Adolescent Seinfeld Scholarship

The second era of my Seinfeld­ studies came in 9^th grade upon the occasion of my first English assignment, reading and reporting on a biography.  My father helped me find The Entire Domain by Kathleen Tracy at the Salinas Public Library, which I quickly read somewhat indifferently, finding its trivial content not very illuminating.  My book report, responding to whether its personage was static or dynamic, was equally as uninspired, as its simple errors reinforced.

            The book’s value lay rather in its appendix, which contained the chronological airing of every episode, a brief summary, and a few details on the show’s production and significance in the whole of the series.  Only now did I begin to understand the show and, by unlearning the three seasons I watched upon their original broadcast, did I learn what it was up to.  

            In tenth grade I participated in a contest, and won.

            When I eventually saw the episodes concerning the situation comedy that Jerry and George pitched to NBC about a stand-up comedian named Jerry and his friend and doing a whole episode I felt an immense excitement paired with a poignant confusion: why did nobody tell me that this had happened?  Why was the infinitely self-referential nature of the show ignored by popular culture for the accented and irate recitation of “No soup for you!” and the jaded conversational filler of “Yada, yada, yada”?  Had the world already moved on from concern with this self-reflectivity by the time I started watching, having already gotten the joke?  Was every “Master of his own domain” joke inherently a joke about jokes without me knowing it this whole time?  Or were people just giddy having gained access to a code that allowed them to discuss masturbation openly, eventually not even caring to what referent “master of my own domain” refers, and just proudly showing others that they are hip to the language?  Was something mysterious going on here that has never given full consideration?

            In my youthful inexperience I still had to defer to the adults, and when I arrived at the arrogant stage of my adolescence I moved away from television to Walden, Jean-Paul Sartre[1], and Holden Caulfield like everyone else.   Considering the extent to which Seinfeld was, and remains, an attack on the society of adults, I realize now I could have rebelled, first, against the Bush administration, then, against the war in Iraq, then, against the generation that allowed this nonsense to occur, then against the fabric of contemporary American values, not by sulking in my room reading Kafka like the 16 year olds who preceded me but, rather, by studying the iconoclastic jokes and explaining to my elders how the jokes were not on Man Hands or some other absurd character passing through an episode, as explicit jokes are made, nor on the protagonists who act with a despicability that increases with every season—it is on the adults who allow society to function as it does, with tradition replaced with nothing but apathy and coldness, love for others replaced with self-love, generosity replaced with selfishness,  in short, the anachronisms of western civilization either remain or have been supplanted by cruel jokes upon anyone who takes them seriously. 

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[1] Many parallels have been made between Sartre and Seinfeld, particular the final incarceration with No Exit, most eruditely Barbara Ching’s “They Laughed Unhappily After—Seinfeld and the Sitcom Encounter with Nothingness.”