There are certain Seinfeld episodes that are classics, like The Contest, The Library Cop, and the Keith Hernandez episodes. But a lot of it doesn’t hold up, and on a re-watch you can absolutely tell when Larry David left.
Also, it is the archetypal Gen Jones/Gen X show in that all interpersonal dysfunction is seen as ironically funny.
Interestingly, I had my kids during Seinfeld's run, and while I enjoyed the show when childless, as soon as my first kid was born I found it unwatchable. Nothing like parenthood to make the navel-gazing narcissism of the four lead characters glaringly apparent.
The show at its best was quintessential New York Jewish humor, and that type of humor is hard not to enjoy if you are a New Yorker, Jewish or otherwise. But with repetition, eventually the seamless selfishness of the characters themselves overshadowed the humor.
Thing is, we not-new-yorkers 'round the nation have (or think we have) a sort of idea what New Yorkiness is, what it sounds like and what it (kinda sorta) means. Via our various media overlords the rest of the nation has been saturated with New Yorkiness. So we are at times sympathetic to the attitudes and the quirks, if only because we (think we) know them.
I for one have had really good times in NYC every trip I went there, and really no discernable downsides. People are people and in NYC maybe moreso, but that's part of the reason to go there in the first place. And people can be really funny (and FUN) in the city, in random exchanges and the like. I mean, Dizzy Gillespie was HILARIOUS at Lincoln Center, but so were the two guys competing for our custom as they tried to entice us into their restaurants immediately opposite each other on a little side street. They were both so good that we decided we would go to both restaurants on consecutive evenings. And nothing about those amusing interchanges had anything to do with downpunching...
What little I saw of the show, I found the lead characters awfulness kind of refreshing. I'd been raised on decades of TV sitcoms where we're supposed to like everyone, where even the "mean" guy always turns out to have a heart of gold, and this - whether it was funny or not - was certainly something new. George promises to look after a woman's cat when she's out of town, forgets to feed the cat (or do anything else) and the cat dies and his defense is "This was a very old cat", you're not gonna get that from the Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Well, there's the pleasure of seeing the asshole confined to a little screen where he can't get at YOU, kinda like a plexiglass box with a tarantula inside.
Of course, the nael-gazing narcissism was the entire premise of the show. We're laughing at them, not with them! Deliberate deconstruction of the sitcom universe, antihero subversion, all that. Post-post ironic, horseshoing back to laughing at simple cruelty. Like I said, comedy is funny/strange.
THANK YOU! This is also my question. It's similar with JK Rowling. Just enjoy living in your 27 Scottish castles and leave trans people the fuck alone.
Also John Cleese is now complaining that "People don't get nuance any more" and we're all too literal-minded because there's been talk about an episode of Fawlty Towers where he uses the n-word and maybe we should cut that? Dude, it's the n-word, whatever it is, it's not "nuance."
Yeah, to harken back to our last Fun Friday, John Cleese is a perfect example of why I don't have heroes, or at least not living ones.
So much of the criticism of allegedly "woke" comedy boils down to "I thought it was funny, so not only should I have been allowed to say it, it should be immune to changing standards of acceptability."
I have no sympathy, because there are comics who have gone on record about things they said 20-30 years ago, taking the position "I shouldn't have said it, and I wouldn't say it today."
This reminds me of something Steve Albini said (back to him again!): “The one thing I don’t want to do is say: ‘The culture shifted – excuse my behaviour.’ It provides a context for why I was wrong at the time, but I was wrong at the time.”
It’s so weird when professional comedians, of all people, don’t understand that most comedy doesn’t age well. It’s just the nature of the art form. Times change. Sensibilities change. It would be supremely weird if most comedy *did* age well; it would mean that culture and current events were static.
I personally believe they DO know that. They constantly develop new material, a lot of which is responsive to the changing times and events. So I take their belly-aching to be just another form of entitlement being expressed under the guise of creative freedom.
We were watching the Young Ones recently (on DVD, of course), and it was mostly new to me, as I'd only seen snippets back when it first appeared in the US (MTV!). There was a scene in which a minor character in that episode dropped the n-word. We paused it - "Did I hear what I think I heard?" "I think you did." Caught us both by surprise.
I draw some comfort from this, just the idea that there must be something deeply unsatisfying about being supremely wealthy (see examples above) and while I will never feel this type of un-satisfaction myself, I like to imagine the rich are plagued by it.
My previous life in political consulting allowed me to rub up against a lot of .01% folks. A surprising and dismaying proportion of them were just entitled assholes. But there were a few who were just good people. One in particular made a mountain of money in the dot-com boom, then retired and uses his money to fund things like Gulf of Mexico restoration efforts, environmental studies, and programs to help folks in distress. He spends his days playing--fishing or driving his cars--and if just the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet.
I think it would be a lot of fun being wealthy like MacKenzie Scott, smart enough to ensure she got her share from Bezos, conscientious enough to start giving it away in a responsible manner.
The thing I wonder about that tempest/teapot graduation speech stuff: did all the kids that walked on him walk out over his position over Gaza or maybe some over his bullshit re cancel culture's devastating effect on comedy oh my god there are more people than ever doing standup, don't they know they've been canceled out of existence?
I'm so old that I remember what can be called the ur-joke about Seinfeld-the-show: that it was funny that it was so successful when Seinfeld himself was so not really not that funny.
And now he's just another <1%er asshole. And less funny than ever.
There is much anger out there, much resentment, an overwhelming feeling that freedom has been taken away from everyone because . . . you can't tell n****r jokes anymore.
Seriously, when you start drilling down with Rightwingers, the vast bulk of their entire political edifice rests on a foundation of resentment over society not wanting to hear racist or misogynist things any more.
Cast your mind back to last year when one of the early chat-bots was rolled out. The creators had programmed it so that it could not spit out the Right's favorite racial epithet. And people like Musk flipped out! "What if having it say "n****r" was the only way to stop the destruction of Earth!?!?!?" they posited. All in an effort to somehow make it okay for this chatbot to be racist.
"What if having it say "n****r" was the only way to stop the destruction of Earth!?!?!?"
Seems like instead we're going to see the destruction of Earth WHILE people say the n-word. "Uh... yeah... Earth, we didn't really give a shit about that, it was just for the sake of making a point."
I finally understand what the term 'paraphrase' means: a phrase that has been thru a civil war, stepped on a couple land mines, and now gets around on an old E&J wheelchair from the VA.
Cancel culture's just another of their projecting or otherwise perverting of language.
They're the last people in the nation to be canceled and to the extent that they're canceled, it's when they're too offensive. Up there with the Dems' raping children in pizzareia basements, pro-life and too many examples for me to keep all together in my mind.
The market says that standups aren't having all that much trouble.
The trouble with blue or insult humor, re which Seinfeld has no professional experience, is that it's thin line between funny, offensive and insulting. It takes a professional to pull it off, or at least someone who isn't an asshole.
Anyway.
Contemporary rightwing politics has been built on resentment of "they" and "them". Been that way since Tricky Dick, went huge with conservative media.
As for anger, there's a lot of justified anger -- a lot among people who either don't bother to vote or elect those most likely to make their lives worse. On the other hand, they're the people who thought their freedom was threatened when compelled to wear masks during Covid.
And if the only place they can have their laughs over insulting, offensive humor -- youn****r jokes -- there are alternative sources.
Now you're diving into the dark deep end of the comedy pool. The craft of comedy is a subject comics either will talk you to death about or avoid like the plague (if you explain a joke it isn't funny anymore). I saw a Bill Cosby show long after the bad stuff was widely known, before he was sentenced. He killed. Crowd loved him. Callbacks, twists, universal themes and frustrations, seamlessly switched to his closer about going to the dentist when his time was up. Horrifying black hole where a conscience ought to be, but funny. That's craft. And we're expected to reject that laughter because of the man weilding the craft. Like Wagner, D.W. Griffith, Roman Polanski, Jimmy Page, too many more. Somehow, the crimes infect the art, and either the art infects us or we are complicit in the crime because we enjoy the art. Comics are a corner case since their job is to offend us. Lenny Bruce's breakthrough was to offend us in an offensive way, instead of insulting our mothers in law and how women drive. The old school warned us it would come to this, and it has. The mask was ripped off, and other darker mask was underneath, much more translucent than the old one. The pain and anger under comedy gets closer to the surface every year.
Tricky Dick ran on it but I can't quite recollect how much it got how much traction among how many. Whatever the answer to that is, it got a lot bigger starting under St. Ronnie.
Plato and the Gang seem to think comedy is nothing more than others' misfortunes enabling our downpunching w/glee. Other people's suffering is a mad romp!
The downpunching will continue til the uppitiness of the untermenschen craters.
It's weird, you'd think a lifetime of doing standup would prepare you for hecklers. Like you'd have something ready, you know there's lots of students protesting about Palestine, some even protesting at commencement ceremonies, maybe some will be at YOUR commencement ceremony, huh? Have a zinger ready for just that occasion, you've had plenty of time to prepare, but no, nothing except the butt-hurt anger that all commencement speakers show when they're heckled. I expected better from a professional.
Seinfeld, while doing press for the movie no one wanted, said his worse standup experience was being heckled. He was delivering a joke on which (he says) expended much work perfecting when a member of the audience shouted out "I heard it already".
Boo-fucking-hoo.
Meanwhile, I was at a comedy club in LA in the early 80s. The comedian had a brain fart in mid-joke, just lost the word or his train of thought. Someone shouted out some word and the comedian ran with it, turning the rest of the joke into a game of Mad Libs.
I never cared for Seinfeld as a comedian or as a show. The only episode I watched from start to finish was the last one. I know these matters are not always take it or leave it, all or nothing, but mean spirit is never a good tendency.
I am not a fan of the humor of smugness and superiority which rests on insecurities and a need to have things and public showiness in order to assert this is why I am better than you and I can make fun of you and you can't do anything about it.
Wait! You're not allowed to turn the tables, let alone ignore me! I have so many cars!
Seinfeld is nothing without his money, his things, and his fame, and he feels that way about himself. Then he projects that onto others. People like that may not deserve to be smacked down, but sure as shit are to avoided and ostracized from my life.
I vaguely remember Jerry had a Klein road bike hanging from the ceiling of his apartment, a bike he never rode, and whatever I thought of the show, I did covet that bike.
I had a frame that I got from Gary Klein directly in the mid 70's while he was still building frames in his parents' barn down in San Martin. It was one of the earliest road frames he built based on his engineering research at MIT. Had boron-reinforced chain stays. I rode it everywhere, including the local trails, but could not keep the chain from jumping off because the frame was so stiff (he's a husky guy, and maybe it wasn't too stiff for him, but I got rattled...).
Stolen from my locked garage one night, along with 3 or 4 other bikes, including a custom Bontrager that Keith built for me.
Side note: Back in the day – Gary Klein, Keith Bontrager, Gary Fisher and Greg Lemond all under the Trek roof at the same time... must have been* mental...
Was a lawsuit against Cannondale's oversized aluminum frame tubes (Klein did that earlier). But the court ruled the patent claim invalid because other builders had made oversized aluminum tubed bicycles before either Klein or Cannondale.
There's the details I had forgotten - thanks! I wasn't a big fan of the super big OD/super thin walled aluminum frames - too easily dented, plus stiff in ways that made them uncomfortable to ride.
I don't have a lot of bicycles, but I do have a plethora of various tires. More kinds of cylcocross tire types for different conditions than is completely necessary. I should probably go ahead and make that spare set of wheels I've been threatening to and mount one of them up so I just have to swap the wheels instead of the tires.
It's true! Being the fussy weirdo that I am, I make sure to get them set up so the cassettes are in exactly the same spacing from the dropout, like to the .001". Makes shifting so much better.
Well, sure, assuming you have just the one frame...but get back to me when you have a dozen or more bikes from across 5 decades, with shifters, derailleurs, chainrings, chains and cogs mixed/matched from...uh, let's see...at least 15 companies in 8 different nations on 2 continents.
I've tried to tone it down a bit on the multiple bike front. I figure that having a spare wheel means having one with a cassette mounted, and since one bike is 10 spd, and another is 11, I'd have wheels for each of those. Plus the 'cross bike has wider rims, so I'd want to match that so I don't have to readjust the brakes. I've got a couple sets for the 11 spd one, as well as for the track bike. I just need to make a spare set for the 'cross bike, which is what I mostly ride now anyway.
I'm a mix/match guy too. Like taking the time to modify Campy shifters to move a Campy derailleur perfectly across a Shimano cassette.
I'll admit I have a soft spot for Jay Leno (who I never watched when he was on the Tonight Show) simply because of his car videos on YouTube. You'd think it would be off-putting, this tremendously rich guy with a sparkling-clean garage with hundreds of cars (a garage so big we see him riding a golf cart from one car to another.) But there's something about Leno's manner and his obviously sincere interest in just gettin' stuff to work that disarms me. And then he'll have on a guest, some Hollywood producer who brings over his ONE vintage Porsche, and my eyes narrow in pre-emptive hatred before the guy's even said a word.
A phrase I now find myself using is "He seems like maybe a nice guy, I guess?" Said while waiting for the video to drop where he pitches a screaming fit at some lowly service-worker who got his coffee order wrong.
He hitched his identity to this persona, and it turns out to be who he was all along. He only needed success to overcome his natural feelings of inadequacy. His wife still reminds him what a loser he really is inside, though.
The thing for me about Leno's car collection is that he doesn't seem grubby about it - like the people for whom the cool old car is "an investment." Yuck. Leno seems to be *really* into the cars he has simply because he likes them and thinks they're cool.
"Don't walk out kids! I have some mother-in-law jokes that just slew 'em in the Catskills. Let me get through my prepared remarks and I promise to smash a couple watermelons."
Wow, I think you nailed the Seinfeld dialog, Roy. I mean, I’ve seen like one whole episode and maybe part of another but this sounds just like that. Love the Tao te zing! And yeah, tattoos are so common now, they’ve lost any hint of wild and crazy, except swastikas on the face. It used to be a spider crawling up a woman’s neck meant something (probably borderline personality disorder) but now it’s just another fashion choice. I hear laser tattoo removal is the coming thing, along with re-inking embarrassing tats. Matt Groening pegged this years ago with a Life is Hell cartoon of two old geezers going, “I see you were an idiot in the ‘80s, too!” Also Akbar and Jeff’s Tattoo Hut: “All the originality of picking out a Hallmark card!”
Funny, I know, but I got that from a medical conference years ago when tattoos weren’t everywhere. A psychiatrist gave a talk about what he learned treating people who had tattoos and that was one example. The worst tattoo (and I know this is a personal opinion) I ever saw on a patient was an entire upper back tattoo of the band Kiss. It was well done but, shit, Kiss? I once used knuckle tattoos to send a message. I had a poor relationship with a hand surgeon (what can I say, he was an asshole) and I had to send him a guy with a badly broken wrist who happened to have “fuck you” tattooed on his knuckles. I asked for a wrist consult and evaluation of whether there was a problem with the guy’s fingers. Passive aggressive to the max.
I was with some friends and their band up in Chico many years ago, and we stopped by the tattoo shop of a guy we knew from the SF Bay Area music scene. While we were in there, some kid (maybe 18?) came in and asked how much it would cost to get the Korn logo across his chest. "Oh, that would be about $2500... Y'know, gotta get the rights and all that stuff." Kid sadly walked out. Our tattoo artist friend said "There is *no way* I was gonna do that kind of work on that poor kid. Sometimes ya gotta save them from their own bad choices."
The scene in Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley get matching tattoos is absolutely lost on millennials and younger. The days of tattoos being unusual and transgressive are in the past, and so that comedy bit didn’t age. (Meanwhile, it’s going to be wild to eventually see Grandpa Jaxsyn and Grandma Kennydi with tattoos that look like wax sculptures melted in the sun.)
I've been giggling about "Grandpa Jaxsyn and Grandma Kennydi" for two days now. I told my partner about this comment and she said she'd noticed that people were starting to get a little too whimsical with their kids' names again. (For a real kicker, see what chef Jamie Oliver and his wife named their kids.)
It’s kind of strange we haven’t had a revival of gemstone names for girls. Once upon a time that was a thing, but now it just sounds like older women from the 1950s: Beryl, Opal, Ruby, Pearl. The latest fad is to do the “creative” alternate spellings of surnames used as first names: Madison, Kennedy, Jackson, etc. Or to name your child after a medieval occupation you’d never want them to have: Tanner, Cooper, Sawyer, Fletcher, etc. Why don’t people get creative and use names like Boatswain (I suppose that would be Bo’synn)?
Trump pretty clearly wants to be Seinfeld, or at least an observational comic in the style of Seinfeld. "Hey, didja ever wonder why shower heads don't put out enough water any more, huh?" That rally he just had in New Jersey he was on for NINETY MINUTES. The crowd was emptying out well before he was done, but he just loves doing his standup bit so much he couldn't stop. That's what he imagines standup is, someone who's just naturally funny (like him!) saying whatever pops into their head at the moment, just riffin', as the comics say, and it's all pure gold because YOU'RE A FUNNY GUY. That it takes discipline and craft and ruthless self-criticism and cutting out the bit you loved because nobody else loved it, he can't even imagine that.
I always liked Seinfeld--especially how, often, two or three story lines would converge at the end. I haven't watched it in years, but it seemed to me that many (if not all) stories began with a lie.
That all seems like such a long time ago. These guys, Friends.
No wonder everybody's relationships are all fucked up.
8/10, no notes —
There are certain Seinfeld episodes that are classics, like The Contest, The Library Cop, and the Keith Hernandez episodes. But a lot of it doesn’t hold up, and on a re-watch you can absolutely tell when Larry David left.
Also, it is the archetypal Gen Jones/Gen X show in that all interpersonal dysfunction is seen as ironically funny.
I hated the show and Seinfeld when it and he were first on and nothing has changed my mind since.
Interestingly, I had my kids during Seinfeld's run, and while I enjoyed the show when childless, as soon as my first kid was born I found it unwatchable. Nothing like parenthood to make the navel-gazing narcissism of the four lead characters glaringly apparent.
"Nothing like parenthood to make the navel-gazing narcissism of the four lead characters glaringly apparent."
I'd leave off the "Nothing like parenthood" part (I've not been afflicted) but otherwise, yeah.
The show at its best was quintessential New York Jewish humor, and that type of humor is hard not to enjoy if you are a New Yorker, Jewish or otherwise. But with repetition, eventually the seamless selfishness of the characters themselves overshadowed the humor.
Thing is, we not-new-yorkers 'round the nation have (or think we have) a sort of idea what New Yorkiness is, what it sounds like and what it (kinda sorta) means. Via our various media overlords the rest of the nation has been saturated with New Yorkiness. So we are at times sympathetic to the attitudes and the quirks, if only because we (think we) know them.
I for one have had really good times in NYC every trip I went there, and really no discernable downsides. People are people and in NYC maybe moreso, but that's part of the reason to go there in the first place. And people can be really funny (and FUN) in the city, in random exchanges and the like. I mean, Dizzy Gillespie was HILARIOUS at Lincoln Center, but so were the two guys competing for our custom as they tried to entice us into their restaurants immediately opposite each other on a little side street. They were both so good that we decided we would go to both restaurants on consecutive evenings. And nothing about those amusing interchanges had anything to do with downpunching...
What little I saw of the show, I found the lead characters awfulness kind of refreshing. I'd been raised on decades of TV sitcoms where we're supposed to like everyone, where even the "mean" guy always turns out to have a heart of gold, and this - whether it was funny or not - was certainly something new. George promises to look after a woman's cat when she's out of town, forgets to feed the cat (or do anything else) and the cat dies and his defense is "This was a very old cat", you're not gonna get that from the Mary Tyler Moore Show.
"No learning, no hugging."
I never watched Seinfeld. Absolutely Fabulous was more my kind of thoughtful, wholesome entertainment.
Same, and same. (Why watch assholes when you don't have to?)
Well, there's the pleasure of seeing the asshole confined to a little screen where he can't get at YOU, kinda like a plexiglass box with a tarantula inside.
Of course, the nael-gazing narcissism was the entire premise of the show. We're laughing at them, not with them! Deliberate deconstruction of the sitcom universe, antihero subversion, all that. Post-post ironic, horseshoing back to laughing at simple cruelty. Like I said, comedy is funny/strange.
I only ever watched it for Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Mmmrowl.
This is like saying you only read Playboy for the pictures. Norman Mailer? Who's he?
Why isn't Seinfeld spending his days just enjoying being supremely wealthy?
THANK YOU! This is also my question. It's similar with JK Rowling. Just enjoy living in your 27 Scottish castles and leave trans people the fuck alone.
This is like asking why Mike Pence didn't just retire from politics after all those Republicans tried to kill him.
Also John Cleese is now complaining that "People don't get nuance any more" and we're all too literal-minded because there's been talk about an episode of Fawlty Towers where he uses the n-word and maybe we should cut that? Dude, it's the n-word, whatever it is, it's not "nuance."
Yeah, to harken back to our last Fun Friday, John Cleese is a perfect example of why I don't have heroes, or at least not living ones.
So much of the criticism of allegedly "woke" comedy boils down to "I thought it was funny, so not only should I have been allowed to say it, it should be immune to changing standards of acceptability."
I have no sympathy, because there are comics who have gone on record about things they said 20-30 years ago, taking the position "I shouldn't have said it, and I wouldn't say it today."
"I shouldn't have said it, and I wouldn't say it today."
Just speaking for myself, I'm not even asking for the first part. Just DON'T SAY IT TODAY and I'm good.
(Because, like a lot of the English, they're still clothed in colonialism long after the colonies got their independence.)
{Nodding in Meghan Markle}
This reminds me of something Steve Albini said (back to him again!): “The one thing I don’t want to do is say: ‘The culture shifted – excuse my behaviour.’ It provides a context for why I was wrong at the time, but I was wrong at the time.”
It’s so weird when professional comedians, of all people, don’t understand that most comedy doesn’t age well. It’s just the nature of the art form. Times change. Sensibilities change. It would be supremely weird if most comedy *did* age well; it would mean that culture and current events were static.
I personally believe they DO know that. They constantly develop new material, a lot of which is responsive to the changing times and events. So I take their belly-aching to be just another form of entitlement being expressed under the guise of creative freedom.
Interesting. So from that perspective, it’s just another manifestation of someone getting older and becoming resentful of The Kids Today.
P.S. Get off my lawn!
I believe so, yes.
We were watching the Young Ones recently (on DVD, of course), and it was mostly new to me, as I'd only seen snippets back when it first appeared in the US (MTV!). There was a scene in which a minor character in that episode dropped the n-word. We paused it - "Did I hear what I think I heard?" "I think you did." Caught us both by surprise.
He's the Warren Buffet of comedy? Maybe not, but give him a few more decades...
Nah, Warren Buffett is cool.
Same with Scott Adams.
Maybe not 'SAME" same, but yeah...
I draw some comfort from this, just the idea that there must be something deeply unsatisfying about being supremely wealthy (see examples above) and while I will never feel this type of un-satisfaction myself, I like to imagine the rich are plagued by it.
My previous life in political consulting allowed me to rub up against a lot of .01% folks. A surprising and dismaying proportion of them were just entitled assholes. But there were a few who were just good people. One in particular made a mountain of money in the dot-com boom, then retired and uses his money to fund things like Gulf of Mexico restoration efforts, environmental studies, and programs to help folks in distress. He spends his days playing--fishing or driving his cars--and if just the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet.
I wanna grow up and be like him!
Rich!
I think it would be a lot of fun being wealthy like MacKenzie Scott, smart enough to ensure she got her share from Bezos, conscientious enough to start giving it away in a responsible manner.
That's what I want to know! Can't buy happiness, I guess.
But you can rent it!
Sometimes I think it would be nice to test that hypothesis.
The drive that delivers that supreme wealth doesn't ever go away. Where to point it? Let's just say Jerry chose poorly.
The thing I wonder about that tempest/teapot graduation speech stuff: did all the kids that walked on him walk out over his position over Gaza or maybe some over his bullshit re cancel culture's devastating effect on comedy oh my god there are more people than ever doing standup, don't they know they've been canceled out of existence?
I'm so old that I remember what can be called the ur-joke about Seinfeld-the-show: that it was funny that it was so successful when Seinfeld himself was so not really not that funny.
And now he's just another <1%er asshole. And less funny than ever.
There is much anger out there, much resentment, an overwhelming feeling that freedom has been taken away from everyone because . . . you can't tell n****r jokes anymore.
Seriously, when you start drilling down with Rightwingers, the vast bulk of their entire political edifice rests on a foundation of resentment over society not wanting to hear racist or misogynist things any more.
Not only no consequences for yelling "NI-"CLANG, but getting PAID for it.
Cast your mind back to last year when one of the early chat-bots was rolled out. The creators had programmed it so that it could not spit out the Right's favorite racial epithet. And people like Musk flipped out! "What if having it say "n****r" was the only way to stop the destruction of Earth!?!?!?" they posited. All in an effort to somehow make it okay for this chatbot to be racist.
"What if having it say "n****r" was the only way to stop the destruction of Earth!?!?!?"
Seems like instead we're going to see the destruction of Earth WHILE people say the n-word. "Uh... yeah... Earth, we didn't really give a shit about that, it was just for the sake of making a point."
To paraphrase the New Yorker cartoon: "But for a moment in time we were able to say 'n****r' freely."
I finally understand what the term 'paraphrase' means: a phrase that has been thru a civil war, stepped on a couple land mines, and now gets around on an old E&J wheelchair from the VA.
Cancel culture's just another of their projecting or otherwise perverting of language.
They're the last people in the nation to be canceled and to the extent that they're canceled, it's when they're too offensive. Up there with the Dems' raping children in pizzareia basements, pro-life and too many examples for me to keep all together in my mind.
The market says that standups aren't having all that much trouble.
The trouble with blue or insult humor, re which Seinfeld has no professional experience, is that it's thin line between funny, offensive and insulting. It takes a professional to pull it off, or at least someone who isn't an asshole.
Anyway.
Contemporary rightwing politics has been built on resentment of "they" and "them". Been that way since Tricky Dick, went huge with conservative media.
As for anger, there's a lot of justified anger -- a lot among people who either don't bother to vote or elect those most likely to make their lives worse. On the other hand, they're the people who thought their freedom was threatened when compelled to wear masks during Covid.
And if the only place they can have their laughs over insulting, offensive humor -- youn****r jokes -- there are alternative sources.
" thin line between funny, offensive and insulting. It takes a professional to pull it off..."
You'd think a professional comedian would see this as a welcome challenge, if it was easy anybody could do it, right?
Now you're diving into the dark deep end of the comedy pool. The craft of comedy is a subject comics either will talk you to death about or avoid like the plague (if you explain a joke it isn't funny anymore). I saw a Bill Cosby show long after the bad stuff was widely known, before he was sentenced. He killed. Crowd loved him. Callbacks, twists, universal themes and frustrations, seamlessly switched to his closer about going to the dentist when his time was up. Horrifying black hole where a conscience ought to be, but funny. That's craft. And we're expected to reject that laughter because of the man weilding the craft. Like Wagner, D.W. Griffith, Roman Polanski, Jimmy Page, too many more. Somehow, the crimes infect the art, and either the art infects us or we are complicit in the crime because we enjoy the art. Comics are a corner case since their job is to offend us. Lenny Bruce's breakthrough was to offend us in an offensive way, instead of insulting our mothers in law and how women drive. The old school warned us it would come to this, and it has. The mask was ripped off, and other darker mask was underneath, much more translucent than the old one. The pain and anger under comedy gets closer to the surface every year.
The mildest criticism has them screaming cancel culture, but they call for the death penalty for anyone to the left of the Steves (Miller and Bannon).
Yup, good people on both sides 😵💫
Been that way since Tricky Dick, went huge with conservative media.
Maybe if you mean when Tricky Dick was born
Tricky Dick ran on it but I can't quite recollect how much it got how much traction among how many. Whatever the answer to that is, it got a lot bigger starting under St. Ronnie.
Plato and the Gang seem to think comedy is nothing more than others' misfortunes enabling our downpunching w/glee. Other people's suffering is a mad romp!
The downpunching will continue til the uppitiness of the untermenschen craters.
Hence my tsunami of respect for the fuckers 😉
It's weird, you'd think a lifetime of doing standup would prepare you for hecklers. Like you'd have something ready, you know there's lots of students protesting about Palestine, some even protesting at commencement ceremonies, maybe some will be at YOUR commencement ceremony, huh? Have a zinger ready for just that occasion, you've had plenty of time to prepare, but no, nothing except the butt-hurt anger that all commencement speakers show when they're heckled. I expected better from a professional.
Seinfeld, while doing press for the movie no one wanted, said his worse standup experience was being heckled. He was delivering a joke on which (he says) expended much work perfecting when a member of the audience shouted out "I heard it already".
Boo-fucking-hoo.
Meanwhile, I was at a comedy club in LA in the early 80s. The comedian had a brain fart in mid-joke, just lost the word or his train of thought. Someone shouted out some word and the comedian ran with it, turning the rest of the joke into a game of Mad Libs.
But Mr. <1% cries like a baby.
Um... maybe consider some other line of work?
We Elaines can be pretty hardcore about Trumpian bullshit.
We* Few, We Proud (but in a good way), We Elaines!
*You
Could be a close election, America needs its Elaines to step up and do their bit, we're all counting on you.
Start dancing!
Roy, you are a genius. What an ear!
“ you never tell a woman you’re voting for Trump!”
Seems fair, since I imagine there are ALL KINDS of women who won’t be telling their Trump-supporting husbands they’re voting for Biden.
Your lips to the goddess's ear.
And then those same husbands can scream that it must be FRAUD that Trump didn't win because "I don't know a single person who voted for Biden!"
"Oh, Biden got more votes? Huh..."
CUT TO KRAMER, EYES WIDE, SPRAYING DROPS OF SALIVA WHILE HE SCREAMS AT THE CROWD:
"This is what happens when you mess with a white man!"
Why didn't I think of that!
She had tattoos! That's the funny part.
I never cared for Seinfeld as a comedian or as a show. The only episode I watched from start to finish was the last one. I know these matters are not always take it or leave it, all or nothing, but mean spirit is never a good tendency.
I am not a fan of the humor of smugness and superiority which rests on insecurities and a need to have things and public showiness in order to assert this is why I am better than you and I can make fun of you and you can't do anything about it.
Wait! You're not allowed to turn the tables, let alone ignore me! I have so many cars!
Ackshually, I kinda resonate with that last, tho for me it is bicycles...
"I'll have you know this bike was built before YOUR PARENTS were born!!"
Seinfeld is nothing without his money, his things, and his fame, and he feels that way about himself. Then he projects that onto others. People like that may not deserve to be smacked down, but sure as shit are to avoided and ostracized from my life.
I vaguely remember Jerry had a Klein road bike hanging from the ceiling of his apartment, a bike he never rode, and whatever I thought of the show, I did covet that bike.
That was a Klein mt bike.
I had a frame that I got from Gary Klein directly in the mid 70's while he was still building frames in his parents' barn down in San Martin. It was one of the earliest road frames he built based on his engineering research at MIT. Had boron-reinforced chain stays. I rode it everywhere, including the local trails, but could not keep the chain from jumping off because the frame was so stiff (he's a husky guy, and maybe it wasn't too stiff for him, but I got rattled...).
Stolen from my locked garage one night, along with 3 or 4 other bikes, including a custom Bontrager that Keith built for me.
Side note: Back in the day – Gary Klein, Keith Bontrager, Gary Fisher and Greg Lemond all under the Trek roof at the same time... must have been* mental...
*was
I have a recollection of Klein trying to patent "stiffness". Patent office told him to go home.
Was a lawsuit against Cannondale's oversized aluminum frame tubes (Klein did that earlier). But the court ruled the patent claim invalid because other builders had made oversized aluminum tubed bicycles before either Klein or Cannondale.
There's the details I had forgotten - thanks! I wasn't a big fan of the super big OD/super thin walled aluminum frames - too easily dented, plus stiff in ways that made them uncomfortable to ride.
Shorter: You can't patent r (or d, for that matter)
They have since changed the patent rules to only look at what's in the patent literature, not the full panoply of scientific literature
I say we hatch a crazy scheme to go to Jerry's apartment and steal it.
Kramer probly pawned it decades ago.
I don't have a lot of bicycles, but I do have a plethora of various tires. More kinds of cylcocross tire types for different conditions than is completely necessary. I should probably go ahead and make that spare set of wheels I've been threatening to and mount one of them up so I just have to swap the wheels instead of the tires.
Spare wheels are gold.
It's true! Being the fussy weirdo that I am, I make sure to get them set up so the cassettes are in exactly the same spacing from the dropout, like to the .001". Makes shifting so much better.
Well, sure, assuming you have just the one frame...but get back to me when you have a dozen or more bikes from across 5 decades, with shifters, derailleurs, chainrings, chains and cogs mixed/matched from...uh, let's see...at least 15 companies in 8 different nations on 2 continents.
I've tried to tone it down a bit on the multiple bike front. I figure that having a spare wheel means having one with a cassette mounted, and since one bike is 10 spd, and another is 11, I'd have wheels for each of those. Plus the 'cross bike has wider rims, so I'd want to match that so I don't have to readjust the brakes. I've got a couple sets for the 11 spd one, as well as for the track bike. I just need to make a spare set for the 'cross bike, which is what I mostly ride now anyway.
I'm a mix/match guy too. Like taking the time to modify Campy shifters to move a Campy derailleur perfectly across a Shimano cassette.
I'll admit I have a soft spot for Jay Leno (who I never watched when he was on the Tonight Show) simply because of his car videos on YouTube. You'd think it would be off-putting, this tremendously rich guy with a sparkling-clean garage with hundreds of cars (a garage so big we see him riding a golf cart from one car to another.) But there's something about Leno's manner and his obviously sincere interest in just gettin' stuff to work that disarms me. And then he'll have on a guest, some Hollywood producer who brings over his ONE vintage Porsche, and my eyes narrow in pre-emptive hatred before the guy's even said a word.
Leno isn't a mean spirit. Seinfeld could never host a talk show. He's too insecure and full of himself.
A phrase I now find myself using is "He seems like maybe a nice guy, I guess?" Said while waiting for the video to drop where he pitches a screaming fit at some lowly service-worker who got his coffee order wrong.
He hitched his identity to this persona, and it turns out to be who he was all along. He only needed success to overcome his natural feelings of inadequacy. His wife still reminds him what a loser he really is inside, though.
Not a big believer in traditional marriage, but if someone's in their 70's and still on their first spouse, they're probably a mensch.
Ditto the spouse.*
*or maybe just inertia
There could be many reasons other than positive character generally and universally towards others and the world! Broaden your vistas, sir!
The thing for me about Leno's car collection is that he doesn't seem grubby about it - like the people for whom the cool old car is "an investment." Yuck. Leno seems to be *really* into the cars he has simply because he likes them and thinks they're cool.
Yeah, if you own a Doble steam car and you're spending the money needed to keep that on the road, you're not in it for the money.
"Don't walk out kids! I have some mother-in-law jokes that just slew 'em in the Catskills. Let me get through my prepared remarks and I promise to smash a couple watermelons."
George is the Larry David who votes for RFK Jr.
George gets distracted by some trivial, petty obsession and arrives at the polls too late to vote for RFK Jr.
And for want of that vote junior only received one vote (assuming he got around to it).
Wow, I think you nailed the Seinfeld dialog, Roy. I mean, I’ve seen like one whole episode and maybe part of another but this sounds just like that. Love the Tao te zing! And yeah, tattoos are so common now, they’ve lost any hint of wild and crazy, except swastikas on the face. It used to be a spider crawling up a woman’s neck meant something (probably borderline personality disorder) but now it’s just another fashion choice. I hear laser tattoo removal is the coming thing, along with re-inking embarrassing tats. Matt Groening pegged this years ago with a Life is Hell cartoon of two old geezers going, “I see you were an idiot in the ‘80s, too!” Also Akbar and Jeff’s Tattoo Hut: “All the originality of picking out a Hallmark card!”
"probably borderline personality disorder" lol
Funny, I know, but I got that from a medical conference years ago when tattoos weren’t everywhere. A psychiatrist gave a talk about what he learned treating people who had tattoos and that was one example. The worst tattoo (and I know this is a personal opinion) I ever saw on a patient was an entire upper back tattoo of the band Kiss. It was well done but, shit, Kiss? I once used knuckle tattoos to send a message. I had a poor relationship with a hand surgeon (what can I say, he was an asshole) and I had to send him a guy with a badly broken wrist who happened to have “fuck you” tattooed on his knuckles. I asked for a wrist consult and evaluation of whether there was a problem with the guy’s fingers. Passive aggressive to the max.
I was with some friends and their band up in Chico many years ago, and we stopped by the tattoo shop of a guy we knew from the SF Bay Area music scene. While we were in there, some kid (maybe 18?) came in and asked how much it would cost to get the Korn logo across his chest. "Oh, that would be about $2500... Y'know, gotta get the rights and all that stuff." Kid sadly walked out. Our tattoo artist friend said "There is *no way* I was gonna do that kind of work on that poor kid. Sometimes ya gotta save them from their own bad choices."
The scene in Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley get matching tattoos is absolutely lost on millennials and younger. The days of tattoos being unusual and transgressive are in the past, and so that comedy bit didn’t age. (Meanwhile, it’s going to be wild to eventually see Grandpa Jaxsyn and Grandma Kennydi with tattoos that look like wax sculptures melted in the sun.)
"Grandma Kennydi"
Did you know there are at least 5 ways to spell then name Kayley? Ask any teacher.
"Yeah, he spelled it wrong again. You know Mr B..."
I've been giggling about "Grandpa Jaxsyn and Grandma Kennydi" for two days now. I told my partner about this comment and she said she'd noticed that people were starting to get a little too whimsical with their kids' names again. (For a real kicker, see what chef Jamie Oliver and his wife named their kids.)
It’s kind of strange we haven’t had a revival of gemstone names for girls. Once upon a time that was a thing, but now it just sounds like older women from the 1950s: Beryl, Opal, Ruby, Pearl. The latest fad is to do the “creative” alternate spellings of surnames used as first names: Madison, Kennedy, Jackson, etc. Or to name your child after a medieval occupation you’d never want them to have: Tanner, Cooper, Sawyer, Fletcher, etc. Why don’t people get creative and use names like Boatswain (I suppose that would be Bo’synn)?
Trump pretty clearly wants to be Seinfeld, or at least an observational comic in the style of Seinfeld. "Hey, didja ever wonder why shower heads don't put out enough water any more, huh?" That rally he just had in New Jersey he was on for NINETY MINUTES. The crowd was emptying out well before he was done, but he just loves doing his standup bit so much he couldn't stop. That's what he imagines standup is, someone who's just naturally funny (like him!) saying whatever pops into their head at the moment, just riffin', as the comics say, and it's all pure gold because YOU'RE A FUNNY GUY. That it takes discipline and craft and ruthless self-criticism and cutting out the bit you loved because nobody else loved it, he can't even imagine that.
That "encampment" joke is cherce.
I always liked Seinfeld--especially how, often, two or three story lines would converge at the end. I haven't watched it in years, but it seemed to me that many (if not all) stories began with a lie.
Remember, Ellis, it's not a lie if you believe it.
E.g. Donald Trump.
George, now an Editor at the New York Times, explains the paper's strange reluctance to use the L word on Donald Trump.
Aw shit, Roy. Now they're gonna go ahead and make this show.