Always nice when a news article appears that confirms your opinions on a public figure. Dude has always fucking sucked.
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Jerry Seinfeld Says TV Comedy Is Being Killed By the ‘Extreme Left and P.C. Crap and People Worrying So Much About Offending Other People’
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I would say I'd be interested in what people would think of sunny if they released the first season today and should I say would a network support this today.
A poster mentioned it earlier, it's a such a shame money has been taken out of the comedy world. I miss the days of some really fucked up humour like Jam, or Brass Wye or the beautiful weirdness of Spaced and the absolute insanity of Father Ted (minus you know who). These kind of comedies literally don't exist in the uk anymore yet and it's really sad.
They would still 1000% work today there are the comedians to do this but needs to be a change because it's sad that it's all chat shows and panel shows these days.
ER, Homicide, and NYPD Blue walked so The Sopranos and The Wire could run.
Hell, if you want to know the precedence, Hill Street Blues established the brains, while Miami Vice established the look.
And the comedy that kinda established the post three camera world was Larry Sanders on HBO.
Anyways, my point is that nothing groundbreaking is happening on any network shows anymore. The average audience age for all networks is 50+ and getting older. Hell, The CW's average age was 58! That's right, the primary viewers of Riverdale and Supernatural were boomers.
Most networks would probably see the writing on the wall that funding early 2000s offensive comedy would probably be a bad idea over…funding offensive comedy made with 2024 audiences in mind. People who see the n word or homophobia as the peak of comedy aren't the biggest audience anymore.and honestly thank god for that because so much comedy is gonna age far better than the "how can we be edgy?" Era of comedy. Hell later seasons of it's always sunny are a perfect example because the first season is undoubtedly the worst and it's still going strong today after steadily becoming more progressive in its messaging over time compared to something like South Park.
Yeah, I'm dying to know what kind of comedy we're missing out on. No please Jerry, enlighten us.
Or did you mistakenly trot out Michael Richards to apologize for his not-comedy at the not-comedy club he was not doing stand up in?
Yeah, I can just see all the extreme left marxists and anarchists that sit on, say, NBC's script approval committee, saying no to Jerry's latest script. There must be so many on that board. If there were, you'd see much edgier comedy; leftists tend to have pretty out there senses of humour in my experience. If he has a problem with anyone, it's with liberal capitalists who want anodyne content with the broadest possible market appeal.
Anyway, it's all rubbish, because there are plenty of comedies that are a hell of lot more boundary pushing than the ones in the 90s, and they do well. And they can do it without making jokes that solely rely on calling people gay or fat or whatever. He's clearly very out of touch and simply whining here.
People have been saying "PC is ruining comedy!" since the 80s and it was always bullshit from reactionary conservative assholes.
Anyway, it's all rubbish, because there are plenty of comedies that are a hell of lot more boundary pushing than the ones in the 90s, and they do well. And they can do it without making jokes that solely rely on calling people gay or fat or whatever. He's clearly very out of touch and simply whining here.
People have been saying "PC is ruining comedy!" since the 80s and it was always bullshit from reactionary conservative assholes.
They had a great writers team for that show. Jerry did not do much on that show. He cashed in and got to promote his stand-up.
I watched the extra stuff on the DVDs back when those were released. I don't remember them mentioning Jerry once when it came to actual creativity.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIcUgyLxNBA
Yeah, maybe he has a point... probably not though, you just need to do it right.
I mean, he was the main actor. Lets not be reductive here, that alone is a shitload of work.
Sure, if you call that acting. He was by far the worst part of the show.
Even so, being bad at something doesnt mean it doesnt take a lot of time and effort
I don't think either of these takes reflect the reality of how the show was created based on the substantial amount of information out there about the development process. Seinfeld was one of the heads of the writing team; he and Larry were the ones who chose who chose which stories were going to be made into episodes, and he's one of the ones who reviewed and edited the final script to make it on the air. If you're saying that it succeeded because of the writing team, you're giving a lot of weight to Jerry's role in that team.
By comparison, while he was the lead actor, he was acknowledged immediately to be a poor actor and so better actors were brought in, particularly Jason Alexander who was primarily a stage actor and wasn't planning to become a television star. Jerry's role was heavily diminished by the ensemble format, which put more emphasis on the other leads. Additionally, the actors who didn't have much involvement in the writing have noted that it was a pretty easy gig for them, since they'd just have to pop in for a few days to do their job while Jerry, Larry, and the other writers would be up all night working for the whole week.
Larry also left in the final seasons, which put Jerry in the role of showrunner.
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I agree with you, I was just making a note that even if acting was all he did that still requires a heavy amount of commitment and effort. In this forum we have a tendency to invalidate work as soon as we dont like somebody
If he didn't use the words extreme left and pc this thread would have like 23 posts saying he's right.
You know, one of the big generosities of time is how it rewards you with more and more reasons that make it easier never to have seen Seinfeld, and to not plan to.
It's always sunny is an interesting example. The other shows that team have done either flopped immediately or are much tamer comparatively speaking.
Interesting that he's such a fucking idiot about this considering how Seinfeld aged remarkably well for the time it was made in. If I recall correctly, it is not nearly as homo/trans/queerphobic as, for instance, Friends.
Anyway, disappointing take Jerry. Most if not everything political correctness is really about is protecting minorities. No one in his or her right mind should have a problem with that.
It's still great despite Jerry's involvement apparently. Though I will concede that it is a less and less appealing watch given how he's on screen for a lot of the time....
Anyway, disappointing take Jerry. Most if not everything political correctness is really about is protecting minorities. No one in his or her right mind should have a problem with that.
It's still great despite Jerry's involvement apparently. Though I will concede that it is a less and less appealing watch given how he's on screen for a lot of the time....
Lol burn. 😅
You know I've started watching Seinfeld with my partner - as I was never into it in the 90s... And I'm finding it excruciating.
I'm not sure I find people acting like absolutely knob ends to each other and strangers particularly funny...
(Though I love Curb - I guess it doesn't have its nuance?)
Jerry is the worst of all trying to bookend the episodes with his lame stand-up - and the least interesting character in the ensemble
Recent episodes that bothered me - Elaine having a rivalry with a woman who was jealous of her shoes / George caught staring at a teenage girl's cleavage... And the end part with Jerry's stand-up doubling down on the bullshit that women love shoes - whilst men love titties. Please. 🙄
Or Elaine stuck on economy class on a flight, the way she treats staff at the airport/on the plane is absolutely repugnant!
(Anyway - We sort of ruined the show as we dipped into the Michael Richards meltdown controversy some point... The Comedy club video is intense and have some sort of PTSD as now we can't see Kramer with going 😬😬😬)
Right? Seems wild to me, I keep waiting for something bad to come out or she lets a true colour show, but damn. When she got the breast cancer diagnosis I was all bummed out, never cared much for other celebs.
That's the frustrating thing about it. The show's legacy was somehow surviving the decades even though certain things are curdling like Kramer in general, or the "cleavage-poke" speech, and people are not forgetting Jerry dating a 17-year old, and the Laugh Factory incident...
I guess the writing room was cooler than the guy the show was based on. Carol Leifer, Larry Charles, Larry David, Spike Ferestein, et al are legends in their own right.
As many gifs and Rob himself even pointed out - IASIP existing proves Seinfeld is just another old out of touch rich white dude these days.
That's a 20 year old show at this point. If you read the, admittedly long, interview you can see that shows like IASiP, South Park, Family Guy, etc just prove his point.
People don't want to read tho lol
As a queer person, I'm kind of glad we live in an era where "not that there's anything wrong with that" might not make it air. That joke never felt like it was truly at the expense of Jerry and the gang's ignorance but rather a childish way to still say "gay men displaying physical affection with each other? ~eeeew!"
It's Always Sunny is not a good example of comedy not changing, I don't know why people keep bringing it up.
Rewatch Season 1, folks. It's completely different.
And those banned episodes wouldn't be unbanned today.
He's right that comedy is different, but that doesn't mean bad, you just need actually funny people writing actually funny lines.
Rewatch Season 1, folks. It's completely different.
And those banned episodes wouldn't be unbanned today.
He's right that comedy is different, but that doesn't mean bad, you just need actually funny people writing actually funny lines.
That's sort of the point. The characters are assholes too and you're not supposed to always support them.
And yeah, some parts of it haven't aged well, but no sitcom has. Not even Family Ties. Seinfeld holds up because the show recognizes the four main characters are idiots a lot of the time.
I won't spoil the series finale, but it makes that point clearly.
Lmao.
Also, this proves that it was Larry David behind some of the best ideas in Seinfeld.
Jerry probably sees the homeless rickshaw joke as crueler than what it really is. He didn't get why his own show is as timeless as it is because he didn't write a lot of it most of the time or is as self-depricating as David is.
And yeah, a lot of jokes wouldn't be able to be written exactly the same, but that doesn't mean you can't joke about the same topics today.
Jerry is just lazy with his writing.
And that's the key thing really.
This thesis only works if it's impossible to write sitcoms without offensive jokes, which it isn't.
Basically because HE can't think of how to make a show without jokes that wouldn't fly today, he thinks PC stuff is 'killing comedy'. It's tiresome.
He could have just shut the fuck up and enjoyed his money. I honestly thought all this time that's what he was doing since he hasn't really made anything notable since the show ended over 25 years ago. If he was actually trying, that makes it pretty clear that Larry was the brains of the operation since apparently he hasn't run into problem. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has no problem being funny either. Even his rant isn't original. Not only you hear this from every has-been hack comedian, but like every conservative ever.
I remember watching the recent George Carlin documentary, in which several comedians talked about him, and I remember how... shallow Seinfeld was. He was critical and dismissive of the idea that comedy could have a social effect, for him everything was about the technique of comedy and the ideas you transmitted to the audience were irrelevant.
He's basically that privileged white friend in a group full of PoCs saying shit like "I don't talk politics and I try not to judge" or some shit. But won't stop saying off color shit and the other friends got tired of explaining why it's not okay.
At least he lightly pushed back when Chris Rock was letting CK and Gervais say the n-word, I'll give him that.
These are my favorite takes in this thread. "If he didn't explicitly say how shitty he is, you guys wouldn't think he was shitty!"
It's like Ye all over again. How much more explicit does he have to be until the defense team gives up the ghost and stands down?
Fuck him. His car driving series was just him and some other rich asshole laughing at the poor so this is no surprise.
Always Sunny is a great example. Some of the shit they are doing is borderline offensive, but they have continued because they have the respect and backing of their fans and folks who would have been their harshest critics. They consistently nail the landing.
Season 1 is a poor example, because many shows are like this. They strike a cord, then tweak the formula to reach a broader audience and greater success. It's no different than Seinfeld itself in that retrospect.
He mentions shows being grandfathered in...and that's all well and good, but Seinfeld himself is as grandfathered in as it gets. If he put some effort and passion into a project that pushed some boundaries, he could absolutely get it made today, no question. Instead he does the Pop Tart movie and whines like one of the countless old, lazy, rich hacks that are clinging to relevance by appealing to the dickhead crowd. He doesn't know what would and wouldn't be allowed because he can't be bothered actually fighting for it.
Would love to see just how awful his 'boundary pushing' stand up special would be.
Would love to see just how awful his 'boundary pushing' stand up special would be.