SEINFELD
Trivial Pursuits
As a kid, I lived all week as a kid for two weekend pleasures: the marathon Saturday matinee fronted by our local Bijou to give parents down time, and Jack Benny's Sunday night radio program. Even back then I wondered how Benny managed to reduce listeners to helpless laughter. Whether at the movies or seated in front of our giant audio console, one always intuitively could quickly grasp what a melodrama, detective tale or comedy was about. But Benny didn't seem to be "about" anything. The action -- such as it was -- always took place before or after the show, never during the show. Week after week, the same characters showed up at Jack's apartment or some other familiar locale to noodle around, idly rehearse, but mainly to take pot shots at Benny's chronic pretentions -- his phony age, inveterate cheapness, lady-killer fantasies, so forth.
Only years later did I appreciate the craft behind the show's apparent insubstantiality, the writers' consummate skill in mining humor in ordinary situations, Benny's uncanny sense of timing, his hilarious deployment of silence and doubletake. A famous example:
CROOK: Your money or
your life!
BENNY: (Silence)
CROOK: I said, your
money or your life!!
BENNY: (More silence)
CROOK: Whatsamadda witchew
you, bud? I SAID, YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!!!
BENNY: I'm thinking
it over.
Curious comfort derived from close acquaintance with Jack's sidekicks. Folks like Mary Livingston, Rochester, and Phil Harris were regarded as family by my family. We took the same delight in their follies and foibles as we did with those of favorite (and not so favorite) relatives, relishing the subtle variations upon their customary send-ups and put-downs.
A deal of ink has been put to paper trying to account for the astonishing popularity of Seinfeld, now entering its tenth season (the eighth and ninth proved hilarious as ever, despite dire predictions attendant upon the departure of the show's much esteemed co-creator, Larry David). Why would the trivial pursuits of four extravagantly self-absorbed Manhattan singles continue to strike such a responsive chord across America -- and now abroad (the last time I saw Paris in April, the show was drawing huge French audiences, and London wasn't far behind)?
A scholarly study several seasons back claimed Seinfeld is so attractive because it speaks potently to the urban alienation which once informed Jewish immigrant experience, and which -- with the closing of the frontier -- now pervades the culture at large. Not that there's anything wrong with that (to quote Jerry's reflexive postscript to his frenetic denials of homosexuality occasioned by a misguided newspaper story). However, the show's appeal seems far more overdetermined to me, stemming inter alia from complex audience identifications and counteridentifications, its extraordinarily adept use of the medium, and its cunning update of earlier comedic styles, of which I rate Jack Benny's sovereign. Jerry Seinfeld says he wanted to make a living making people laugh as far back as late childhood. Devouring TV shows and movies in his formative years, then performing for l2 years as a stand-up comic exposed him to a wide gamut of humorous traditions. Besides Benny's conscious or unconscious influence, one also discerns the imprint of George Carlin, Lennie Bruce, the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello (Seinfeld has notably spoken about their impact), Catskill Borscht Belt vaudeville, Thirties and Forties screwball comedies, French bedroom farce of the fin de siecle, and -- several centuries further back -- the Italian commedia del' arte (itself influenced by various folk vaudevilles and classic Roman comedy). Featuring characters with eternally fixed personality traits like Pierrot or Columbine, commedia del'arte became a prototype for the long and honorable succession of comic teams on stage, screen, radio and TV whose antics have been relished all the more because of their predictability. The thirtysomething cast in Seinfeld's commedia consists of:
Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld): club and occasional TV comic enjoying a modest success. Boyishly handsome, obsessively neat; a frequent consumer of whole grain cereal, basketball games, bad movies, and alarmingly pneumatic young women who keep ditching him on the flimsiest of pretexts when he's not disposing of them on equally slim grounds. Once came close to engagement to a woman who resembled him so uncannily he couldn't stand her.
Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus): presently employed by the logorrheic J. Peterman (he of the catalogue). Dimunitive beauty with a sassy in-your-face disposition, huge dark eyes, cheek bones to die for, a mop of fashionably disarrayed brunette locks, and an a la page wardrobe belying her limited means. She and Jerry were lovers until they discovered friendship suited them better (she faked her orgasms; he counted his). Her numerous infatuations regularly culminate in the disillusioned pits.
George Costanza (Jason Alexander): lived with his parents forever while unemployed until he lucked into a minor job with the NY Yankees organization, which he performs with minimum competence and maximum irritation to all. Jerry's best friend since high school and frequent foil for his barbs. ("You need major help, a team of psychiatrists; you need to travel to Vienna, have case studies!") Short, balding, hypochondriacal, craven, unremittingly humiliated, depressively grandiose. Lacking any vestige of personal dignity whatsoever, George is endlessly preoccupied with injuries to same (see below). In aid of inflating his tattered ego to potential dates or bosses, he spins extravagant tall tales which are inevitably exposed to his utter disgrace. Last season his terror of marriage was assuaged when his socialite fiancee died from licking glue off cheap wedding invitations (George's choice).
Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richard): ex-compulsive gambler, means of present income obscure. Marfan lanky and gangly; sports a Brillo haircut, clothes lifted from a Fifties doo-wop ensemble, and a more than passing resemblance to Mr. Punch. A manically uncensored talker, flailer, moocher, rulebreaker, pratfaller, and chief source of Seinfeld's physical humor. Lives on Jerry's floor, frequently out of Jerry's refrigerator (as do Elaine and George). Blissfuly unaware of his total weirdness, Kramer basks in a two-year old's aura of omnipotent self-confidence. Harebrained get-rich-quick schemes have included a chain of make-it-yourself pizza restaurants and a male brassiere ("The Manssiere").
Peripheral personalities include relatives (chiefly Jerry's retired parents, who roast in a Florida condo -- they've yet to master their air-conditioner, the perenially intrusive Uncle Leo, and George's extravagantly dysfunctional folks who are waiting for him to die so they can divorce); employers, friends and enemies (notably Newman, a sardonic obese postman Jerry views as the quintessence of evil, for reasons never specified).
As we say in litcrit, the central narrative trajectory involves this unlikely gang of four in ever shifting combinations and permutations. Like Benny's cast, their external circumstances may change, but their quirks and defenses are fixed as the motion of the stars. Like Benny and the Bourbon kings, they remember everything and learn nothing.
From a Freudian perspective,
George is Superego Guy. He's at the primitive, cookie-jar stage of super-ego
development, forever getting caught with his hand in the jar. While he
can tremble with incipient guilt at causing a feather's fall, he will cheat
or prevaricate whenever he thinks he can get away with it (e.g., visiting
a Eurotrash boutique daily to hide a fancy suit that's going off next week
at half-price from potential buyers).
When exposed, he twists reality
like toffee. Arguably the zenith of shameless self-justification is George's
explanation to a fireman about his role in a birthday party conflagration.
He claims he trampled over women and children getting to the door because
he wanted them to get closer to the good air while he pointed the way to
safety.
FIREMAN: How can you
live with yourself???
GEORGE: It isn't easy.
Kramer's disinhibited shenanigans
smack of untramelled instinct, pure Id energy, whether he's distributing
a bag of defective condoms, seducing Elaine to kidnap a dog across the
courtyard whose barking is savaging her sleep, or urging Jerry to
put the make on a neighbor's
sultry girlfriend while the man lies in a coma.
JERRY: You mean there's
no such thing as coma etiquette?
KRAMER: I give him twenty
fours to come out of it, then
everything goes!
Jerry and Elaine are representatives of the beleaguered ego, better tuned in to what passes for reality on the show, steering a precarious path between the wretched excesses of George's hapless guilt and Kramer's lunatic impulsivity.
All four share a sharper Nineties version of Jack Benny's unfocused modus vivendi and gentle amour propre. Their post-adolescent slacker lifestyle is devoid of ambition (saving Jerry's), or responsibility to spouse, children, whatever. Their central preoccupations are great food (much of it Chinese take-out), great clothes, great sex, and movies -- great or terrible. They occasionally agonize over commitment, but laziness and finickiness quickly put paid to courtship, let alone long weekends (Jerry opts out when he discovers a lover eats her peas one at a time). Their narcissism could gag a herd of goats (Jerry's is especially egregious).
Exasperating as the protagonists
can be, they're also rather touchingly supportive of each other. Much of
the clique's click devolves around their sheer love of shooting the breeze
for its own sake, a la Benny. Their gab is wickedly racy and irreverent,
punctuated by get-outta-here
doubletakes (watch Jerry when Donna Chang, a Jewish girl he thought was
Chinese tells him the delay in delivering their Chinese food is "redicurous"
[her given name was Changstein; she takes acupuncture classes and quotes
Confucius]). Discourse sizzles with ironic ripostes that would do Tracy
and Hepburn proud, with one-liners whose economy and compression Freud
would have deemed the very essence of wit (e.g., deriding the trendiness
of both the sauce and the town, George nominates Seattle as the "pesto
of cities").
Much of the talk spins around frankly taboo or at least politically incorrect subjects: nose-picking, ascertaining the bride at lesbian weddings, sex with paraplegics, ill-behaved immunologically challenged bubble-boys, masturbation (arguably the most famous episode involves a contest to determine who can stay manually continent the longest. Everyone loses.).
As in the famous Saul Steinberg cartoon, there's no "there" out there beyond Manhattan. The action mostly transpires in Jerry's preternaturally immaculate apartment or, since no one ever cooks, in a luncheonette down the street (about ten blocks from my digs). Most episodes begin with a brief clip from one of Jerry's stand-up routines -- all one usually sees of his performance, obscuring the piquant fact that he's always already performing. The subsequent plot is an extended riff on the clip's subject -- finding parking spaces, the vagaries of answering machines, dying of cancer, whatever.
Consonant with the opening monologue's minimalist content and in the Benny vein, nothing much ever seems to be happening on Seinfeld. The Benny show's laid back self-referentiality is raised to a xenith of post-modern absurdity during the episodes in which Jerry and George pitch a TV series -- Jerry -- to NBC about themselves (as Seinfeld and his co-producer Larry David actually did), featuring actors playing themselves and friends, doing -- "nothing!". (Kramer even sneaks in to audition for his own part, but has to leave in the grip of a peristaltic rush.). The pilot is replete with shrewdly observed, second-string sitcom defects (too-hearty canned laughter, tacky sets, the actors' give-and-take a beat too slow in sharp contrast to the Seinfeld team's hyperkinetic repartee, so forth). Jerry is quickly pulled, not because it's terrible, but in aid of demonstrating the clout of the ruthless successor to the NBC chief. He's resigned after becoming futilely infatuated with Elaine, who deems him a corporate hack. He hopes to win her hand by joining Greenpeace in an expedition to sabotage an arctic whale hunt. And so it goes.
The uncanny hall-of-mirrors construction of the Jerry segments typifies the formidable comic artfulness underpinning Seinfeld's seeming triviality, endless navel-gazing, and chasing after one's own tail. Under the cloak of harmless entertainment, the show has actually been conducting a subversive interrogation into what Virginia Woolf called the cotton-wool of everyday life. Beyond puncturing pomposity, Jerry's wit defamiliarizes the familiar, exposes an inherent strangeness lurking at the core of the quotidian: on the restaurant check presented in a leather cover with a tassle, Jerry muses: "What is this, the story of the bill? Have I graduated from the restaurant?"
Ordinary frustrations are consistently raised to lunatic hyperbole for Jerry and his people, constantly underscoring the flimsiness of their gargantuan narcissism against the obduracy of events. In yet another Chinese restaurant, an inscrutable maitre'd keeps assuring the ravenous quartet -- "only ten more minutes" -- while the entire world is being admitted and fed.
Assessing minute injuries to self esteem commands a lion's share of Seinfeld narratives, as when Jerry gets "re-gifted" (in Seinlanguage, that's when a former host gives you the bottle of wine someone else bought him). Inordinate time and effort is expended in voyeuristic peek-a-boo, trying to figure out "what's really going on" beneath one supremely unimportant surface or another, as when Jerry becomes obsessed with discovering why a girl friend won't take a piece of pie from his fork, why another always wears the same dress, or if yet another's breasts are real or a surgeon's triumph. True to form, his maladroit sherlocking infuriates each of these ladies into storming out of a potential relationship. On the way out, the last taunts him that the goods are real -- and he'll never get to handle them.
Whether pursuing the redress
of petty grievances or the truth of some profoundly insignificant matter,
whether enticed by Kramer into taking a quiet pee in an apparently empty
mall parking lot or
seduced by George into impersonating
an
airport limo customer so as to cadge a free ride: depend upon it -- instant
karma always gets you in Seinfeld's world, just as in Hitchcock's Calvinist
universe. (The lot isn't empty; the limo was hired for the seclusive leader
of an American Nazi movement making his public debut at Madison Square
garden.) A tightly wound chain of cause and effect reminiscent of
Psycho or Attic tragedy (Cocteau's "infernal machine" springs to mind)
inevitably precipitates excruciating disgrace.
But thinking on it further, anything that transgresses the status quo, ill or well intentioned, has a way of setting the clock of nemesis ticking towards a fatal count-down -- as when Jerry decides to have his hair cut secretly by his barber's nephew, and precipitates a vendetta out of Cavalliera Rusticana, complete with an uproarious satire of Rossini on the sound track.
In sum, the pleasures of Seinfeld are multiple, numerous and subtle. One can identify with and/or feel superior to the madcap four as they indulge in Benny-ish self-delusion, fall and rise again like cartoon characters from their largely self-induced misfortunes. One can savor their wit, deride their fatuous yuppy ambitions, enjoy the twists and turns of scripts which serve up a closure satisfaction as gratifying as the cleverest detective story.
But beyond these pleasures, one also discovers a latent sadness encountered in much fine comedy, here residing in the compromised compassion and narrow narcissism so native to the age afflicting Jerry and his crew (in this regard one never really believed that the Benny character of that gentler time and show was as meanspirited as he was painted, simply a bit misguided). Trapped in Buddhist hell on a consumerist merry-go-round, they are driven by unslakeable desire, fated to feed and never to be sated, to search and never find.
Seinfeld has said: "To live is to keep moving". The motion on Seinfeld is gyroscopic. Its characters spin in place simply to keep upright in an existence whose relevence to the universe is about the same as a gas station in Altoona, Pennysylvania.
Not that there's anything wrong
with that.