing]" style has become a shorthand for tired, hack comedy, but it was genuinely distinctive and original when he started doing it, and it feels overfamiliar because he was so successful and frequently imitated

I didnt think they were meant to be funny when I did a little re-watch of it, just amusing bits that were providing commentary on what happened.

I wasn't really laughing that much but then by the end you are laughed out.

xp like, 'take my wife - please!' was probably funny the first time people heard it, it's not Henny Youngman's fault it became a cliche

I remember liking Seinfeld (the show) quite a lot when it was on 25 years ago, but ever since whenever I catch a bit of it I can't see at all what I liked about it.

However, this one scene will always fondly stay with me: Jerry has to do a show for kids, chats a bit with George before he's on, then walks in the room and you just see George listening in on his opening: "Hi kids! So what's the deal with homework? You're not working on your home!" after which he's booed by all the kids. George smiles, shakes his head and walks off.

isn't Seinfeld kind of a victim of his own success to some extent, that kind of "what's the deal with [banal thing]" style has become a shorthand for tired, hack comedy, but it was genuinely distinctive and original when he started doing it, and it feels overfamiliar because he was so successful and frequently imitated.

I was just trying to unpick the whole 'how much of a hack is Jerry?' thing in my head*, and was pleased to find someone's done the research on 'what's the deal with...' in Seinfeld

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/59044/whats-deal-whats-deal-did-seinfeld-actually-say-it

* I'm on something like 'it depends on the needs of the episode/joke but our baseline is that he's definitely successful and probably good; however, as time goes on we suspect this whole stand-up thing is sociopathic'

The clip with Seinfeld and Shandling discussing Robin Williams is great - they're both batting this joke back and forth about how you "never hear of 63 being young unless somebody dies". When Shandling does the gag, it's soulful, existential, disturbing. Then Seinfeld repeats the gag back to him, except more condensed, pithier, with more precise timing - and it's funnier but it's suddenly become just "a bit".

Which feeds back into the craft discussion.

that "what's the deal" article is missing this SNL sketch from 1985:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90-jXbyv7ok

Omfggggg

lmao the way they immediately stop fighting when someone brings up Gilligan's Island

they kinda did this same sketch a few years later as a game show. glad it's on YouTube now because I've been looking for it forever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsJYmf_G5d0

Lots of otm comments on here lately.
Cracks about his act become a running gag---he's selling out in reverse (or becoming The Great Hack)(or both of those, because he knows letting on that he is or "is" a hack is now good for business, on this hip show). At least once, it even leads to a confrontation (if you can't see it: the hawt Suthun Belle tells Jerreh she's seen his act).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3kTYCLSgsg

Tracy Kolis! She also plays Kelly (quite a different character---or is she) in "The Soup," Bania's debut:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soup_(Seinfeld)

More fuel for Jerrynalysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL2sr99Sv18

Just catching up on the fantastic discussion that has gone down in this thread over the past several days. Question about that 1985 backstage SNL sketch, though: are they specifically making fun of Seinfeld, or was this specific style that much of a cliché of stand-up comedians at the time? It’s so on the nose that it’s hard to imagine it’s not the former, but how much of their audience would actually have gotten the reference? I WANNA KNOW!

was wondering the same. I thought Seinfeld himself was relatively unknown until the show.

My best guess is that it’s one of those things, like half of the bits in Zucker Brothers movies, that is a pretty straight parody of a specific thing (in this case Seinfeld), but it’s funny enough that lots of people enjoy it as something random and inspired, with no idea that it’s referencing something at all, let alone what that thing is

jerry was definitely known in 1985! everybody did stand-up like that by then. he was on the Tonight Show way before 1985. he started in the 70s. i certainly remember him from television back then and i am not a professional comedian. he was on Letterman a lot. like Leno.

that whole "did you ever notice..." thing started in the 70s. george carlin would start jokes like that. david brenner was a big influence on the 80s people.

Otm, yeah i think its one of those things where that style was the dominant mode and also Jerry was also one of its most visible proponents, so it would have worked as parody either way.

Has his 1987 HBO special ever come up itt? I think its up on youtube, a typical-for-its-time mix up standup and truly terrible sketches, some of Jerry's familiar material adapted into scripted sketch form with him dressed up as a little kid, a dog, a 1950s dad, etc, really excruciating stuff. A really interesting document of Jerry kinda going along with the accepted showbiz playbook of the day, going past the limits of what hes good at and eating shit. Its easy to imagine him taking off the dog costume and being like "if i'm gonna do a tv show it needs to be nothing like this"

I saw the Pop Tart movie, thought it was good, don't know why it has such bad buzz other than people's general dislike of Seinfeld, plus his complaints about PC killing comedy, plus his support of Israel, plus his dating a 16 year old etc.

It's funny how this is coming out at the same time as all these post-Barbie films about products like Monopoly and Play-Doh are being announced, but it seems mostly like a coincidence based on Seinfeld's weird obsessions despite them appearing so much of a piece.

I hadn't heard of Harold von Braunhut, but he was a real person who was even more strange/sinister than the Wernher von Braun type character in the film:

Harold Nathan Braunhut (March 31, 1926 – November 28, 2003), also known as Harold von Braunhut, was an American mail-order marketer and inventor most famous as the creator and seller of both the Amazing Sea-Monkeys and the X-ray specs,[1] along with many other novelty products marketed towards children, often advertised in comic books. Von Braunhut also gained notoriety for his racial and political views. Despite his Jewish upbringing, he closely associated with white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_von_Braunhut

re: Jerry's sociopathic tendencies discussed above, there's a joke about Gus Grissom that genuinely took me aback, though it was funny, film is a strange mixture of the frivolous and cold-blooded, plus this weird genuine affection for all this loving photographed early-60s disposable pop culture junk that doesn't extend to any of the human characters

Yeah, to be a successful observational comedian, I suppose you have to be able to stand outside regular normal human behaviour to an extent, so that you can comment on it. But it always looks ridiculous when comedians show themselves up as being too far outside. Like a bit in Seinfeld where he talks about laundry detergent and how much the ads emphasise its ability to remove bloodstains, and he wonders how much blood people could possibly be encountering on a day-to-day basis, and you just think, do you really not know anyone at all who could explain this to you? You really can't think of any reason that, say, on a monthly basis, some absolutely huge section of the population might be concerned with bloodstains?

I saw a comedian once who had a whole bit about how ridiculous the shower caps in hotel rooms were. He insisted that nobody ever used them. It was very odd. He's now one of those brainworm wake-up-sheeple types.

more solid evidence that the stand-up in the show is bad not good! even if the real jerry s believes the opposite! i will not back down! *waves arms around costanza-style*

"I saw the Pop Tart movie, thought it was good, don't know why it has such bad buzz other than people's general dislike of Seinfeld, plus his complaints about PC killing comedy, plus his support of Israel, plus his dating a 16 year old etc."

omg, its just terrible nobody hates it because of american writer and fashion designer shoshanna lonstein gruss. most people like jerry seinfield! his anti-pc thing is on trend for his age. he hasn't become bill maher yet but its probably only a matter of time. i don't think most average american seinfeld fans have any idea what he thinks about israel.

i like seinfeld. that movie is unwatchable. i tried to watch it. i really did.

as a i wrote on the streaming thread, i agree with this comment on the NYT comments thread for the bizzare positive review that the NYT gave it:

Chris C
Chicago, IL 3h ago

"Unfrosted" has been widely described as one of the worst movies of the *decade*.

To find out for myself, I watched it. My jaw was on the floor. It truly is the worst movie I've ever seen. It's so *lazy.* It's like Seinfeld rolled in every morning at 10, talked through his scenes, did no second takes, then left at 4. Even his narration was the flat, affect-less reading of a blasé high schooler reading aloud to the class.

I was amazed that not a single joke made me laugh. It wasn't so unfunny that I was laughing for the wrong reasons; it was so unfunny that I found myself *silently studying it.* I was oddly enthralled by the utter blandness and poor quality of the writing, acting, and filming. I don't want to give the impression I was entertained -- merely fascinated.

I recommend watching the film yourself, then reading this review. No offense to Ms. Nicholson... I guess it's brave to be the only professional critic in the industry who gave the movie a good review. Truly baffling. Had she watched this after waking up from surgery? For the life of me, I honestly can't imagine a single person watching this movie and calling it a "Critic's Choice." This review is almost as fascinating as the movie.