Seinfeld

Commonweal, Feb 9, 1996 by Frank McConnell

Being Irish, I think it's important always to have a few really good reasons to be depressed--otherwise you'll start feeling good about stuff, and when you do that, you know the cosmos is going to put out the drop line on you: the disposal will back up, the pilot light in the furnace will go inexplicably out, you'll get a solicitation in the mail from the Psychic Friends Network, whatever. Paranoid/neurotic? Yeah: it is the way of my people.

By the way, this is a piece about "Seinfeld."

So: among the allowable reasons to be depressed at this point in time are the economy (especially in California); the recent death of Roger Zelazny, a great science-fiction writer and an entirely lovely man; the presence of Ricki Lake on TV; and, if that isn't enough, the fact that this is very probably the penultimate season for "Seinfeld," which did as much or more for TV comedy as the now-mythic, now-available-on-reruns "Mary Tyler Moore" show did in the seventies.

"A show about nothing": that was the catch-phrase for "Seinfeld" that got generated--probably with the enthusiastic help of some PR guys from ABC--in its first season. Set in Manhattan--still, after all these years, the real psychic capital of America--it traces the meanderings of four people through their lives, four people who happen to share an addiction to the same mediocre neighborhood diner, the same anxiety about their lives' futures--and mutual affection. Nothing does happen in most of the episodes, in fact, except for quibbling and quarreling among the four major characters. A show about nothing? Actually it's a show about bumbling: bumbling the way you and I bumble through our days, years, lives, always expecting that the moment of crisis, kairos, The Great Turning Point, is just around the comer. And it never, dammit, is: sound familiar?

I love "Seinfeld" because it's funny as hell; and, more, because it's funny in a way American sitcoms didn't manage to be funny until this thing came along. "Sitcom": think about the word. "Situation Comedy." From "I Love Lucy" and "The Honeymooners" down to the abominable "Married . . . with Children" and the blandly pleasant "Coach," the sitcom is about ordinary folks getting themselves involved in extraordinary, absurd pickles, and clawing their way out: slapstick in the living room. "Seinfeld" follows that formula--after all, this is TV, the most unrelenting formulaic mode of storytelling ever--but follows it with a difference. In "Seinfeld," the situations are ordinary--you lost the watch your mother gave you and she's coming to visit, or you were caught making out with your girlfriend during Schindler's List--and the characters are extraordinary: articulate, witty, self-conscious, and as neurotic as a cadre of waltzing mice. The show's premise is that life is predictable, but we are excessive in our response to it: we used to call this "realism."

The center of the show is Jerry Seinfeld, a struggling stand-up comic, played by Jerry Seinfeld, a struggling stand-up comic and the show's main writer and co-producer. His friends are Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an ex-lover and now good pal who has perennially rotten luck with men; George (Jason Alexander), balding and insecure at mid-life, who has rotten luck with women; and Kramer (Michael Richards), of the weird hair and explosively clumsy body movements, whose personal chaos seems somehow always to leave him standing upright while the other, far more rational three usually end in various postures of defeat or discomfort.

As I said, the comedy here isn't dazzlingly unprecedented. "The Dick Van Dyke Show," "Mary Tyler Moore," and "Bob Newhart"--with, still, the fastest and sharpest dialogue ever on the Tube--all these, and of course "Cheers" and of course "Taxi," anticipated the brilliance and (important word) civility of "Seinfeld." But none quite achieved its special tone.

And that tone is best described in the old phrase, comedy of manners. No kidding: if "Seinfeld" has a Muse, a patron goddess, it sure is--surprised as the writers might be to hear it--Jane Austen.

I said that the sitcom is basically slapstick in the living room (remember Dick Van Dyke tripping over the ottoman at the beginning of every episode?). Well, comedy of manners is slapstick also, but slapstick for the living room. Its characters know that they are involved in an elaborate, largely artificial social dance of dialogue, dissimulation, and desire. Unlike the characters of simpler comedy, they watch themselves play out their absurdities, even as they realize they are powerless against the pull of the absurd. And the absurd is in the little things, not the pratfall but the faux pas: that's the world of Pride and Prejudice, and that's the world of "Seinfeld" at its very best.

How splendid to make the show's protagonist a stand-up comic, since standup is the boiled-down puree of comedy of manners: however outrageous, it can only (only!) be slapstick translated through the self-consciousness of language. In fact, all the major players in the cast are stand-ups: they know they're silly while they're being silly. It's a show--for once--where nobody is dumb, a show with clowns and no fools. That alone raises the ante--and the interest.