Homer, The Simpsons

Seemingly, it is quite ironic that the patriarch of The Simpsons is named Homer, for his presence, and the content of the show as a whole, is seemingly everything that epic poetry is not. Heroism, leadership, and large-scale, mythical action is what inspires people to tell a story and re-tell and embellish it, make its heroes braver and their actions bigger. As a kid, however, I reveled in recapping the previous evening's Simpsons re-run with my best friend Nick Ward every day at school, thus returning Homer to the realm from the textual to the oral. The stupidity, or often simple hubris, of Homer made him mythical without setting the story at sea, at war, or in a political power grab.

The sitcom occupies the boundary between the oral and textual spheres; it contains the written tradition in its scripted nature, in its ability to describe the personal, telling the stories of individuals and households, the everyman that Homer exemplifies; but it also contains the oral tradition in its debts to stand-up comedy in its improvisational, performative nature, and the larger aims of telling the great story of humanity, and to mythologize the everyday. Seinfeld especially has passed down an oral tradition not unlike the way Grecian orators did thousands of years ago. The best moments of the show are moments of storytelling. "The sea was angry that day, my friends," George begins his account of his moment as "The Marine Biologist" in the episode of the same name, "like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli." It is an epic simile that begins an epic account of a regular man's inability to be a hero, to inhabit the world of the epic. And when somebody repeats that, quotes Seinfeld, as generations will continue to do, this is what they mean: to continue to seek glory and fail is glorious; to fail to be a hero is heroic.

The question of Homer's identity also speaks to the authorship of Seinfeld. Was Homer a collective of storytellers or just a way of describing the way stories developed through generations of oral tradition? Similarly Seinfeld (Jerry), or Homer (Simpson), is just a mouthpiece for dozens of writers and performers that created the tapestry of the stories and their telling. When orality is blended with literacy, as when the Odyssey was first written down or when a planning meeting became a script, authorship becomes slippery; it becomes a metaphor for the creation of the story.

But back to "the Marine Biologist": in Seinfeld little action occurs, beyond the occasional sight gag. It is more a series of scenes in which the characters trade stories, itself an analogy for the scripting of the show. So, George is walking on the beach with a woman who believes he is a marine biologist. He is telling her about it: storytelling, as it is all made up, improvised on the spot, coming from the frustrated imaginative realms of his consciousness that have always wanted to be what he is not. And when they reach the crowd and the actual action is to occur it cuts to the coffee shop and we receive it in story form. "The sea was angry that day, my friends." The audience is tripled; we watch as George captivates his three friends, as we see so many times, the four taking turns, switching the roles of orator/audience into all different possible combinations, and we hear the studio audience, mixed with the laugh track, leaving us triply captivated, yet triply removed from the actual "event."

The difference between the written and the spoken concerned Derrida for the former is considered a representation of the latter. The speaker is present whereas is the writer is absent. In the same way someone might romanticize having seen Jerry Seinfeld do his act live in the eighties, that it was a more authentic experience than watching his show; or he might even aggrandize having watched him on Letterman, not even live, but still in the moment of his comedic rise. Derrida would argue that this logocentrism, always going back to the origin, retreating to find the real, misses the point, and that what the scripted show, the written, more complex achievements, has just as much value as a bygone performance. Things may be accomplished in writing, misspellings, for example, that may not be put into words. Seinfeld, however, goes a step further. It creates concepts, though based in a written script, that cannot be written, making the play doubly complex. When George approaches the crowd it seems a whale is dying in the surf, and it is Larry David's voice that shouts "Is anyone here a marine biologist?" The depth of this choice goes beyond writing. The informed Seinfeld viewer knows that George is based upon the very man, also the executive producer, who has challenged him, called the bluff that he knows is false, though David himself is not visible; he is hidden for the sake of the verisimilitude.

"The Wink" devotes an entire show to a deconstructed binary that exists extra-linguistically; it is not in the spoken or the written but in the physical, the performative. A wink creates meaning when it answers a question or proposes lasciviousness; but it can also qualify a verbal request or the sincere recommendation of a fellow employee, "Morgan, He's doing a great job (wink)." When Wilhelm, George's boss, says, "I understand," he really means he mis-understands that Morgan is screwing up. And another wink ensures that Morgan screws up, reinforcing the unintended irony bestowed by the first: when Kramer offers to take an envelope signed by some of the Yankees organization to his buddy Stubbs with a memorabilia store, George says, "Yeah, like I'm gonna risk my job with the New York Yankees to make a few extra bucks," and he winks, and it seems he is, as Kramer ends up taking the envelope and selling it with the card inside. And a wink creates innuendo when, in front of his wife, George tells him to enjoy his "massage (wink)," a mathematical attachment to the word, to the wink power or multiplied to the power of your imagination.

The spoken can be just as tricky to comprehend when pulp has caused you involuntarily to contradict yourself. "Yes" and "no" exist simultaneously, the difference existing, like the pulp, in the eye of the beholder. And like the grapefruit pulp the uncertainty, the undecidability stings, "Boy, it stings."

Perhaps that is what the sitcom is, a the briefly epic poem of a winking orator. "A funny thing happened to me on the way here," with a wink, becomes the Odyssey.