Over the past few months, Jerry Seinfeld — a comic whose eponymous sitcom perfected a consciously apolitical discourse about the mundanity of modern life — has repeatedly popped up in the media for his weighty opinions.
During and after the promotional cycle of his latest Netflix movie unfrostedThat’s a comedy about Pop Tarts Divided critics And Some visitors are robbedSeinfeld swept audiences to the left and won repeated accolades the right With headline-grabbing commentary on everything from student protests to toxic masculinity.
Many of these comments are the typical “comedian bash audience wake up” schtick that we’ve heard so often in recent years. his Seinfeld Co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus recently addressed the rhetoric in an interview with The New York Times Magazine, saying she’s wary of comedians who complain about “political correctness.” “To me, that’s a red flag,” she said“Because it sometimes means something else.”
Generally, the more comedians protest the intrusion of politics into comedy, the more they themselves start to sound awfully political. That’s what we’re seeing now with Seinfeld, who has lamented political correctness for years and whose public profile has grown more complicated since the October 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel.
when more and more celebrity Began publicly advocating for a cease-fire in Gaza, Seinfeld continued to support Israel, even joining A Controversial military Training camp Occupied West Bank. This has been ongoing feedback and public protest Against him — criticism Seinfeld has often made reframed as Anti-Semitic. in a the interview Along with provocative anti-wook provocateur Barry Weiss, he suggested that the criticism was “stupid” and misguided since comedians “don’t really control anything.” he too pivoted His nostalgia for “real” men, domestic concerns like “dominant masculinity” and the absence of “an agreed-upon hierarchy” in society—which, he noted, are why we have road rage.
This concept of comedy and politics as separate is one Seinfeld clearly holds sacred. To Weiss, he said the only rule of comedy is “Is it funny?” Adds, “No one really cares about anything else.”
Of course, people care too much about “something else”; This is why comedy as an art form has constantly faced censorship, blacklisting and backlash when it becomes too intensely political – as it often does. Seinfeld seems to want to pretend he’s completely apolitical, a kind of “Who, me?” Assuming that he is a political person. This is his position accepted over and over on the end decadeall the time complaint about regularPolitical correctness” He clearly brings this “harumf, the kids are awake too” to his comedy show, as his lazy 2020 Netflix Standup Special 23 hours to kill.
The lack of cultural traction that the special got, as well as the then-and-gone blip unfrosted, speaks to how Seinfeld is positioned as a public figure now. Although his cultural influence is extensive, his laterSeinfeld The output had little staying power; His most successful recent work, Comedians in cars getting coffeeAn interactive web series that ran from 2012 to 2019.
To be fair, almost nothing can equal it Seinfeldimpression, but in the absence of another true breakout (like, say, Louis-Dreyfus’s Vip Or Larry David, creator of Seinfeld Curb your enthusiasm) Jerry Seinfeld, the person, is of more interest to fans than his current creative work. What he says matters offstage, and what he says indicates how much decades of fame and wealth have warmed him.
He is not at the top of the cultural conversation. He became famous before the age of social media, and didn’t have to contend with the two-way communication celebrities are forced to live with their fans today.
It reminds harry potter Author JK Rowling, who has tarnished her legacy with transphobic hate campaigns, portrays her justifiably upset critics as an angry mob.
Like Rowling, Seinfeld’s current politics are intruding on fans’ enjoyment of her past and present work. As with Rowling, Seinfeld’s doubling down on his anti-wake up views has metastasized into other reconstructionist takes, such as desire. go back to old, crazy peopleMasculinity of the age. And like Rowling and other tainted popular figures like Elon Musk, Seinfeld doesn’t seem ready to handle online discourse and criticism.
It seems self-evident that Seinfeld’s angst isn’t about “or even the decline of any kind of cultural order, but what happens when politics gets in the way of his relationship with the audience. Seinfeld wouldn’t be the first person to seek to divorce his celebrity from his personal politics.” In an earlier era of comedy or celebrity, it didn’t matter; but today’s cultural and political climates are inseparable – a reality celebrities often seem unwilling or unable to grasp.
For some in the audience, it’s impossible to distinguish Seinfeld the comedian from Seinfeld the staunch supporter of the Israeli government—not when that government has waged a horrific attack that has resulted in thousands of civilian casualties and what my colleague Jacques Beauchamp calls “a humanitarian nightmare of unimaginable proportions.” . Seinfeld’s thoughts on gender and heritage only add to the confusion about his current persona, so at odds with the one he spent decades cultivating.
Seinfeld clearly thinks his opinion doesn’t matter much; After all, he’s just a late-career standup guy. But audiences are paying more attention to personal opinions than ever, and as a master of incoherent comedy, he should know better than anyone how important the little things can be.
