Doubly annoying because he clearly does not care. No one on Earth needs to be that bad unless they just have utter contempt for their audience.
Jerry Seinfeld is a comedian. Never said he was an actor. He doesn’t try to be, and when called upon to act, quite purposely delivers his lines in his stand-up voice. As if to say, who are we kidding? You want believable characterization, you came to the wrong place. If you want funny lines delivered as funny lines, nice and loud so you can hear them, I can do that.
But even back in the ancient days of the Seinfeld sitcom, the show was often smug and self-indulgent. There was a running story, for instance, that went on for several episodes about how the series idea was sold to NBC. Perfectly hilarious, I’m sure, if you happen to be a famous comedian trying to sell a new series to NBC, but since very few of us are, there was nothing there for the typical viewer to identify with and it just seemed like Jerry Seinfeld was mostly amusing himself. Just like in this movie.
Believe it or not, Seinfeld was a very very popular show, that millions of people though was funny.
I didn’t think it was mass delusion, but I guess you never know.
I know it was popular. I was a big fan and don’t need to be convinced. But Seinfeld’s smug smirking at his own jokes and some of the self-indulgence made it less funny than it might have been. Also, as it got super-popular, the writers became rather pompously aware of their role as social meme-creators – “yada yada”, “not that there’s anything wrong with that”, and many others which would invariably become conversations around the office water cooler the next day. It was like a case of somebody being famous for being famous, rather than for any intrinsic quality or talent.
Almost all written only by Larry David.
I figured out why this film appeals to me. Everything in it would have been completely plausible to a dumb 7 year old in 1970… like me. It confirms everything I used to (and still kinda) believe about “Big Cereal”.
I guess I just don’t believe that millions of people were pretending to like Seinfeld just for performative reasons. But then I again I just might not be smart enough to rise above it all and see how I was duped into liking something just because it was popular.
Larry David has more credits than anyone else, but that statement is hardly true. Many of the episodes were co-written by multiple writers, and Seinfeld (who is credited with 17 episodes) had major influence (both good and bad) even when he wasn’t a credited writer.
I mean the episodes where they present their show to NBC. Not the whole Seinfeld show.
I don’t get this. You can only find humor in stories about your own industry? I’ve never worked in animal control so I can’t enjoy Animal Control? Never worked in an office so I can’t enjoy The Office? Never been a game developer so I can’t enjoy Mythic Quest?
I can find humor in a spoof on the difficulties of operating in a specific field even if I have never been employed in that specific field.
Some sources credit it all to Larry David, but according to IMDb, The Pitch and the two episodes of The Pilot were credited equally to Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, and Peter Mehlman. And I can sure see Seinfeld’s self-indulgent interests at play in all of them.
No, I can extrapolate from experience how many enterprises like typical office environments work. When there are at least three episodes of a series that focus on an exotic business that almost no viewer has had any experience with but is intimately familiar to the writers, that’s just self-indulgence, something Seinfeld has always engaged in.
I’ll say again that I really liked the series and was quite a fan of most of the episodes, but never had much good to say about Seinfeld himself.
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I think the thing is that Jerry Seinfeld was a good up and coming observational comedian who got himself a sitcom. He lucked out with a fine supporting cast, and most importantly, great writers, the best of which was Larry David.
Seinfeld and David shared a cynical, jaded view of the world, so their styles and sensibilities meshed well together. But I think David is just better at creating fictional scenarios, whereas Seinfeld has been and still is a decent observational comedian, but his comedic style just doesn’t translate well to fiction.
Does this criticism apply to shows whose whole premise is making a TV show, like 30 Rock, or The Mary Tyler Moore Show?
I haven’t had much exposure to 30 Rock, but it’s not about the selling and launching of a new TV show, it appears to be about the running of one. And come on, Mary Tyler Moore was something entirely different – and I was a big fan – a sweet show with feminist undertones about a young unmarried woman who could “make it on her own” as a humdrum associate news producer at a Minneapolis TV station. Not at all the same as Seinfeld’s “Lookit me! Lookit me! I made billions selling my standup schtick to NBC as a TV series – and boy was it funny how it all happened!”. 
Why is the distinction between “selling and launching” versus “running” significant? Neither are within the experience of most of the audience.
And yeah, The MTM Show was a lot different in tone to Seinfeld. That’s why I used it as an example - it’s still a show about showbiz, which you seemed to think was inherently self-indulgent.
Surely part of the joke was that the fictionalised NBC show was pretty lame, and ultimately a flop?
I spent years unwilling to watch Seinfeld, thinking: “why would I watch such a smug dickhead?”. But I learnt to view his dickishness as a feature, rather than a bug.
I can’t really comment much more on 30 Rock since it’s one of those shows that didn’t get much attention from me, since I typically don’t watch much TV to begin with. But that’s a gross mischaracterization of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. No one would realistically say that it was “a show about showbiz”. It was as I described – It was a show about an independent young woman and her interactions with eccentric characters in and outside the office.
That “the office” was a TV station newsroom was incidental and essentially a MacGuffin – they could have been in almost any line of work, and still had the pompous and unaware Ted Baxter and his ditzy girlfriend Georgette, Betty White as the perky man-chasing Sue Ann, Ed Asner as the gruff but big-hearted Lou Grant, and all the others. The show was basically about human relationships and caricatures of people we can all identify with. So was Seinfeld much of the time, and that’s what made it good.
But it sometimes veered into becoming a kind of self-indulgent biography about things that few people cared about, like interactions with NBC executives – that, combined with Seinfeld’s constant self-satisfied smirks, made some aspects of it annoying. But you don’t have to tell me it was, overall, a good show. But as someone noted above, Larry David probably had a lot more to do with that than Jerry Seinfeld, and the excellent fit of the major characters like Jason Alexander (George Costanza), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Elaine) and Michael Richards (Kramer) was just amazingly fortuitous.
To the extent that Seinfeld was funny was thanks to his costars. Wasn’t the guy with the fancy hair originally the star of WKRP? Nobody watched the show for that guy.
Heh? Who you talking about who had fancy hair on the show? All the guys on the show, to the extent they had hair, had pretty standard issue 70s-style haircuts.
