Jerry Seinfeld Is Right

Except for the bit where he's wrong

It’s a funny thing about comedians who claim “you can’t say anything anymore”: I’ve never actually heard one say it. I’ve heard lots of people claim that comedians say it, but I’ve never heard any comedian say it.

I’ve heard lots of comedians say that various culprits - whether they accuse political correctness, wokeness or something else - have made it more difficult to make good comedy, or that you can’t make jokes that you could make before, but “you can’t say anything anymore”, or phrasings with that meaning? Nup.

In fact, one of the comedians most often accused of making the claim, Ricky Gervais, has specifically said on multiple occasions that he disagrees with it. Gervais is on the record as saying that you can, indeed, say whatever you want, and that if people don’t like it, they can say that, and that he thinks that’s a good system. He may believe his critics are full of shit, but I defy you to find me an instance of Gervais ever saying that they’re stopping him from saying anything. Other comics might have differing views on modernity’s level of censoriousness, but “you can’t say anything anymore” - nah, that’s the province of right-wing blowhards at dinner parties, not professional comics.

It’s like “edgy”. When people want to criticise a comedian they find offensive, they accuse them of aspiring to “edginess”, but failing. But I’ve never once heard a comedian describe themselves as “edgy”, or say that they want to be “edgy”. It’s something critics of comedians invent to try to make their criticisms seem less subjective and/or petty.

So, OK, now to Jerry Seinfeld, who according to this headline reckons that the “extreme left” is “ruining comedy”.

Well, first things first: headlines are rubbish. If you’re judging any article on what the headline says, you are almost certainly misjudging it. Headlines are designed to generate clicks, and therefore will usually go for an angle that maximises the chances of anger, fear or extreme emotional reactions. This rarely results in the headline being an accurate summation of the article’s contents - in fact it’s increasingly common for a headline to outright contradict its article.

What this means is that all the people who have been quoting that Seinfeld headline in the last couple of days and commenting on it scathingly are being either misleading - pretending that the headline is a true reflection - or ignorant, because they haven’t even read the article themselves. I suspect in most cases it’s the latter.

Anyway. The headline isn’t a lie, but it’s at best an unfair reduction, and at worst a misrepresentation, of what Jerry Seinfeld actually said. For a full account of the interview, go to the New Yorker, which includes far more than his comments about the extreme left and is a very interesting piece for any student of comedy. But in the Fairfax article which focuses on that small part of the interview, which I linked to above, here is what he’s quoted as saying:

“It used to be, you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M*A*S*H is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.’ You just expected there will 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 PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

“Now they’re going to see stand-up comics because they 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, 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.”

“We did an episode of the series in the ’90s where Kramer decides to start a business of having homeless people pull rickshaws 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.”

“I see a slight movement,” he said. “With certain comedians now, people are having fun with them stepping over the line and us all laughing about it.

“But, again, it’s the stand-ups that really have the freedom to do it because no one else gets the blame if it doesn’t go down well. He or she can take all the blame themselves.”

So, a few things. Firstly, what he’s wrong about: it’s not the “extreme left” that is doing what he says it’s doing. A lot of people think that “wokeness”, whatever one might think that term means, is a movement of the “extreme left”, but they’re mis-categorising the left there.

Now, the extreme left would probably ruin comedy if they could - extreme leftists tend to have terrible senses of humour. But in general, those guys are concerned with other matters and in any case aren’t really in any position to sway the entertainment industry one way or another.

It’s not extreme leftists filling up comedy writers rooms, or making Saturday Night Live as unfunny as it’s ever been. It’s not extreme leftists who make a fuss about offensive jokes or claim that Dave Chappelle is committing violence on stage. The people who make a big deal about comedy causing harm and constantly use the term “punching down” as a substitute for thought are never interested enough in doing meaningful politics to qualify as “extreme left”.

Those people are people who obsess over identity and think symbolic gestures and representation are more important than material change to people’s lives. That’s not leftism, and Jerry Seinfeld has unfortunately fallen for the con that it is.

That aside, though, I think he makes some good points, which I agree with. And one thing that really, REALLY needs saying is that, according to those above quotes, he is not saying that comedy has been “ruined”. He is, I think, saying that comedy now isn’t as good as it once was, and a couple of points about that:

1. Lots of people think that things aren’t as good as they used to be, from comedy to movies to music to food to clothes to manners. Sometimes these are just nostalgic yearnings rather than serious critiques, but even when they are, so what? You can think that things are as good as or better than they once were, but it’s not a dreadful thing for others to think otherwise. That’s fine.

2. It’s not automatically an invalid view to believe that something used to be better. If you think that some works of art and/or entertainment are better than some others, than logically some eras of art and/or entertainment will be better than others too, because those eras will have more of the better works than other eras do or did. It’s all a matter of opinion, of course, but an automatic reaction of “everything in the past was worse” is as irrational as an automatic reaction of “everything in the past was better”. You may or may not agree that comedy was better in the 90s, but liking comedy of the 90s more than comedy of the 2020s isn’t a self-evidently incorrect preference any more than liking the Beatles more than Taylor Swift.

But it’s also important to recognise the specifics of what Seinfeld is saying. Firstly, he’s talking about the sitcom genre, which he sees as having been brilliant in the heyday of the multi-camera comedy, which I guess from his references we can pin as running from the 1970s to the 1990s (for me it ended in 2004, with the finales of Frasier and Friends. Fans of Raymond and Will & Grace might believe it ran longer, and lovers of the Big Bang Theory even longer, but we can probably agree that the last three decades of the twentieth century were when that comedy format really ruled the airwaves).

He is certainly talking about that genre partly because that’s the genre he had such wild success in, and probably particularly because that’s the one he’s got most experience in. The fact he’s referencing a particular kind of sitcom does indicate, to me, that there’s an element of nostalgia working there. In the 21st century there have been some spectacularly good comedies of a different form: The Office, Arrested Development, The Good Place, The Mighty Boosh, The Inbetweeners, Broad City, 30 Rock…look, the list goes on and on, and for me proves that the evolution of comedy does not inhibit the funniness of comedy.

On the other hand, it’s also true - to me - that right now, at this moment, sitcoms - rarely multi-camera with live audiences anymore, but episodic comedy set in a specific situation does still exist - seem to be in general less funny and less exciting than they once were. No doubt part of that is my own age and nostalgia speaking, but hey, take what I say, and what Jerry says, with a grain of salt as you will: my biases and background are there for all to see, and all I can do is my best. Fact is that although there are great comedies around, they seem to be thinner on the ground, and in general more comedy seems tired and uninspired, and less comedy seems original and fun.

The real key to what Seinfeld says is in his analysis of why this is, and here I genuinely believe he is onto something. It may not be deleterious to good comedy to have jokes pass through many hands on the way to the screen - some would say the more cooks the worse the broth, others might think multiple eyes on a script help hone it to the sharpest point - but I think it’s definitely a negative when the people scrutinising the comedy have priorities other than “is this funny” on their mind.

It’s notable that even when he brings up the rickshaw gag that he says you couldn’t do today - and he’s probably right about that - he says they "would’ve written another joke”. Many would say that it’s fine that comedies can’t do certain jokes anymore, because they can simply do another joke, and sure, that’s true. If there are some things that are now considered offensive, it doesn’t cripple the artform, because non-offensive things are still available.

But I still believe it diminishes comedy when subjects, viewpoints or specific jokes are taken off the table. It doesn’t “ruin” comedy, it just narrows the possibilities and hamstrings the kind of unbridled creative freedom that maximises the chances of creating something great. The wider the range of options to choose from when writing comedy, the more likely the comedy is to be funny. The narrower the range, the less likely.

Or put it this way: people who are focused above all on making something funny are more likely to make something funny than people who aren’t. And I believe Seinfeld is right to note that in the modern era, there are more people working in comedy who aren’t than ever before. If you read criticism and commentary on TV and film comedy, you will notice that a lot of critics mention things like diversity and progressive attitudes more than they talk about whether it made them laugh. This is partly because many critics are afraid to simply state an opinion and stand by it, preferring to reference things that can’t be dismissed as subjective (this is also why a lot of comedy reviews prefer to just run through the subject matter rather than rank its funniness); and partly because many people genuinely think there are more important things in comedy than making people laugh.

If you think that, that’s fine. But Jerry Seinfeld and I don’t, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that putting people who disagree with us in charge of making comedy is less likely to result in comedy that Jerry and I enjoy than putting people who agree with us in charge would be.

But we also really need to take proper note of the part of the interview that directly contradicts the “ruining comedy” line in the headline that everyone is seizing on. Firstly, Seinfeld concedes that there is a level of pushback that is nudging the dial in the opposite direction, as is so often the case in the cycles of popular culture. So given that he is highlighting signs of improvement, you can hardly accuse him of thinking comedy has been ruined.

But more than that, he actually said that stand-up comedy, as opposed to sitcom, is thriving, and for much the same reason that he thinks sitcom is struggling: stand-up is an individual artform not subject to multiple people interfering with the material, and so stand-ups are shining because of their ability to articulate their own individual vision. Or “saying whatever they want”, if you like.

You might disagree with that too - you might think that in today’s comedy, it’s the more sensitive TV comedy, more careful to avoid offence, that is the better field, and that stand-up, allowing as it does the ranting of Gervais and Chappelle and CK et al, is a cesspit. Fair enough.

But I dispute the assertion that Jerry Seinfeld - who, whatever else you might think of him, is definitely a guy who knows a bit about comedy - is a reactionary cretin for differing with you on that.

And more than anything I dispute the assertion that a veteran comic’s considered views about the differences between comedy of the past and comedy of the present, and the reasons why those differences exist, are nothing more than the boorish simplicity of “LEFTIES RUINED COMEDY!” At the very very least, please read what the man actually said before having a go, and don’t pretend that that headline is the entirety of his thoughts.

One last point: the state of modern entertainment is often put down to things termed “wokeness”, “PC”, or other buzzwords - in this case Seinfeld, foolishly in my view, used “extreme left”. People have widely varying views on what these words mean, which is a good reason not to fixate on them. If something is happening, we should have conversations about what it is and what it means, and not what word someone does or doesn’t use to label it. I think it’s incredibly unwise for anyone to use “woke” in any discussion, because the term is so weighted it’s both unnecessarily inflammatory and basically meaningless at this point. But if we want our discussions to be interesting or constructive, we should look past the label and be able to say, “OK, sure, this guy has used a word which others have used in saying really stupid stuff, but I’m going to overlook that particular word and engage with the totality of his argument, rather than go the easy route of dismissing it all for the sake of feeling good about the superiority of my own side”.

That’s what I reckon, anyway.