How 'Seinfeld' was born The joys of a sitcom about 'nothing'
McConnell, Frank
Frank McConnell HOW 'SEINFELD' WAS BORN Jane Austen meets Woody Allen Being Irish, I think it's important always to have a few really good reasons to be depressed-otherwise you'll start feeling...
...In fact, all the major players in the cast are stand-ups: they know they're silly while they're being silly...
...Nothing does happen in most of the episodes, in fact, except for quibbling and quarreling among the four major characters...
...Elaine who constantly screws up finding the right guy...
...Maybe life should sometimes try a little harder to imitate art...
...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 corner...
...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...
...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...
...Paranoid/neurotic...
...George (Jason Alexander), balding and insecure at mid-life, who has rotten luck with women...
...It's a show- for once-where nobody is dumb, a show with clowns and no fools...
...Situation Comedy...
...Seinfeld" just built, like all art worth the name, on an established tradition and came up with something new and fine...
...And the absurd is in the little things, not the pratfall but the faux pas: thafs the world of Pride and Prejudice, and that's the world of "Seinfeld" at its very best...
...Frank McConnell HOW 'SEINFELD' WAS BORN Jane Austen meets Woody Allen 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...
...and the Shadow, the dark, feared, often-denied other inside all our dreams...
...and, more, because it's funny in a way American sitcoms didn't manage to be funny until this thing came along...
...who nevertheless gets, as if by magic, all the girls and money and success everybody else wants-mainly by not even trying...
...the Syzygy, the "ego," organizing impulse...
...Jung famously described the unified self as a quartet, or quaternity, of mutually-tensioned personalities: the Animus, the striving, male part...
...the Anima, the nurturing, female part...
...George who constantly screws up finding any woman...
...From "I Love Lucy" and "The Honeymooners" down to the abominable "Married...
...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...
...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...
...the presence of Ricki Lake on TV...
...Did I invoke Jane Austen...
...No kidding: if "Seinfeld" has a Muse, a patron goddess, it sure is-surprised as the writers might be to hear it-Jane Austen...
...As I said, the comedy here isn't daz-zlingly unprecedented...
...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...
...That alone raises the ante-and the interest...
...Set in Manhattan-still, after all these years, the real psychic capital of America-it traces the mean-derings 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...
...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...
...Yeah: it is the way of my people...
...Seinfeld" follows that formula-after all, this is TV, the most unrelenting formulaic mode of storytelling ever-but follows it with a difference...
...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...
...Jerry, ironic and detached, who tries mainly to keep his balance...
...By the way, this is a piece about "Seinfeld...
...His friends are Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an ex-lover and now good pal who has perennially rotten luck with men...
...The fact is, "Seinfeld" is the kind of show that would have been written by Jane's kid, if she had married Woody Allen: and that is a marriage made in heaven...
...the recent death of Roger Zelazny, a great science-fiction writer and an entirely lovely man...
...Its characters know that they are involved in an elaborate, largely artificial social dance of dialogue, dissimulation, and desire...
...How splendid to make the show's protagonist a stand-up comic, since stand-up is the boiled-down puree of comedy of manners: however outrageous, it can only (only...
...The four main characters are so perfectly a single, self-conscious self, so perfectly a comic projection of our own daily negotiations with the world, that it's difficult to believe the writers didn't, sometime, flip through a copy of Psyche and Symbol...
...Well, actually, not so difficult...
...be slapstick translated through the self-consciousness of language...
...But none quite achieved its special tone...
...And it never, dammit, is: sound familiar...
...Comedy has its own wisdom, older and wiser-and more fully human-than psychology...
...So: among the allowable reasons to be depressed at this point in time are the economy (especially in California...
...I love "Seinfeld" because it's funny as hell...
...and Kramer, anarchic and maladroit (what the hell does he do for a living...
...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...
...Hip, bitter, and finally deeply generous, the show's wit and Weltanschauung is in the background of sitcoms like "Frasier," "Friends," and the splendid "Mad about You...
...Well, comedy of manners is slapstick also, but slapstick for the living room...
...The show's premise is that life is predictable, but we are excessive in our response to it: we used to call this "realism...
...And that tone is best described in the old phrase, comedy of manners...
...A show about nothing...
...And isn't it funny that, as our political and civil discourse becomes everyday more fifth-grade simplistic and coarse, comedies like these preserve an idea of civil speech-speech that saves our humanity while accepting our silliness...
...Jung would have loved this show...
...C.G...
...Sitcom": think about the word...
...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...
...That's only half-right...
Vol. 123 • February 1996 • No. 3
