Comic Proves There is no Left Wing Censorship of Comedy by Censoring Himself For Saying There Is

The Seinfeld Capitulation is a small but telling example of the power of public shaming.

I’ve always had slightly mixed feelings about Seinfeld.

On the one hand Seinfeld stands as undoubtedly the greatest US sitcom ever made. The ‘show about nothing’ still stands up as a masterpiece of modern comedy and a legacy that all of the cast members and writers can be rightly proud of.

At the same time I have to say that for me the weakest part of Seinfeld was, well, Seinfeld himself. The show pivots on a strange contradiction. The conceit of the show is that Jerry is the funny one. But all the really significant laughs for a viewer come from the other characters.

Jerry provided the incredibly dull stand-up bookends to the show. The character and the show itself dutifully pretend that these moments are funny, but the striking thing about Jerry’s observational shtick is that it was and is the most influential individual act in comedy over the last 30 years….and it stinks.

The whole “have you ever noticed” brand of comedy is a weak conceit, supposedly finding the gleam of comedy gold in the trivial and everyday but just as often delivering bland statements of soul crushing mediocrity.

And nobody acknowledges it. The whole comedy circuit treat Seinfeld as a giant, a master of the craft, and I’ve never seen any sign of it except for his confidence and undoubted success. Seinfeld as a performer bores me to tears. Sure, its slick, its eminently professional, and its delivered with some timing and a certain suave assurance, but its weak smile comedy.

Has anyone ever had a belly laugh from a Seinfeld ‘hey, have you ever noticed…’ gag? I don’t think they have. He’s not a tears running down your face kind of comic. He’s a weak smile comic. A ‘that’s kinda clever’ comic.

Michael Richards as Kramer was much funnier than Jerry. Jason Alexander as George Costanza was much funnier than Jerry. Even Julia Louise Dreyfus as Elaine Benes was much funnier than Seinfeld. These were primarily actors portraying comedic characters and delivering great performances (Richards of course was also a stand-up until his cancellation).

And to be fair they were given the bigger, crazier, more extreme character profiles to play with. They ran with it to superb effect, allowing the full expression of traditional comic arts (physical comedy) absent from many stand-up performances. So what was Jerry doing in the show?

Jerry was the straight man. He was the calmer center. He was there to be the sounding board, the amused witness, the eye of the storm. Kramer and George would flap their arms about, Elaine would dance like a lunatic, and Jerry would adopt the same attitude to their antics that the observational school he pioneered adopts generally-that of the slightly superior, slightly condescending and slightly entertained observer.

The show probably would not have worked without that stillness at the center…but Jerry wasn’t really acting and he wasn’t really the funny one either. If the show was a fairground ride, Jerry would have been not the bit with the lights and noises that spins round fast and makes everyone giddy, but the vital but unnoticed little gray chunk of metal that holds the spinning parts together.

That’s the role of a straight man, of course, and it takes comic skill…but not comic brilliance.

In Seinfeld Julia was Elaine, Jason was George, and Michael was Kramer…but Jerry was just Jerry.

Seinfeld himself is obsessed with the craft of standup. He’s pretty prickly about his ability and reacts furiously to anyone suggesting he isn’t one of the masters of the genre. And he does have things backing him up on that. Other comics defer to him and show him respect. Those who don’t, get their own talents belittled, as witnessed in the slightly weird angry moments when Seinfeld referred to Bobcat Goldthwait as a failed stand-up without naming him (Goldthwait had mocked Jerry’s huge age-gap relationship with Shoshanna Lonstein Gruss. It’s telling that Seinfeld’s fury focused in response on himself being a better stand-up than Goldthwait is).

Years after his sitcom stardom ended though, he repeated the feat of delivering a hit show with a very minimal format. The Goldthwait feud going fully public was a jarring moment in a success built on professional friendships. The Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee show was a deconstruction of what an interview is, in the same way that Seinfeld was a deconstruction of what a sitcom is.

Instead of a comedy about nothing, where the idea of a comedy plot was broken down and laughed at while it disintegrated, he gave us just a comic talking to showbiz pals in a cool car. The formula was the leanest chassis imaginable, delivered with Seinfeld’s trademark smoothness. The majority of the guests were other US comedy circuit grandees, products of the SNL factory, with the occasional big acting name who also started out in the same environment.

I’m no gearhead, and even the stuff about cars is endearing. Jerry is at his most human as a fan of engines, rather than people. The enthusiasm for valves, pistons and intricate mechanical workings producing a thing of mechanistic beauty is not a departure from his comedy approach, but a manifestation of the same personality. In both comedy and cars its the mechanics that fascinate him.

Jerry is a mechanic at heart. There’s no comedian as interested in the craft in the US, and the last one anywhere as concerned with it was the British comic, actor and game show presenter Bob Monkhouse. Monkhouse was famous for keeping comedy bibles containing thousands upon thousands of jokes, a categorizing, analyzing and dissecting instinct Jerry shares.

The result for the car chat show was lean, stripped down, fascinating. We get this general sense of warm affability, and a few moments of genuine humanity (Seinfeld’s strained sympathy and compassion towards his friend Richards as they go over the circumstances of his comedy cancellation is rather moving). We also realize how much a network of celebrity friends is part of Jerry’s reality. Partly its natural and human-these are the circles in which he has moved for most of his life. But also its dependent and artificial-we see how much of Jerry’s ego is wrapped up in celebrity affirmations.

Fans come to him to pay court as he passes by on the street or happens into the same coffeeshop. He’s generally both genial and dismissive in these moments, accepting his ‘due’ politely but wanting it moved along quickly. But the stars on the show are also paying court-they are offering their respects to Seinfeld as inspiration, mentor, respected colleague. Again it’s typical of Jerry to have turned what could have been an incestuous and sickening bit of backslapping and self-indulgence into a good comedy product.

To see how good he is at this, just compare how cringe-worthy other derivative attempts in the similar format have been, like James Corden’s offerings of celebrity sing-alongs in a car. At least some of the warmth in a Seinfeld production is real. The only time one of the Seinfeld Cars & Coffee episodes seems totally false, unfunny and alienating is the one that features a transparently edgy and dishonest Barack Obama. That’s fascinating too, in an entirely different way. You can see the wary craftiness in Barack’s eyes as he calculates whether or not a stand-up comic will prioritize satiric impact over political affiliation and actually ask him something dangerous or, worse still, laugh AT him.

Jerry plays that episode super-straight, a hint of the moral and political capitulation to come. Gradually, Barack gets more comfortable and eases into the mock folksy affability that is his chosen mask, knowing that Good Ole Jerry won’t challenge it.

More recently of course Jerry has offended many of his celebrity chums. First he delivered a university graduation speech which offered sensible and rather traditional liberal advice about not taking yourself too seriously. Such a mild thing, but in these times, controversial, primarily because Jerry didn’t pander to the youth and woke assumption of their own massive significance. What he gave was a sort of aging successful comic’s version of a Jordan Peterson approach-humane, gently humorous, dutifully appalled at the capacity for evil but primarily concerned with seeing life as a divine comedy we stumble through to the best of our abilities without ever really knowing what we are doing.

Such gentle thoughts are not for this age.

The woke don’t do moderate anymore. The progressive globalist doesn’t understand laughing at himself. This idea that we are all human beings in a fellowship of errors comically bumping our way through the corridors of problems we will never solve is an old man’s melancholy wisdom, and not for even the oldest progressives in town.

They are all about the certainty, the fanaticism and vanity of thinking that every engine ever built was built by old white men who are wrong, and that pixie dust and unicorn farts will really power the future as an escape from all those nasty errors (“unburdened by what has been”).

The speech was in many ways a lament. A lament for a world where comedy was possible.

And it was followed up by further thought crimes publicly expressed, particularly a truthful piece in which he opined to the New Yorker in April that woke and leftist fanaticism was killing comedy. In that piece (again a telling thing, the article was titled The Scholar of Comedy) Jerry marked his 70th birthday by reflecting on the chilling and limiting effect that policing offence has had on comedy (“This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people”).

As a criticism this was mild stuff. It shouldn’t have been earth-shattering for a comic to assert that he likes free speech and that policing offence weakens comedy. These are points that were once accepted and indeed even made by the Left. They are points they would have once made themselves in defense of earlier generations of satirists or of material offensive to Christians, for example. Imagine telling a leftist that The Life of Brian should be cancelled because it offends Christians. Or that black comedians should stop devoting chunks of their acts (sometimes their entire careers) to mocking white people. After all, that offends many of us.

But in a completely self-blind proof of the point, the celebrity social circuit in which Jerry moves went nuts. His fellow Seinfeld star and personal friend of decades Julia Louise Dreyfus publicly trashed his comments in a move that must have hurt a man as careful regarding his status in comedy as Jerry is (in the same article he dismissed the idea of a legacy, stating that he takes the Marcus Aurelius stoic approach of realizing that nothing he does matters…which is a case both of misreading stoicism and showing that you are protesting too much). This was followed by many others deriding Seinfeld as an angry old man missing the point.

Wokeness, we heard with the usual tiresomely dishonest responses, is just about politeness, about the inevitable change (the improvement) of social values and etiquette and not being a jerk to minorities, gays and trans.

All said of course while being massive jerks to every non-protected group. And unfunny with it.

The hypocrisy, hysteria and pile on was of course predictable, because we are at the point where even former liberals recognize that a large chunk of their old side are now Puritans with pitchforks and flaming brands. That’s why people like Matt Taibbi have been driven away in the world of journalism, why Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F.Kennedy Jnr have departed the Democrat Party, and why comedy writers as diverse as the cartoonist Scott Adams and the sitcom creator Graham Linehan are now voices of cancelled dissent.

Nothing says ‘we don’t stifle comedy’ like a mass woke pile-on, right?

Shamefully Seinfeld has proven himself an abject coward in the face of such social pressure. Unlike the admirable Linehan, or unlike notable examples of resistance to cancellation pressure like JK Rowling, Seinfeld did not take long to crumble. The hint of that professional respect he has become addicted to being withdrawn, together with the personal betrayal of people like Dreyfus, has seen him backtrack on his comments with embarrassing alacrity.

Now, Jerry says, he regrets his comments. Apparently his sincere and honest view today is that eveything is wonderful. Comedy is thriving under Woke Puritan cancellation campaigns of hypocritical ostracism, bullying and intimidation. It’s not censorship at all.

Like a captured Pod Person, Jerry intones the Julia Louise Dreyfus mantra almost word for word:

“So does culture change? And are there things I used to say that I can’t say that everybody’s always moving? Yeah, but that’s the biggest, easiest target. That accuracy of your observation has to be a hundred times finer than that…So I don’t think, as I said, the ‘extreme left’ has done anything to inhibit the art of comedy.”

The capitulation is painful to witness. This was the man who clearly saw how much agony and pain was inflicted on his friend Michael Richards. A whole career ended by the magic n word uttered in a moment of angry reaction to rudeness. This is the man who spoke about wanting to be a man in that same ‘controversial’ New Yorker interview:

“I wanted to be a charming, witty man. That never happened…when we grew up, Muhammad Ali and JFK and Sean Connery. Those were men. We wanted to be like them. They were all witty and handsome and had broad shoulders….I don’t care if someone is an arsehole if they’re charming. A charming arsehole is way better than a boring, polite person.”

And way funnier too.

Jerry, for all his success, failed in his dream. He has shown more feminine shoulders than male ones. He’s been broken and forced into a repentant confession by his woke colleagues and ‘friends’. He said the truth and then repented it. In the end, he didn’t have the courage that comedy needs just as much as it needs observation.

He saw what was wrong, but all it took was old friends giving him the cold shoulder and he wet his pants. The social circuit and the precious ‘friendship’ of people who care more about their insane ideology than 20 or 30 years of human contact broke him down into this abject mess, this fool saying of course we cancel people and that’s just great.

That’s a failure of the comedy test, of his commitment to comedy regardless of offence. But its more than that.

Its a failure as a man, too.

And the sadness is I think he knows it.