What’s funny about this is there’s never been anything edgy about Jerry Seinfeld’s standup act. And as far as Seinfeld goes he was barely involved in the writing. That was all Larry David and other talented writers. Of 180 episodes Jerry Seinfeld had 18 writing credits and all of them were shared with Larry David. Of those 18 credits 5 were in the first season which is undeniably the show’s weakest and most forgettable. Jerry was always just the name. Larry was the talent.
I guess that’s probably why Larry David just wrapped the final season of Curb this year while never once complaining about “not being allowed to do comedy” anymore like Jerry is. Turns out, you’ve always been allowed to do whatever comedy you like, you just have to actually be funny.
It’s also funny because It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is still airing too, and that is massively more edgy than anything seinfeld ever did.
I think that the problem is that jerry want to be edgy and still be considered the good guy. Which is not how Curb, IASIP or even the Seinfeld tv show ever was. They always were presented as bad/flawed people doing bad stuff. You 100% can still do that type of comedy. But you can’t do comedy where the characters are supposed to be good but do bad stuff
It’s also funny because It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is still airing too, and that is massively more edgy than anything seinfeld ever did.
And that’s always been my argument when it comes to this particular dead horse. I don’t think any jokes are off the table, you just really have to make whatever discomfort you’re summoning be worth the punchline. The edgier something is the more it has to be funny to compensate, the point of offensive humor is to be funny not to offend, right? This has to be common sense. I don’t get how it flies over the head of so many people.
There are a lot of people who seem to think offending is all it takes. I think Sam McMurray’s character “Glen” in Raising Arizona, who is constantly telling “jokes” about Polish people being stupid that none of the other characters find funny, is a perfect example of the type.
Exactly. Either risk it and have a big payoff, or insert a point behind it. Make the audience think after they laugh, or search within themselves why that was funny, or the context behind the joke.
Or if you go for the edgy or dark joke, and get called out - you rolled that die, live with it. Crying “it’s just a joke” or “comedy is cancelled” after your bit failed to land is hacky
Yeah it was absolutely Larry David’s show. But Seinfeld is a genius stand-up comedian in his own right.
He’s categorically wrong on his conclusion here.
seinfeld pilot
You know, why we’re here? [he means: here in the “Comedy club”] To be out, this is out…and out is one of the single most enjoyable experiences of life. People…did you ever hear people talking about “We should go out”? This is what they’re talking about…this whole thing, we’re all out now, no one is home. Not one person here is home, we’re all out! There are people tryin’ to find us, they don’t know where we are. [imitates one of these people “tryin’ to find us”; pretends his hand is a phone] “Did you ring?, I can’t find him.” [imitates other person on phone] “Where did he go?” [the first person again] “He didn’t tell me where he was going”. He must have gone out. You wanna go out: you get ready, you pick out the clothes, right? You take the shower, you get all ready, get the cash, get your friends, the car, the spot, the reservation…There you’re staring around, whatta you do? You go: “We gotta be getting back”. Once you’re out, you wanna get back! You wanna go to sleep, you wanna get up, you wanna go out again tomorrow, right? Where ever you are in life, it’s my feeling, you’ve gotta go.
seinfeld final episode:
It seems like whenever these office people call you in for a meeting, the whole thing is about the sitting down. I would really like to sit down with you. I think we need to sit down and talk. Why don’t you come in, and we’ll sit down. Well, sometimes the sitting down doesn’t work. People get mad at the sitting.You know, we’ve been sitting here for I don’t know how long. How much longer are we just going to sit here? I’ll tell you what I think we should do. I think we should all sleep on it. Maybe we’re not getting down low enough. Maybe if we all lie down, then our brains will work.
…what particularly about these bits is either edgy or genius?
You don’t have to find it funny. Did people laugh at it how and when he said it? If so, it was funny. Too late to cast your vote now. That’s how comedy works.
I’m just saying that its pretty funny in and of itself that Jerry Seinfeld is like “you can’t say anything in comedy any more” and all his bits are about losing a sock in the washing machine
Yeah he’s obviously wrong about that and lives in N elite bubble. He’s colored by how he saw the left treat Dave Chappelle and Louie CK, for example. But he also saw how the right treated Lenny Bruce and Dice Clay, for example. He should know better that nobody on the left is actually wanting to put comedians in jail for their jokes, that’s exclusively the province of the right.
Also, this is the daily mail. It’s probably not even real quote.
Unfortunately for Chapelle and Seinfeld, James Acaster did that bit that absolutely destroyed their whining.
And Unfortunately for Louis CK, his sex-pest-intimidation is just too memorable.
Why don’t we mention Michael Richards (Cosmo Kramer) while we’re at it.
Maybe the issue isn’t “you can’t say anything nowadays” and instead it’s “you can’t say the n-word, the t-slur, and look-its-my-dick-im-jacking-off-at-you nowadays”
As for Andrew Dice Clay, the man’s schtick was just racism, sexism and pretending to light a cigarette. it was hardly one for the ages.
And then as for Bruce, yes, him being arrested for saying **removedsucker is the only legitimate example of being cancelled for comedy on the list - but also he impersonated a priest and stole donations meant for a leprosy charity, which you’d be cancelled for in 200BC as well as 2024 AD
I don’t think anyone was “cancelled.” That’s a righty-wing bogeyman word with no definition.
Nothing any of these comedians said or did takes away the fact that when they deliver their acts, they bring down the house. They connect with the crowd and the crowd laughs, involuntarily! The crowds are voting with their laughs and any one of these legendary comedians on an average day can play any room and get laughs. You’d be lucky to witness it. Laughing is involuntary. If the crowd is laughing, can’t say the act isn’t funny, that’s some election denying bullshit. You certainly won’t find it funny if you don’t realize it’s an act. Punchlines aren’t true statements of the comedian’s personal point of view or opinion, they are an act. Sometimes the joke is that the thing was even said in the first place.
At any rate, all the examples I gave are real things that happened. The three most justifiable shit storms, against Kramer, CK, and to a lesser extent Chappelle, are examples I gave of the left coming after a comedian.
Bruce, you agree, is as an example of the right coming after a comedian. You are wrong to lump Dice Clay in with CK and Kramer; Dice Clay cleared the way for comedy as an artform, and, again, the crowds laughed.
A better example I’m sure you’ll also agree is not justified is South Africa, where the political right simply banned stand up comedy as a practice. That’s the usual example, too, in far right countries: no laughing allowed!
Man, if you can’t find the humor in these people’s acts, not just Seinfeld, but also Dice Clay, or whatever other dirty or sexist or whatever fart jokes you think you’re too whatever to laugh at, all these comics would laugh at your discomfort, which is with one person standing in front of a room full of people and talking for an hour straight. Anyone can buy a ticket. How provocative could it possibly get before they get booed off stage? You should go to a Chappelle set and turn the crowd against him; just explain why he’s not funny like you do online. Should be no problem for you.
Without the show and its success, he wouldn’t be a well known Stand up today. He’s still surfing that wave.
He was a well-known comic before he did the show. Perhaps not a household name but very few comics ever are. He had already been on Carson like a dozen times, as a stand up in the 80s that’s like the height of fame. You might even say that Seinfeld’s TV show elevated him to a status that no comic had ever before achieved.
Weird how these woke kids keep killing comedy while still being the best comedians, and it’s always the ones leaning on their 30+ year old sets that think it’s a problem.
What is the deal with airline food, anyway?
What’s the deal with time passing? It just happens! You don’t want it to, but it does. One day you’re riding high, one hand on Larry David’s coattails and the other up some high school girl’s skirt. You’re thinking, “I’m gonna be on top forever. Everyone loves me now and it’s always gonna be this way.” Then the next day you’re complaining about woke on a drive time radio show with Kid Rock. What’s his deal anyway? He’s not a rock, or even a kid. He’s a man. He should be called Man Man.
You know who had a 30 year old set that was still awesome and hysterical to the very end? The Amazing Jonathan.
I got to see him in Vegas probably a few years before he died, he was doing shows in what amounted to a fancy conference room somewhere. I was the person called up to the stage, and even though I knew every single thing he was going to say and do, it was still just funny. I got to look him right in the eyes up close, and it was clear that he knew he was doing the same set he’s done forever, in a conference room. and it seemed like we both knew that “WTF am I doing here?” added a whole other layer of funny to the whole thing.
Maybe I was reading too much into it. Maybe it was just the methamphetamine.
As a comedian you either die funny or live long enough to become a reactionary shit bag.
I don’t think he was ever funny. Larry David may have been funny, and Seinfeld was fortunate enough to be involved with the show, but Jerry himself has always been a poor comedian and a tool.
I think Seinfeld was pretty funny in the 80s. His style of observational comedy was fresh back then though. Then there were a million Seinfeld copycats and there wasn’t anything special about him anymore.
The same thing happened with Carlin. So he kept reinventing himself and updating his comedy with the times and that’s why people loved him until the day he died.
Carlin got better as he got older. His shtick was always tight fast well rehearsed dense sets but he went from mostly irreverent to actually saying something. And he was still able to be so funny while clearly getting so angry.
Carlin was an artist. He could tread that line between offense and enlightening. Like I could sometimes feel my hackles go up watching him, even back in the 90s, but like you said, you really got the feeling like he was trying to communicate something real and important to him. That goes a long way to buying good will and keeping people listening, even as they’re feeling slightly defensive.
I guess that’s authenticity.
He’s gone full Bill Maher.
“Is my comedy stale and out of touch? No, it is the audience who are wrong.”
I listened to much of the interview on the radio. He touched on a lot of good points and then came to the absolutely wrong conclusion. He talked about how many writing rooms are “writing by committee” where jokes will go through a review by many different groups. If this is truly the case (I don’t know) that is not an issue if the “far left mob” but rather the enshitification of comedy due to corporations and Wall Street bankrolling these productions wanting to ensure return on investment. This kills creativity by reducing risks. Topical comedy is a risky medium by default.
Also, shout out to Rob McElhenney for his sarcastic one word response. In Jerry’s imagined world, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia can’t exist.
But the thing is… writing by committee has always been the norm- including for Seinfeld, which makes me wonder how much he was actually involved in the writing process.
The very idea of a writer’s room is writing by committee.
Had to look up said response and I agree. For anyone else looking, here’s a screenshot of what I found:
But see, he wants it to be funny because he thinks making fun of homeless people is funny. It would instead be funny because of how fucking stupid Kramer is. That’s really the big turn in recent comedy: laughing at bad characters doing shitty things (and usually getting their comeuppance) instead of laughing at shitty things happening to people.
The first season of its always Sunny would definitely be canceled (if debuted) today
Yeah, things were so much less politically correct in- *checks notes* 2005.
What the fuck are you talking about?
They’ve certainly killed right-leaning comedians like Seinfeld, Bill Maher, Dennis Miller and (can’t believe he made the list) Dave Chappelle.
Or maybe they killed themselves by just getting even lamer with their unfunny jokes that punch down at marginalized groups. 🤔
That’s weird about this to me, I never would have called Seinfeld right leaning. Like every one of his standups I’ve ever seen is very neutral, and the show was actually pretty progressive for the time. Chapelle did the punching down, got called out on it (rightfully so), and then doubled down and swung to the right because now he’s the victim! But as far as I know, Jerry didn’t do anything (In terms of jokes, ignoring the… youthfulness… issues for the moment) He just decided to bust out with I’m a victim too stop censoring me? Was there any preface to all this?
I think it’s just anger about being out of touch. You can’t make comedy in a vacuum, it necessarily draws on contemporary culture, and Jerry’s probably feeling a bit left in the dust. But he frames it in a way where he feels victimized. That’s my reading for most embarrassing or offensive old comedians though, so maybe I’m painting with too broad a brush.
Yeah the Dave Chappelle one came way outta right field lol that PIC with Taylor majore Greene idk how to spell it was unexpected or I’m uninformed
I think you mean left field just fyi
I was trying to be funny lol
Yeah that’s why edgy comedian like Jimmy Carr has released 2 Netflix specials in last 3 years. And he, unlike Seinfeld, isn’t whining about ‘kids these days’.
There’s a shit ton of good young comedians. Jerry is an old man telling kids to get off his lawn.
Yeah, but Jimmy Carr’s greatest achievement is beating Father Time by transforming himself into a plastic vampire. Jerry Seinfeld’s greatest achievement is making a movie where a bumblebee removeds Kronk.
I love Kronk, but immortality > bee sex.
Jerry’s greatest achievement is his billion dollar bank account…
Nah, that came from the TV show Seinfeld, which is arguably Larry David’s greatest achievement.
Who’s bank account is it in LoL? Cuz at the end of the day, dude’s got a billion dollars and that’s a helluva accomplishment by anyone’s standards.
That sounds exactly like a guy who collects Porsches.
Far-Right Influencers Celebrate Jerry Seinfeld Once Again Claiming ‘P.C. Crap’ Killed Comedy
“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 P.C. 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.”
So he picks shows that had some racism in them as justification that we should still have racism around for entertainment purposes?
What an idiot. I’ve heard plenty of comedy that’s funny as hell without being a knuckle dragging buffoon and going after low hanging fruit like racism or making fun of women.
The clown admits he’s just not creative or smart enough to make decent comedy that isn’t easy cheap shots.
So he picks shows that had some racism in them as justification that we should still have racism around for entertainment purposes?
He also picked shows that were “extreme left” for their time. M*A*S*H was full of left-wing morals and speeches from the pens of both Larry Gelbart and Alan Alda and was savagely critical of an American war against communists while America was still in Vietnam.
Mary Tyler Moore was about an independent career woman in the 1960s, when women weren’t allowed to have their own credit cards.
All in the Family was about a conservative racist constantly being shown that the world had moved on from his archaic ideas about the way things should be.
So what is his issue with the “extreme left” exactly if those were the shows he picked?
So what is his issue with the “extreme left” exactly if those were the shows he picked?
You could legit just read the screenshot and answer your own question.
Looks like Jerry is a pretty mainstream liberal who is okay with shows tackling issues of their own volition, but doesn’t appreciate the current production model of everything having to pass through focus groups, committees, and wanker consultants, coming out the other side so impotent and safe that it doesn’t arouse the intellect enough to really make a point or stand for anything specific.
Like if you watch Disney stuff and think that’s normal, you’re part of the problem.
the current production model of everything having to pass through focus groups, committees, and wanker consultants
Sorry… you think that’s current? It’s always been that way.
American television was always known for production interference, but it was mostly from advertisers, bored executives, and censors. Not even close to the same thing, widespread use of focus testing and demographic committees and having 12 different sensitivity consultants is all relatively modern, and that’s on top of most of the traditional interference.
And you in all likelihood knew all this, but chose to waste our time anyway.
That is absolute nonsense. And I do know this because I worked in the entertainment industry for over 10 years. Did you?
Did Seinfeld?
A person heavily involved in TV production since 1989 doesn’t seem to agree
By “a person,” do you mean Jerry Seinfeld?
That couldn’t have been subtle enough to ask.
Also his frame of reference is TV shows that aired at specific times. Few people under 60 watch TV like that anymore. Where is the funny stuff? On the fucking streaming services, YouTube, TikTok, etc.
Where is the funny stuff? On the fucking streaming services, YouTube, TikTok, etc.
You may have just made his argument for him. If Ticktok is what passes for comedy today, loud, obnoxious reaction bits from people who think a bad hair day is literal, all delivered in 10 second disposable bytes, yeah nah.
First of all, that description tells me you’ve never used TikTok. I haven’t either, and fwiw I’m not a fan of TikTok one bit, but from what I hear coworkers listening to and laughing at that is like a telephone game description of it.
But if tens of thousands of people are laughing with something… Yeah, that’s comedy.
You don’t need to use meth to have an informed opinion on it, and dear lord its popularity has no bearing on its value.
but from what I hear coworkers listening to and laughing at that is like a telephone game description of it.
No, it is accurate. The three primary sources of inspiration for TikTok videos seems to be Facebook style outrage bait, black american subculture, and anime, which all rely heavily on zany and sassy and dramatic reactions to shit. Every time someone shows me something, I just have to smile and nod to be polite.
It isn’t by accident, either, every social media platform is designed to appeal to the 14-25 demographic, the rest of us are just stuck along for the ride, and you get exactly the maturity and sophistication you’d expect from that design focus. The short format and pressure to grab people in 0.5 seconds before they scroll past aren’t helping, either.
I get it, you don’t like TikTok. Again, neither do I but I’m not making it my personality to shit on what others do like.
Normally when people identify all the “P.C. crap” that Seinfeld complains about as coming from the “extreme left” I figure it’s because they’ve gone so far to the right that from way out there Bill Gates looks like a communist. But it’s tempting to give Seinfeld the benefit of the doubt and assume that he might just be confused and ill-informed. The same refusal to accept reality that leaves him unable to let go of the urge to put a llama with a human head in his movie about Pop-Tarts may also have been sufficient to prevent him learning anything at all about politics for the past 30 years.
I think you’re right that he is* just out of touch and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Oh my God, I forgot about that Pop-Tart movie.
E: He is out of touch, not you.
Jew supports Israel. In other news, water is wet and the sky is blue.
Wasting no time conflating zionists and jews. Netanyahu would be proud, fucking fascist
I just wanna understand, not really looking to pick a fight. But isn’t he a Jew supporting Israel in that photo?
The problem isn’t stating that he is a jew that supports Israel but that it is “natural” for a jew to do.
So he’s right about two things.
