Seinfeld, since the age that I started to think of the show as made by real people and not its own real world that the television presented me, has been a kind of riddle to me. Up until a certain age—somewhere between 9 and 13, let's say—disbelief is not suspended as much as it just does not exist, but once the charade, the theater of the event, is revealed, it is hard to get lost in a weekly situation comedy unless you are getting lost in the brilliance and intricacy of the jokes, the way the charade is constructed and seems to hold together. Yet Jerry-Seinfeld-the-character, who was a stand-up comedian and even created and produced an episode of a situation comedy, remained Jerry-Seinfeld-the-person, seemingly, and there lay the riddle—if the show flirts with autobiography and thus a certain level of verisimilitude, how much does it intend to accurately describe reality, especially since the non-thespian lead rarely seems actually to be acting?
Now that we have fifteen years between the present moment and the airing of the series finale, longer than the show was actually on the air, and twice as long as Larry David's tenure as executive producer, we can read the respective post-Seinfeld careers of Seinfeld and David as a means of understanding the sensibilities that each brought to the show, or, at least, I will presently argue that we may, and, if you disagree, you may presently suspend the aforementioned disbelief. The most instructive moments from the televisual, new millennium work of the co-creators of Seinfeld are those in which Seinfeld (or another actor from Seinfeld) enters the Davidian universe of HBO's faux-reality-TV, improvised avant-garde post-sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, or when David appears in one of Seinfeld's post-Seinfeld projects, and we will start with an example of the latter, which is the most recent, in which Jerry invites Larry out for coffee, which is actually breakfast, on Seinfeld's self-explanatory web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, the first episode entitled "Larry Eats a Pancake."
"It's a miracle we ever got any work done because nobody can waste time like you and me," Jerry says to Larry as they get out of the 1952 Volkswagen Beetle that Jerry has taken out on the town for the purpose of this episode.
"I agree—it's a miracle." Larry says, "I always wanted the show to get canceled so I wouldn't have to work."
For someone who enjoys Curb Your Enthusiasm as much as I do, and particularly the Larry character played by David, it is gratifying to see the "real" version of the man, not too different from his fictional self yet entirely sociable, yielding and not despicable, though this Larry is of course just a different kind of fictional version of David, an improvised television self, acting natural, so to speak in a showbiz context, but he is warmer and kinder, someone seriously preoccupied with the consumption of chicken, for example (we learn after Jerry asks "What the hell is wrong with chicken"), "it's a lot of cholesterol... and if it's not free range chicken there's a lot wrong with it," and generally concerned with his diet and the environment, as evidenced by the first piece of writing I read by him, written as the Larry David outside of his TV show, about a decade ago in Rolling Stone about the alarming rates of mercury in tuna, arguing that we need to look after the health of the oceans so he could remain a happy frequent consumer of tuna fish sandwiches, otherwise the world as he knows it would collapse. Jerry makes a joke about the idea of "free range," that it's a myth involving chickens in cowboy hats, "Home on the Range," etc.
This is a trivial moment—and thus quintessentially Seinfeld (and Seinfeld)—but an important one in understanding the dynamics of these comedy greats: Larry has a slightly ironic, for the sake of not seeming preachy, moralizing streak; and Jerry is amoral—he is nice, he does not curse, his comedy is inclusive and commercially viable, but it is unpolitical and oblivious to any real notion of ethics that goes past the etiquette of tipping to, for example, the socioeconomic implications of a tip-based income.
"You're like a young king, aren't you," Ricky Gervais says to Jerry in the second episode—"Mad Man in a Death Machine"—after Jerry asks in the restaurant to where he has driven them, "Can I have two yellow eggs and two egg whites?" Gervais' comedic proposition is the best moment of the whole series, in my humble opinion, because it rings so true as it simultaneously takes to task the whole premise of the show.
"Things are kept from you, but...you wanna do stuff... 'He wants to drive around in a car,' and someone says 'well, just let him go around in a car.'"
"'But he wants to do it with celebrities,'" Jerry adds.
"'He wants to do it with some of his friends he's seen on the tele.' 'We'll get their number.'"
Jerry's material is based on his celebration of never having grown up, inhabiting a world based around cereal, Superman and inconsequential foibles. I remember watching one of his big returns to TV, a Tonight Show appearance about five years ago, and the five minutes of new—I should note killer—material from the fiftysomething legend were all about eating cookies in the middle of the night. He has nothing but money and time, like a "young king" who doesn't quite grasp the responsibilities of his role, instead telling cookie jokes, collecting vintage cars as an extension of the common boyhood dream, and he has his people arrange play dates for him with other people who understand the lifestyle of having nothing but money and time, and, instead of a privilege bestowed at birth, comedic talent. Another great moment is Alec Baldwin's deadpan summation of Jerry that gives the episode—"Just a Lazy Shiftless Bastard"—its title and us the line, "Your life has been one unbroken boulevard of green lights, hasn't it?" They drove in a 1970 Mercedes 280 SL in signal red. They park it in a garage and, like the rest of the help that appear in the back- and foregrounds of the show, the attendant is seen and not heard.
I once saw Jerry Seinfeld in person. I had just finished sixth grade and Jerry had just finished the most successful situation comedy of all time, as people like to say. My English uncle, a captain of industry and then collector of Aston Martins, took me and my brother to the Concourse d'Elegance in Pebble Beach, paying fifty dollars for the each of us—to my shock and horror (the things I could have done with fifty dollars!)—at the improvised ticket desk erected on the 18th hole of the Pebble Beach Golf Links. We spent the afternoon looking at beautiful antique cars arranged in and out of tents along the fairways, and at one point I turned around and there was Jerry Seinfeld, surrounded, of course, by half a dozen people. I wanted to be one of them, but I didn't want to bother him, nor did I have anything to say. I just stared for a bit and kicked myself for not having a Pez dispenser and Sharpie on my person.
I followed everything he did after Seinfeld. I taped I'm Telling You for the Last Time off of HBO onto the VCR and watched him literally bury (or at least simulate the burial of) and perform all of his material once before my dad recorded over it with a soccer game which, needless to say, was, in hindsight, very disappointing, and, in the moment, really upsetting. When I discovered Napster a year or so later I downloaded the album and listened to it on headphones and roared with laughter as I discovered the internet. I saw Comedian—the cinéma vérité documentary of Seinfeld, the biggest name of his generation, start awkwardly from scratch in small New York basement comedy clubs along with an obnoxious youngster who spends the movie complaining that he his not famous—the day it came out with my dad after he picked me up from high school.
It was a perfect myth—man of integrity climbs to the top of show business, walks off stage on the most perfect note imaginable, and starts from scratch in obscurity, toiling for love of the craft, suffering for jokes. A moment in the movie perpetuates this myth and describes the timelessness of it when the other comedian complains to Jerry that he's not famous yet and Jerry, the seasoned guru of show business, says "you got something else you'd rather have been doing?" and tells him his "favorite story about show business."
Glen Miller and his orchestra they were doing some gig somewhere. They can't land where they're supposed to land 'cause it's a winter snowy night, so they have to land like in this field and walk to the gig and they're dressed in their suits, they're ready to play, they're carrying their instruments. So they're walking through the snow and it's wet and slushy and in the distance they see this little house and there's lights on in the inside and there's a curl of smoke coming out through the chimney and they go up to the house, they look in the window they see this, this family. And there's a guy and his wife and she's beautiful, and two kids they're all sitting around the table and they're smiling, they're laughing and they're eating, and there's a fire in the fireplace and these guys are standing there in their suits, and they're wet and they're shivering and they're holding their instruments and they're watching this incredible Norman Rockwell scene, and one guy turns to the other guy and goes "How do people live like that?" That's what it's about.
I was sold on this myth. Jerry Seinfeld was my hero and, though I had watched Larry David's special and subsequent series on HBO and I knew he had something to do with Seinfeld, though I didn't really understand what, I believed Seinfeld was the heart of Seinfeld, the proletarian toiler whose work ethic flourished from the need to selflessly make people happy through some amalgam of truth, intergrity and jokes. I was so devoted that when I heard rumor of Jerry returning to TV I was there for the big debut, even though it was just an American Express commercial. And this moment when he returned to TV was the moment the myth began to fade because, of course, it was just an American Express commercial, and in the ten years that have passed since that moment, the episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm that had already aired and the ones that would be steadily produced became better and better. The riddle of Seinfeld became clearer and ultimately obvious: Larry David hijacked Jerry's mainstream appeal, his formulaic accessibility, near universality, commercial viability—the man could create hype for commercials, for god's sake—and used it to produce the most interesting television ever to be consumed by such a large audience, recursive and self-referential jokes whose punchlines cannot even be properly identified, seamless ripped-from-the-headlines parodies that never break the verisimilitude of the episode, and a constant undercutting and near shame of the form in which they worked, an embarrassment so severe he quit at the show's peak after killing off Susan with cheap envelope adhesive. This was two years before everyone else supposedly quit at the show's peak, mind you, not before demanding a million dollars an episode for the final season. David's was an embarrassment so severe that he quit the most successful show of my lifetime to write and direct a somewhat difficult-to-watch moralizing film, 1998's Sour Grapes, and cast himself as the obnoxious producer of a show not unidentical to Friends, an artless, sentimental Seinfeld rip off that nobody could accuse Seinfeld of resembling. But, for Larry, the resemblance was too close.
Seinfeld's post-Seinfeld work, especially the second era that begins with that American Express commercial, is not in the same category as that of David. Each season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, it seems, surpasses the glory achieved by its precedent, even the Seinfeld-reunion season, which brought Seinfeld back to form playing the straight foil to the mad creative genius of David's writing, a season that felt like the inevitable peak of the series, was trumped by Larry's subsequent Season 8 sojourn in New York. Jerry made a blasé children's cartoon in which he voices a bee (Bee Movie), an interesting reality TV show, by reality TV standards (The Marriage Ref), and now a rip-off of the British program Carpool, a debt which goes unacknowledged I should note, a seemingly minimalist literal vehicle for jokes that is instead propaganda for himself and his friends, an advertisement for the bourgeois lifestyle, cars, and coffee. Or, as Larry sums it up in the first episode, "You've finally done a show about nothing."
No comments:
Post a Comment