# Fuck Jerry Seinfeld **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [January 23, 2021, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260 "2021-01-23T04:08:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2021, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/101 "2021-01-24T19:19:04Z")
> [@MichaelEmouse](#): > > NBC apparently believed that what he offered was worth a lot of money. If he’d gotten paid less, he would effectively have been generously undercharging to the benefit of NBC or its advertisers. I’m not sure why they deserve his generosity. When the show was scheduled to end, I saw an article that said that NBC offered him $5 million an episode to renew it for one more season. At 22 episodes, that would have meant a $110 million payday. He turned it down. Now with the various streaming services, anyone with an ownership interest in a popular show is making big bucks, beyond the original broadcast, DVD sales and syndication rights. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2021, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/102 "2021-01-24T19:47:32Z")
> [@MrMrmrmr](#): > > Someone on the Straight Dope was pedantic! Inconceivable! > I’m sure your great big brain will recognize what that was. If you don’t want to be picked on, you colossal asshole, you shouldn’t have made that idiotic comment about how all rich people will bugger off and abandon their countries if faced with a progressive taxation system. ---
**Author:** ![MrMrmrmr](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrmrmrmr/32/5828_2.png) [@MrMrmrmr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrMrmrmr)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2021, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/103 "2021-01-24T20:07:51Z")
Sorry reality is not how you wish it to be. ---
**Author:** ![Saintly\_Loser](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saintly_loser/32/4045_2.png) [@Saintly\_Loser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saintly_Loser)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2021, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/104 "2021-01-24T20:47:23Z")
> [@MrMrmrmr](#): > > So you believe in the Laffer curve then. Two things. First, some months ago, I posted about this incredibly annoying debating tactic. See [here](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/terrible-debating-tactics-you-have-seen-especially-not-logical-fallacies/921694/34). Second, the Laffer curve? Seriously? I suppose that the Laffer curve is real in the sense that there is a point on a curve that represents the tax rate that will produce the maximum revenue. However, as generally used by conservatives, which is to mean that the lower tax rates are, especially on the rich, the higher tax revenues will be, the Laffer curve is absolute bullshit that has been shown to be nonsense, and nobody with a brain believes it, not even those who profess to believe it. It’s just a line of bullshit to convince the credulous that the rich are the job-creators, and if we dare to tax them fairly, they’ll take all their jobs away from us and we’ll starve. ---
**Author:** ![MrMrmrmr](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrmrmrmr/32/5828_2.png) [@MrMrmrmr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrMrmrmr)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2021, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/105 "2021-01-24T21:50:11Z")
I can’t disagree with what you wrote. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2021, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/106 "2021-01-25T17:02:59Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > But I see a problem with large foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Googling, it has an endowment of something like $50 billion. Bill plans to leave it his fortune, or most of it, which is something like $100 billion. And Warren Buffett plans to leave his fortune, or most of it, to the Gates Foundation. That’s another $80 billion. So we’re talking about something like $200 billion. Even if those leading the foundation have all the best intentions, that kind of money is inherently corrupting. I suspect that any time people are left in charge of or have access to vast amounts of money, some of them will find a way to divert it into their own pockets. But that holds true for government agencies, charities and NGOs too. I’d probably have a little more faith in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when it comes to helping the poor than (for example) the World Health Organization, despite the WHO doing good work as well. I wonder about the effect of confiscating, say, half of Seinfeld’s money and distributing it among “worthier people”. What percentage of it would find its way to worthy causes? Ultimately, focusing exclusively on the obligations of “the 1%” involves considerable denial of reality. For instance, in order to properly finance health care, education and other federal and state programs in the U.S., taxes are going to have to be raised markedly on a wide swath of the population, not just the ultra-rich (although they’ll properly be asked to pay more on an absolute and percentage basis). But politicians playing to crowd resentment pretend that we can have everything we want and need solely by whacking the wealthy. It’s not going to work. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2021, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/107 "2021-01-25T17:12:24Z")
But the potentially scary thing is that the Gates Foundation is already richer than the WHO (or even really most governments) and as more of Gates’ and Buffett’s money moves to it, it’s going to be even more ridiculously wealthy. And without whatever oversight the WHO has. It’s basically Doctor Evil’s wet dream. ---
**Author:** ![Dark\_Sponge](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dark_sponge/32/121_2.png) [@Dark\_Sponge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dark_Sponge)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2021, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/108 "2021-01-25T17:12:34Z")
Yes, he is rich and arrogant. On a side note, I really enjoyed Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. What percentage of his income would he need to give away for you to consider him a philanthropist? ---
**Author:** ![Euphonious\_Polemic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/euphonious_polemic/32/3002_2.png) [@Euphonious\_Polemic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Euphonious_Polemic)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2021, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/109 "2021-01-25T21:28:31Z")
> [@Dark\_Sponge](#): > > What percentage of his income would he need to give away for you to consider him a philanthropist? For my part, I’d be good with him giving only a very small percentage - say 1%, as long as it was given to me directly. ---
**Author:** ![Bear\_Nenno](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bear_nenno/32/3358_2.png) [@Bear\_Nenno](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bear_Nenno)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2021, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/110 "2021-01-26T15:06:18Z")
What percentage of your income have you donated to charity? ---
**Author:** ![DavidNRockies](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidnrockies/32/6279_2.png) [@DavidNRockies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidNRockies)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2021, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/111 "2021-01-26T15:15:51Z")
While the individual can obviously choose whether or not to answer for themselves, I think the aggregated numbers are an interesting answer to that question: > **[The Average Percent Of Income Donated To Charity Can Improve](https://www.financialsamurai.com/the-average-percent-of-income-donated-to-charity/#:~:text=According%20to%20several%20of%20the,highest%20for%20lower%20income%20households)** > > The average percent of income donated to charity by levels of income is sadly very low across the board. According to several of the largest charitable foundations, the average income donated to charity ranges from just 3% to 5% of annual gross... [I wish I could have easily linked to/posted the chart in the article, but …] ---
**Author:** ![Atamasama](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atamasama/32/12961_2.png) [@Atamasama](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atamasama)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2021, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/112 "2021-01-26T15:40:48Z")
> [@DavidNRockies](#): > > [I wish I could have easily linked to/posted the chart in the article, but …] Let’s see if this works. [![](https://i2.wp.com/financialsamurai.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/US-Average-Charitable-Giving-by-Income-Level2-764x476.png) ](https://i2.wp.com/financialsamurai.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/US-Average-Charitable-Giving-by-Income-Level2-764x476.png) ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2021, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/113 "2021-01-26T15:43:58Z")
And note that the OP was criticizing Jerry Seinfeld for not contributing more of his supposed billion-dollar net worth to charity. So even if you’re giving a fraction of your income to charity, what percentage of your net worth are you giving? Because on a global scale, most people here are in the one percent. ---
**Author:** ![DavidNRockies](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidnrockies/32/6279_2.png) [@DavidNRockies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidNRockies)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2021, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/114 "2021-01-26T15:49:12Z")
You have mad skills. ETA: Ah. I see how you did it. I was regrettably lazy 😉 ---
**Author:** ![FlikTheBlue](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fliktheblue/32/10972_2.png) [@FlikTheBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlikTheBlue)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2021, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/115 "2021-01-26T16:09:45Z")
> [@Oredigger77](#): > > A sitcom is easily worth a billion dollars. If you could give all 250mm adults in this country $4 worth of entertainment you’ve earned a billion. I never liked his show and I don’t find him funny but he has still probably given me $4 in entertainment just for “no soup for you” and soup nazi. Hell I just pissed away $20 on the powerball for 12 hours of dreaming and thought that was worth it so his whole show has at least given me that much value over the years, though I don’t know enough about the writing process to say if Jerry earned 20% of the credit but that seems reasonable especially if we extend this world wide instead of just focusing on the US. This. I haven’t read the whole thread, but the reason entertainers, whether actors, musicians, athletes, authors, etc. make so much is because they provide a service to 10s or 100s of millions of people. A teacher can only teach one classroom of students at a time. A doctor or nurse can only attend to one patient at a time. A firefighter can only fight one fire at a time. The farm worker can only pick one avocado at time, and so on. Jerry Seinfeld, on the other hand, can reach millions of people with one rerun of his show. Tom Brady reaches millions of people when they watch the Super Bowl, and so on. I don’t begrudge either one their money. They put in the hard work and they deserve it. The owners, whether of the farm, TV network, football team, record company, or whatever, are a different story. They’re the ones who collect money without having worked for it, and they are the ones who should bear the brunt of paying for the social safety net. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2021, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/116 "2021-01-26T16:29:56Z")
> [@Mike\_Mabes](#): > > Just found out today he is worth almost a billion dollars. A billion dollars! For co-creating a sitcom. What a great contribution to humanity. > > Fuck him. Why isn’t he giving most of his money to charity? Well, how do you know he’s not? Really, is Foundation Guide all that accurate a source? Do they have access to his accountant’s files? And the guy doesn’t actually have a billion dollars in a bank account. > [@Mike\_Mabes](#): > > A baseball player making $100 million a year packs up his whole family and moves across country with his kids because he can make $130 million on another team. No baseball player has ever made $100 million a year, but if one has the opportunity to make another $30 million, hell, they’d be crazy not to. But what’s funny about this is that the guy you’re pitting did EXACTLY what you seem to think he should have done. He was offered over $100 million a year to keep doing the show, and decided to call it quits. > [@Mike\_Mabes](#): > > Bill Gates deserves to be rich, so does Springsteen, a thousand others. They do things that only a small percentage of people can do. Do you really believe a sitcom is worth almost a billion dollars? Why is a sitcom worth less than a couple of albums? ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2021, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/117 "2021-01-31T06:30:54Z")
> [@FlikTheBlue](#): > > I haven’t read the whole thread, but the reason entertainers, whether actors, musicians, athletes, authors, etc. make so much is because they provide a service to 10s or 100s of millions of people. A teacher can only teach one classroom of students at a time. A doctor or nurse can only attend to one patient at a time. A firefighter can only fight one fire at a time. The farm worker can only pick one avocado at time, and so on. Jerry Seinfeld, on the other hand, can reach millions of people with one rerun of his show. Tom Brady reaches millions of people when they watch the Super Bowl, and so on. I don’t begrudge either one their money. They put in the hard work and they deserve it. It’s a valid point that popular entertainers can produce immensely valuable products because of the nature of their medium, which lets them sell the same product to millions of purchasers simultaneously. But I don’t think that means they “deserve” any particular sum of money for it. They put in some work to make the product, yes, and it may in many cases have been hard work. But it remains the same amount of work whether ten or ten thousand or ten million people decide to buy the product. If the money that people “deserve” is based on how hard they worked. a popular entertainer doesn’t deserve any more money than a less popular one who worked just as hard. > [@FlikTheBlue](#): > > The owners, whether of the farm, TV network, football team, record company, or whatever, are a different story. They’re the ones who collect money without having worked for it, and they are the ones who should bear the brunt of paying for the social safety net. Goodness knows I’m no knee-jerk defender of capitalist elites, but even I know it’s ridiculous to assume that owning a farm, or a TV network or whatever, doesn’t entail any work. Being an executive who manages the activities of performers and makes the high-level decisions about what those activities should be counts as work. Which is why I don’t think we should indulge in bullshit speculations about which rich people “deserve” however much money for what they do or whether they’ve “worked hard” enough for it or what type of work they did for it. Let’s just tax people according to the amount of money they have, and not get into the weeds of how much money any of them “deserves” and why. ---
**Author:** ![Atamasama](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atamasama/32/12961_2.png) [@Atamasama](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atamasama)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2021, 7:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/118 "2021-01-31T07:41:39Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > Which is why I don’t think we should indulge in bullshit speculations about which rich people “deserve” however much money for what they do or whether they’ve “worked hard” enough for it or what type of work they did for it. Let’s just tax people according to the amount of money they have, and not get into the weeds of how much money any of them “deserves” and why. Yes, this. I agree with you 1,000%. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2021, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/119 "2021-01-31T15:41:52Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > If the money that people “deserve” is based on how hard they worked. a popular entertainer doesn’t deserve any more money than a less popular one who worked just as hard. Yes, but you could also look at it from another angle: If a TV show (or a bestselling novel, or a hit record, or a sporting event, or…) makes a certain large amount of money, who deserves that money? What percentage of the profits should go to said popular entertainer, as opposed to going to someone else who may deserve it less, or more? ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2021, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260/120 "2021-01-31T15:48:00Z")
The whole concept of “deserve” is ridiculous, and should be put out to pasture. It’s completely subjective. If I don’t like professional sports (I don’t), I might think that Michael Jordan didn’t deserve the fortune he made. I might think that [Gilbert Gottfried](https://www.ranker.com/review/gilbert-gottfried/1070480?ref=node_name&pos=11&l=1303395) is funnier than Seinfeld, so he “deserves” more money. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-jerry-seinfeld/931260.md?page=7)