(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding

If I were to choose my least favorite Seinfeld episode it would be “The Heart Attack.”  It’s not that I dislike it or that it’s not better than most of what’s on TV—it just misses the accomplishment of your average Seinfeld episode for the reason that it successfully manages to satirize in a traditional sense: identify an object as ridiculous and reveal it as such in a straight-forward, stable mode of narrative that we don’t find elsewhere in the show.   Each character is solidly cast in an identifiable role, and Jerry’s commenting, aloof perspective is privileged.  At the coffeeshop George convinces himself he is having a heart-attack.  Elaine is concerned but Jerry just realizes that his hypochondriac friend watched “Coronary Country” on TV the night before, but they go to the hospital anyway.   It turns out George was fine except that his tonsils grew back and needed to be removed again.

            Jerry’s preoccupation in the episode is deciphering a note he wrote the night before cataloguing a moment in the middle of the night when he woke up to find a man screaming in a B-movie, and as such asks any new character who enters the story what they think the piece of paper says.  Elaine meets George’s doctor and, beginning the series’ joke that women want to marry doctors, flirts with him and then goes out with him.  Kramer asserts his membership in the institutionalized counter-culture by insisting that George see a natural healer because hospitals are big business and want you to be sick so they can make more money.   George, infamously cheap, decides to avoid the surgery and overnight stay in the hospital for the double-digit homeopathic consultation.

            In the end, however, George pays more than he would have for the initial surgery because the concoction that Kramer’s healer gives him turns him literally and comically blue.  The show further degenerates into gimmick and slap-stick cliché when the paramedics get into a fight on the way to the hospital resulting in an accident that further frustrates George’s health woes.   It’s not far from the end of Annie Hall, which ruins what is an otherwise first-rate film: the parody of Los Angeles new-age absurdity alienates a subculture from Woody Allen’s straight worldview just as homeopathic healing is alienated from the straight perspective of George and Jerry.  However, Allen and Seinfeld are at their best when no one’s approach is privileged, everyone is ridiculous and we are left unsure if the medical establishment is better than the natural healer, or if the fellow in the full plastic suit is a pretentious idiot who has lost his mind since he arrived in L.A., in short, if anyone can be correct either in asserting or negating the assertion or negation of someone else.

            Seinfeld, unlike Woody Allen’s films, is not against 1960s bohemianism.  In fact its representation in Kramer often survives better than the straight lifestyles of the other three.  What is under attack is the way mainstream society appropriates and degenerates anything that may at one point have been worthwhile by claiming to understand it.  When Elvis Costello asks “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?” a rhetorical reading is assumed, but it is much more interesting as a literal question: how has the establishment made a mockery out of compassion?  This is in a sense the history of mankind: important figures telling us what’s so wonderful ‘bout peace, love, and understanding, and other people perverting it in the process of passing down the message.  “Writing is the seedbed of irony,” in the words of Walter Ong, “and the longer the writing (and print) tradition endures, the heavier the ironic growth becomes.”  Jesus’s words become the New Testament, whose use and interpretation becomes more ironic the longer people take the Bible to be the word of God as it drifts further and further away from its erroneous creation as such—peace, love, and understanding become funnier and funnier. 

            The same may be said of the ‘60s: the establishment adopts its canon—John Lennon, some Bob Dylan, etc., whatever suits the unified conception of what the era meant—and suddenly in 1970 John Lennon can’t say anything because what John Lennon stands for has already been decided.  The Beatles were bigger than Jesus because they, in that moment, were creating their legacy, had a voice in it, before it could be completely defined by those who wanted to create an idealized idea of them, before two millennia of irony made their essence a joke.  However, the increasingly hyperactive literacy, and consequent irony, of the end of the 20^th century made the Beatles as big of joke as Jesus by the 1990s.   This is why Seinfeld declared itself to be nothing from the start: so that anyone who attempted retroactively to make it into something, to describe it as a pinpointable unified idea, could not be considered as anything other than a complete idiot.