The guy and the show. Maybe I’m not hip enough to get it, but I just never liked it. I’ve heard all these arguments from my friends:
“It’s about nothing–GET IT!?!”
“Um. no.”
“But, see, they’re BORING and ANNOYING!”
“Yes. That’s why I dislike the show.”
“Isn’t it genius? Doesn’t it just make you have an intellectual orgasm?”
SO, can someone tell me what’s with this show? I know I am late, but ah well.
This really smart dude I know once said:
I agree with him.
Seinfeld is funny because some people find it funny. Also, it’s not funny because some people don’t find it funny.
The humor in Seinfeld usually came from a few places:
wringing the most out of mundane but excruciating situations, like forgetting where one put one’s car in a parking garage.
the self-centeredness of the main characters. They played this up more as the series progressed.
multi-threaded plots that would twist back on themselves in unexpected ways.
The show would sometimes push the boundaries of political correctness. They did this more than once with the O.J. case (like the bit with the trial where Sue Ellen Misky put on the bra outside of her clothes, and it didn’t fit). They did it again with a low-speed chase involving motorized wheelchairs.
I’ve always thought the basis of Seinfeld’s comedy is that the idiosyncrasies of everyday life can funny. I mean come on…do they really have to show you how to operate a seatbelt when you get on a plane?
Your friends are not very perceptive. That’s like trying to explain MASH by saying “It’s about an army field hospital in the Korean War–GET IT!?!”
It’s funny because the writing, not the show concept itself, is funny. While I wasn’t the biggest fan, I thought a lot of the stuff was really clever, especially the multi-threaded plots that Jeff Lichtman mentioned.
Kramer. That’s the only thing it had going for it, IMHO.
The plots were often amazingly clever. They rivalled the Simpsons in terms of complexity. It is a very impressive and highly laudable skill to be able to utilise a number of apparently disparate plot elements and fully develop and resolve them in the space of 22 minutes. Seinfeld (along with the Simpsons) managed to do this with reasonable consistency. Add to this that both shows often resolved all plot threads with a single ending, and you can see why they are both so highly esteemed.
(Sorry to introduce the Simpsons into the thread, but it shares the cleverness of Seinfeld, and the two are arguably the greatest shows of the '90s.)
And Seinfeld had refreshingly different characters. Many people, myself included, are not always enamoured with admirable characters. Cultural history is littered with unadmirable protagonists - Hamlet, Alex (of a Clockwork Orange) and Holden Caulfield are classic examples. All the characters of Seinfeld were entirely unadmirable, and this made them interesting. Their actions weren’t motivated by self-sacrifice or the desire to do good. They were motivated by self-interest, and this made them interesting (perhaps Ayn Rand would also be more loved were she a sitcom character rather than a real person.)
And finally, Seinfeld is great because of the writing, which covers the previous two points I have made, and the uniqueness of the plots - finding humour in the mundane - that others have spoken of. But, to steal a quote,writing about humour is like dancing to architecture.
The early episodes of Seinfeld had just the right amount of absurdity, which made them very funny. Unfortunately, absurdity often slides into ridiculousness, and that is what happened with Seinfeld around the third season.
Speaking of O.J., the best episode in retrospect aired in 1995, when Elaine was dating the guy named “Joel Rifkin,” which is also the name of a famous serial killer of the time. She’s trying to get him to change his name, and suggest some football players, including O.J. “O.J. Rifkin.” That’s a real improvement
Actually, no, Annie, which is what makes that line even better, in retrospect. The Joel Rifkin episode first aired November 18, 1993. It wasn’t an OJ murder joke. It was an OJ name joke.
Nothing
I like SEINFELD, because (as mentioned) it makes mo\inor aspects of life funny. Also the characters-who can NOT finf Kramer funny? This weird guy, who doesn’t have a job, wears retro clothes, and doesn’t want his first name known…he is hilarious. Likewise George-the frustrated bachelor/nerd…the kid that everybody made fun of in HS. Elaine’s character is more complex-most of her appeal comes from the weird assortment of bosses that she works for…like the guy that owns J Peterman.
The best episode: when Kramer finds the set of the old “MERVE GRIFFON” TV Show-and re-creates the show in his apartment!
So I’m the only one who watches the show just to look at Elaine?
Theres nothing great about it- GET IT!?
I’m not a huge Seinfeld fan but I’ll try and explain some of the things that I find very funny about it. Please bear with me if I’m fuzzy on the details, as I don’t really watch it too often.
The show is definitely not about nothing. It’s about human nature.
To me, the brilliance of the show was that it was so uncomfortably realistic. They highlighted all the little flaws in the way people think and behave. When the show was at its best in the earlier years, it was about 3 regular human beings, Jerry, Elaine, and George. They weren’t especially honest, ethical, kind, or generous, but they weren’t necessarily horrible people either. In other words, you could relate to them.
And, like any of us, they would find themselves in all sorts of everyday situation that required them to make a decision. And that decision usually amounted to this:
“Do I do the right thing or the wrong thing?”
Of course, they usually chose the wrong thing–not because they were evil, but because the wrong thing was usually cheaper or more convenient, or resulted in them getting some mundane thing that they really wanted.
The comedy lay in three areas:
Showing these people going through the process of making the “right or wrong” decision. The writing made it funny, but the whole notion of portraying someone’s decision processes over and over was unique. I think most of us sometimes dissemble in order to get a discount on something, but watching someone else make that decision and justify their actions just shows the absurdity of our own behavior. Example: Jerry(?) pretended to be married to get a discount on dry cleaning.
Showing the consequences of their wrong decisions. These consequences were usually somewhat exaggerated, but it was funny to see how things could follow from the wrong decision. By showing us what happens when we are immoral or unethical (to great comedic effect) it allows us to learn from other peoples bad behavior. In a sense each show served as a kind of a fable, where we see the bad effects of bad decisions. So it was actually morally uplifting without being preachy.
Showing people’s irrational ideas and preferences. Or as we’d say in NY–their misha gass. And there was no central normal character. They were all nutty. And that’s uncomfortably realistic. We all have our own misha gass, and it’s endlessly entertaining to learn about other peoples’. I always loved the shows where one of them would be dating someone who was otherwise very desirable, but had some kind of flaw that the protagonist just couldn’t get over. And it was hilarious how they named these flaws. Elaine dated a “slow-talker,” right? And Jerry dated a beautiful woman with “man-hands.” I think we can all really relate to that situation–where a potential partner just has some feature that turns us off? (A really great guy wanted to date me once, but there was something about the enormous size of his head that I just couldn’t get over. I’m sort of ashamed of that, but that’s reality.)
These three main comedic elements were highlighted by two factors:
The role of Kramer. He was the straight man. On the surface, he was the comic relief. He was outwardly the most crazy. But he was the only one who stuck to his own moral and ethical code. His particular set of values was pretty screwy, but he was the only honest one in the bunch. Setting the other three against Kramer just highlighted their moral and ethical lapses.
The way the show set up all the sub-plots and coincidences to make everything even more problematic or uncomfortable than it already was. As someone upthread noted, there’s often a great little twist at the end that brings it all together.
The famous masturbation episode will illustrate these points (yes, there are spoilers):
–George makes a “wrong” decision–masturbating in his parent’s house on the living room couch. The fact that it was to a Cosmo magazine–well there’s your misha gass.
–His mother finds him on the couch, faints, and hurts herself and lands in the hospital. Not super likely, but not totally outside the realm of possiblity. So George has to deal with the consequences of the fact that his own slightly deviant sexual behavior landed his mother in the hospital.
–Through this episode, we learn about George’s mother. She is definitely irrational and manipulative and awful in so many ways. But some of her behavior is uncomfortably realistic–especially to anyone who has a New York Jewish or Italian mother!
–The whole situation prompts the 4 main characters into a rather uncomfortable discussion about masturbation. And all of them try to convince the others that they don’t do it and/or don’t need to do it. Again, this highlights our own irrational behavior, because most people don’t like to admit that they masturbate. They make a bet to see who can go the longest without masturbating.
–Kramer is the first one to masturbate. IIRC, right after the bet is made, he sees something sexy out the window, goes into Jerry’s bathroom for a minute, and comes out and announces that he’s out of the bet. This is an example of Kramer as being the most sane and moral of the bunch. Not only does he freely admit that he can’t not masturbate, but he also won’t do something “wrong” (changing his sexual behavior) because of outside influences. So, here we get Kramer as the comic relief–he can’t last 5 minutes without masturbating, it only takes him 30 seconds to finish, and he’s willing to do it in Jerry’s bathroom–but he’s also plays the straight man, in that the other’s behavior actually ends up seeming more weird than his behavior.
–Over the course of the episode, we see the sub-plots and coincidences develop. Jerry is dating a virgin who will only go almost all the way. Elaine keeps seeing JFK Jr. at her gym (this was at the height of his hunky eligible bachelorhood). And whenever George is at the hospital visiting his mother, a nurse comes in and bathes the patient in the next bed. The silhouettes and the sounds behind the curtain are VERY erotic, but George can’t even pay attention because his mother keeps bugging him. So, all three of them are becoming more and more sexually frustrated. Of course, Kramer, having been honest in the beginning, isn’t in any distress at all. I don’t remember how it all came together in the end, except that Jerry’s virgin girlfriend slept with JFK Jr.
All in all, a great episode. Everything was exaggerated for comedic effect, but it really rang true.
The show went downhill in the later seasons for the following reasons:
–They made the central 3 characters much more reprehensible. I could relate to basically decent people struggling with everyday dilemmas. But by the later seasons, they were no longer basically decent. They were horrible people.
–They moved away from showing the characters making one or a couple of small wrong decisions to showing them engaging in a series of pretty serious lies and deceptions. Instead of showing the imaginary consequences of a wrong choice in a decision that we would be likely to encounter ourselves, they showed the consequences of actions that we, ourselves, would never engage in. It was a later episode that showed George taking a nap under his desk at work. I’ve certainly been tempted to do that, and it was funny to see him actually doing it! It would have been funny if they showed him dealing with the consequences of simply taking a nap under his desk, or possibly, having gotten away with it once, doing it several more times. But they showed him converting the underside of his desk into a kind of a bedroom. That was too unrealistic to be funny.
–The consequences that they showed were too unrealistic. There was an episode where Elaine created an imaginary coworker to avoid some kind of a confrontation. I don’t remember why, but she had to “kill” her imaginary coworker. So there was this big huge funeral for someone who a) didn’t exist, and b) didn’t even exist as an imaginary person for very long. If they had just shown people trying to express sympathy for the death of someone that they had never heard of but feel like they ought to have heard of, that would have been funny. But to show people giving long eulogies–again, too unrealistic to be funny.
Overall, I think it’s a really brilliant show. As I said, I’m not a huge fan, but that’s not because I think it’s “not that great.” I just find certain elements of the show really annoying, and the annoyance usually exceeds the amusement for me.
The OP finds the characters “boring and annoying,” but the show makes us see how boring and annoying we are ourselves. We laugh at the show because we are laughing at ourselves, and that’s what makes it great.
I think you will find that you are not alone there
Curb Your Enthusiasm is much smarter and funnier.