Just last week comedian, and now movie producer and director Jerry Seinfeld set all sorts of hairs running in Hollywood when he declared the movie business as dead, but they just didn’t realise it yet. Well, he is back, and this time he has taken aim at comedy too.
Jerry appears to be in his later stage “Don’t give a fuck!” period, which is common in people in late middle age with financial independence. We applaud this and look forward to embracing this stage in life ourselves very soon.
Specifically, he was talking about TV comedy. He says you can’t make a decent sitcom anymore, and it is the fault of the “extreme left”. This is why people are flocking to stand up for their laugh fix. He laid it all out in an interview with The New Yorker (via Dark Horizons):
“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.”
As an example, he talks about the Seinfeld episode where Kramer recruits the homeless as rickshaw pullers for his business.
This is because, as he says, “They’re outside anyway”:
“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.”
He says stand-up is agile and comedians police themselves via the audience reaction, not a luxury you get when writing a sitcom and there is a studio involved in a script:
“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.”
Seinfeld’s Unfrosted streams on Netflix beginning May 3rd.
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