Mr. Seinfeld becomes living proof that everything and anything needs to be constantly reevaluated according to our ever changing standards of moral decency, and anyone who expresses an opinion of any kind even remotely at odds with those standards will find themselves facing either cancellation criticism or forced irrelevance.
At the risk of stating the obvious, there should be nothing controversial about Jerry Seinfeld. The legendary comedian and creator of one of the most beloved sitcoms in history has been a fixture of our lives for almost forty years now, and for the most part, he has studiously steered clear of anything controversial, refusing to make political statements and instead focusing on what he does best, comedy. It is a sad fact of the modern world, however, that well enough simply cannot be left alone under any circumstances. Everything and anything needs to be constantly reevaluated according to our ever changing standards of moral decency, and anyone who expresses an opinion of any kind even remotely at odds with those standards will find themselves facing either cancellation criticism or forced irrelevance. Hence, over the past decade or so, we have been treated to a series of musings on Seinfeld episodes that should now be considered “problematic” for various reasons, and more recently, a veritable explosion of coverage as he promotes his new film, Unfrosted. CNN’s Gene Seymour, for example, recently opined about his “growing unease” with Mr. Seinfeld as if anyone should care. He began by noting that he loved Seinfeld, the show, but his relationship with the man himself was “complicated,” “especially lately.” “In most of his activities outside his eponymous classic sitcom (1989-1998), Seinfeld bemuses more than amuses me. In his stand-up routines, which never fail to get monstrous hype and attendance, he’s made me laugh. But I’d be lying if I said I never wondered why I was laughing at all.” In his view, Mr. Seinfeld simply isn’t edgy enough, which we should take to mean edgy in the right progressive way, preferring “routines [that] don’t leave you with any perceptions of substance about what is truly mortifying about Being Human.” Somehow, this has led Mr. Seymour to conclude that Mr. Seinfeld is “always Getting Away With Something when he pulls off this suave, impeccably creased act.” What that might be remains completely unclear, but apparently it has something to do with Mr. Seinfeld’s promotional tour for Unfrosted, where he dared to lightly buck progressive orthodoxy by committing both the sin of speaking his mind and the more unforgivable sin of omission. Thus, his “lightly-worn insistence on steering clear of controversy has hit a couple of telling snags lately, as when he submitted his methinks-he-doth-protest-too-much gripes about ‘political correctness’ killing comedy…He has also become more visible in his assaults on antisemitism and his support of Israel in its war with Hamas, leading to the disquieting question as to whether many people will miss having an apolitical Seinfeld slipping through controversy the way his sitcom alter-ego often seemed to slip away from long-term trouble.” In other words, Mr. Seinfeld isn’t edgy enough, but when he does speak his mind or support any cause progressives do not agree with, he causes “unease” and should be punished for it somehow.
Similarly, Slate.com’s Dan Kois recently wondered whether it was Mr. Seinfeld who’d change over the years or we did (meaning he and his progressive brethren), asking “What Is the Deal With Jerry Seinfeld?” In his view, the new Jerry we’ve seen promoting Unfrosted is “Jerry the old grump.” In his view, as Mr. Seinfeld has “gotten older and richer, he’s become more and more likely to speak his opinions about the world—if not always in the work, then in his interviews. The blitz of the past month has been many Americans’ first encounters with points he’s been making for some time. As the Times points out, he’s even started embracing his Judaism more publicly, and in December traveled to Tel Aviv to visit the families of Hamas hostages. Who can fault a Jewish celebrity for calling attention to the dead and missing of Israel?” Indeed, who possibly could after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust? Mr. Kois, himself, in fact because he’s “notably not commented on the Netanyahu government, condemned the war, or discussed the suffering of Gazans—omissions that seem likely to draw attention this weekend, as he visits an elite college campus to deliver the commencement address at Duke,” more on that it in a moment. According to Mr. Nois, Mr. Seinfeld “has released himself from any pretense of niceness, or even civility. Yes, he’s still playing with language and pointing out the foibles of modern society. But his most recent special opened with a bravura, seven-minute riff on what a drag it is to do things with your friends. It’s pretty funny, and also fundamentally sour and unpleasant. ‘Why are your friends so annoying?’ he asks. ‘You’d get rid of all of them in a second—if it wasn’t a bigger pain in the ass to find new people.’” This is a rather odd criticism given he began the piece by recapping the Bizarro World episode, where Elaine is unable to have nice friends because she is too fatally flawed, giving up a chance to be with decent people and instead returning to the all diner to pour over the miserable minutia of everyone’s lives, suggesting at the least the new Jerry is very much like the old, only this one dares to say a few things progressives would prefer he didn’t. Regardless, Mr. Nois concluded, “I look in the mirror now, and it’s my whininess, my resistance to change, my smug dissatisfaction with everyone else that I find least appealing about myself. Seinfeld embraces his misanthropy, as he always has—he’s never pretended to anything different—but it feels different now, in a darker world. Is a pure, decent human being really so bad?” The darker world business is another canard from the Trump Era, suggesting we simply can’t enjoy the same things ever again, meaning we should definitely read decent human being as decent progressive human being.
In any event, it’s impossible to believe either of these articles would have been written, much less published on prominent websites, were it not for the two supposedly controversial comments in question, or rather the one comment and the other non-comment. The political correctness critique is one that even NPR’s Leaha Donnella admits has been made for “neigh on a decade now” in a recent article, noting “It falls in line with the rich tradition of blaming political correctness for all the ills of the modern world” and somehow has something to do with Donald Trump, who apparently “has done it many times over the years.” The problem, in her mind, is that these statements don’t properly account for the feelings of the supposed victim, that is the “why someone might find a particular type of joke, or comment, or act of mass discrimination perpetrated by the most powerful person in the world, distasteful. Instead, they caricature the *type* of person who takes issue with these things: a snowflake, a buzzkill, a crybaby.” Rather than directly engaging with the obvious – that is a comedy environment so activist that Saturday Night Live steadfastly refuses to engage with President Biden’s declining mental faculties as they weren’t comedy gold, classic films that no prompt hysteria and certainly would never be made today, or even the re-evaluation of Mr. Seinfeld himself, which is happening while everyone watches – she proposed that the term political correctness can mean just about anything, while continuing to list examples that can mean just about anything herself. “Does being politically correct mean capitalizing the term Indigenous? Not laughing at a transphobic joke? Trying to push back against racist research policies at an elite university? It’s all in the eye of the person trying to dismiss someone else’s concerns as whiny.” Ms. Donnella, like Mr. Seymour and Mr. Nois, also wants to have it both ways as progressives are pone to do, claiming political correctness is an ill-defined tool of the right while deploying all the various ill-defined tools of the left, while studiously pretending they have no idea what everyone is talking about. We might not have a formal definition of political correctness and no one might care about the “I” in indigenous, but this is the same group that forced the renaming of beloved sports franchises for fear we were offending someone and introduced the term Latinx that was asked for by no one and is favored primarily by white people anyway. They are also the same people that insist “transphobia” is defined exclusively by whether or not one believes men can turn into women and vice versa. If you believe in treating trans-people with respect, dignity, and fairness but stop short of thinking male genitals do not belong in high school locker rooms or women’s prisons, you are a transphobe. Lastly, this same cohort that has declared everything including electric cars racist and believes it’s perfectly acceptable to describe white people as pathological. While it might be true, strictly speaking, that political correctness lacks a specific definition, it doesn’t take much to know it when you see it. Pretending otherwise, says far more about those doing the pretending than anything else.
Regarding Israel, it’s equally telling that none of the articles or protestors articulate anything Mr. Seinfeld actually said or did that should be considered objectionable. Beyond general statements in support of Israel and an attempt to console the victims, Mr. Seinfeld hasn’t said much at all in fact, save to sign a petition asking President Biden to focus more exclusively on freeing the hostages. This not a man calling for aggressive military action in Gaza, recommending blockades, objecting to aid, or anything of the sort. Instead, the criticism is largely focused on what he hasn’t said, but they would like him to as an international celebrity. Putting this another way, he has not attacked Israel’s conduct of the war in general or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular, nor has he been sufficiently vocal about the plight of the Palestinians, but why should he? Mr. Seinfeld has never purported to be an expert in these matters, and however he feels, he should be entitled to his own opinion and he should equally be allowed to keep it to himself if he so chooses. Alas, that simply isn’t enough anymore and so both issues came to something of a head when around 30 Duke University students staged a “walkout” when he spoke at their graduation this weekend after receiving an honorary degree. Typically, we might say, the headlines garnered more attention than the limited number of disrespectful students themselves (I say disrespectful because then Vice President Al Gore spoke at my commencement, droning on for a half hour about an internet bill of rights in obvious speech aimed at the 2000 campaign and somehow I managed to survive). NBC News, USA Today, The New York Times, CBS News, Variety, The Guardian, BBC, Vulture, and others all ran stories suggesting some kind of mass movement, from “Jerry Seinfeld’s Duke University Commencement Speech Spurs Walkouts as Students Chant ‘Free Palestine,” (Variety) to “Duke Students Walk Out of Jerry Seinfeld’s Commencement Speech” (Vulture), but that was far from the case given there were barely two dozen out of over six thousand students involved. From what I can tell, only Politico had the decency to note that barely thirty students actually participated in the protest in the headline, making it clear this was just a tiny contingent of malcontents not America’s young people mobilizing against a comedian. Unfortunately, these malcontents have found an outside megaphone in a fawning media that has changed dramatically over the past decade, from reporting to activism.
Indeed, we see some of this in the reviews of Unfrosted itself where critics were not pleased that the movie was simply a bit of entertainment, a send up of anything and everything that might best be described as Seinfeld meets Airplane! If you’re looking to spend an enjoyable hour and half, laughing out loud at parts, marveling at a string of cameos, and the insanity of it all, you’re likely to like the film as has almost everyone I’ve spoken to about it, finding it a pleasant surprise. If, on other hand, you are seeking some kind of on-the-nose message about the human condition or current events, you are likely to be disappointed. Carla Renata, The Curvy Film Critic, typifies the reaction, “Unfrosted is good for a few laughs here and there, but if you are looking for more substance than that, it doesn’t exist.” At the risk of repeating myself, we should take this to exclusively mean progressive substance, no other substance need apply. Likewise, Tanner Gordon of Spectrum Culture claimed, “It’s pop culture cannibalism so meaningless that the calories barely register,” which should properly be devoid of progressive meaning. This shouldn’t be surprising to fans of Mr. Seinfeld to begin with. To the extent Unfrosted has meaning, it’s the same as what made Seinfeld great in the first place: It delights in poking fun at corporate greed and competitiveness, marketing and advertising, our increasing desire to defer to experts, our increasingly out of control protest culture, and more, but like Seinfeld it does not do so to make a point or at least not a point in the obvious, symbolic sense of this is my point and the filmmakers are geniuses for making you more woke simply by watching. It does so to allow the audience to laugh out our foibles and our culture, and then make of it what they will on their own, for better or worse. This, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to be allowed anymore, at least by our supposed cultural betters – who, yes, to answer Mr. Nois question have changed, and dramatically for the worse. Mr. Seinfeld is too big to be cancelled for these minor transgressions, but forced irrelevance remains the goal.
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