Jerry Seinfeld: The ‘Seinfeld’ star has claimed ‘PC crap’ has killed off TV comedy. It’s not only a ludicrous statement, but ignores the fact that comedy – including his eponymous sitcom
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Jerry Seinfeld Interview with The New Yorker
Jerry Seinfeld said in an Interview with The New Yorker while touting his feature directorial effort “Unfrosted” that “P.C. crap” and the “extreme left” is making television comedy go extinct. Seinfeld is a sitcom icon thanks to his eponymous NBC sitcom that ran between 1989 and 1998, but he says viewers no longer flock to their television sets in order to get their comedy fix like they did for decades.
“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.”
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.”
“In my opinion, guns aren’t funny,” the episode’s would-be director Tom Cherones once said. Larry Charles, who scripted the episode, also admitted to “pushing the envelope” too far, and told The Daily Beast last week that he regretted some of the “misogynist language” in his draft. The script is almost Gervaisian in its eagerness to be outrageous – it’s no real surprise that everyone involved had cold feet.
But the decision to abandon “The Gun” also cements the fact that trying out material, and figuring out whether it’s working, is very much part of comedy. Seinfeld seems under the impression that this kind of humming and hawing is an unwelcome product of today’s sensibilities, that it’s a form of censorship to think a joke feels “off” and then axe it entirely. What a bleak worldview, at odds with history, and yet another regressive, knee-jerk judgment of both leftist and young audiences by a comedy great who should really know better.
“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.”
Seinfeld went on to stress that it’s the “stand-ups” who “really have the freedom” to cross the line when it comes to comedy nowadays, further suggesting that television networks are no longer interested in doing anything that will ruffle feathers and offend the P.C. crowd.
Seinfeld is giving interviews to promote his new film, by the way. Unfrosted, hitting Netflix on Friday, is about the birth of the popular American breakfast snack known as the Pop-Tart. I’m guessing, based on his comments, it’ll be a real, two-middle-fingers-up-to-political-correctness hootenanny, right? Anything less won’t suffice.
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