Watching Seinfeld 15 years after its finale

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."

C for "Coffee"

In the last episode of season seven of Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry David has an argument with Mocha Joe about the nature of a favor.  Mocha Joe believes a task performed for Larry merited a tip due to the nature of their relationship whereas Larry believed it to be a simple favor between friends.  To actualize his claim Larry agrees to pick up some coffee beans on the other side of town, and, when traffic prevents him from arriving in time to pick up the beans, Larry feels his effort fulfilled his obligation, that trying was enough.  This disagreement on the practicality of semantics is classic Curb Your Enthusiasm.  However, this episode is the climax of the Seinfeld reunion plot of the season, and Larry’s perception is compromised with his counterpart in the reunion, Jerry Seinfeld; when the argument ensues the next day on the set, Jerry happens to be present and meanders into the conversation.

            Jerry sides with Mocha Joe, that he needs coffee beans, not someone driving around for him.   The audience, or at least myself, tends to side with Larry in such arguments, though this privilege has grown highly unstable in the most recent season, most uncomfortably in “The Black Swan” in which Larry is cast as a heartless and murderous mobster silencing the dissent of his closest friends through appeals to their own self preservation.  However, in this particular quarrel we have the other side of the argument privileged through the “icon” Jerry Seinfeld, who can now drown out the “no-con” Larry.  Larry storms off shouting the childish cliché “E for effort” to which Mocha Joe replies “F for favor” and Jerry contributes in pure comic perfection “C for coffee.”

            The essence that each creator brings to both Seinfeld and this season, or at least the episodes with Seinfeld, comes into clear view in this interchange: Mocha Joe is the substance of an episode—the discussion of the nature of a “favor”— this is, indeed, the only one in which we see him; Larry/George is the emotional, self-righteous appeal to process—“effort” as a valued product; Jerry is the indifferent, ironic commentary that favors bourgeois logic—the currency is “coffee,” which Larry does not produce.    That Larry has millions of dollars, is on HBO, and has the critical clout to claim smugly to himself that he was the genius behind Seinfeld makes him everything that George is not; unemployment is a privilege, not a bane; NBC is a joke, not a humiliation; disagreement is the fault of everyone else.  But in the presence of Seinfeld, and Seinfeld, Larry is demoted to the status of George all of a sudden.  He is employed; we can only assume NBC is once again his boss; and Larry has perversely cast his ex-wife as George’s ex-wife, and written their reunion, in an effort to reunite himself with her, thus needing the help of others.  As it turns out, when Jason Alexander quits when Larry changes the ending, he insists that he, Larry, play George, and the cast refuses—though we see a sublime rehearsal of what it would look like had Larry performed George—and Larry is demoted even further, not even allowed to be George.

            Mocha Joe is the episode—both the guest star of this episode and a representative of the archetypical episode—and Jerry and Larry are the opposing interpretations of the episode: for Jerry it is coffee, the physical commodity that stands in for process; for Larry it is process which, in the aesthetic ideal, does not end in any product and may not be represented in any product.  In, “The Pilot” episode of Seinfeld, what is essentially Jerry’s show, Jerry warms up the crowd before the taping and discusses what Jerry is in the exact words that he may describe the successful produced show he is, thus reaching a moment in which the process reaches a product.  However, he is cut off by Crazy Joe Devola who leaps from the crowding shouting Sic semper tyrannis, and it cuts to commercial.  In Larry’s show Jerry interrupts Larry’s conversation—the epitome of the preoccupation with process (dealing with the man who sells coffee on the set of a show) over product (the show being produced on the set)—and interrupts his ideal.  Thus always to tyrants.  

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.

Prognosis Negative Capability

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on

—John Keats, 

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

This is insincere merely by being in English.   I can’t express myself earnestly in English.  That’s why this story is only half the story: the half defined by dissection, description, and, of course, joking.  But that’s only half that story as well, its own superficial outward definition; it misses the capacity of the insincere to express a purity, to eschew the teleological obsession in cataloguing Love, Values, and Truth and, instead, find love, value, and truths in the disruption of such (re)presentations, the complication of such simple definitions.    Seinfeld expresses this love as insincerely and with as much unrelenting irony as possible: while it “convinces” us—or was it just because I was a naïve child when I first entered its world?—of its bleak realism, its accurate representation of the cynical and sarcastic outlook of the cosmopolitan 90s ethos, it simultaneously underlines every element of its production, the extent to which it is contrived, and its difference from the reality it supposedly claims to describe. 

What I above expressed as “a purity,” in describing the opposite of one’s statement within one’s statement without privileging one or the other, becomes especially evident at moments in Seinfeld in which a single scene, idea, line, juxtaposition or casting choice can stand for two precisely opposite propositions, what John Keats famously described as “Negative Capability” in a letter to his brothers.  He describes an unfortunate dinner and the thoughts in his mind after a “disquisition” he had with a friend upon leaving the engagement:

several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. 

Nothing describes Seinfeld’s ascription to the tradition of Shakespeare and Keats better than the episode that ends the season that began with Jerry and George’s foray into writing, the veritable transcription of the words of these Grecian epic poets, the encapsulation of a mythologized form of an oral culture.  “The Pilot,” the two-part episode that tells the story of the production and broadcast of the first and only episode of Jerry, the show pitched by George and Jerry as “about nothing,” exemplifies this transcendental tension that, properly considered, expresses what cannot be anything other than a spiritually exuberant soul at the heart of the show and its creators, or, as Keats put it, a “sense of Beauty [that] overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

Showing the process of how strange it is to make a sitcom from one’s own life masquerades as reinforcing the sincere expression of insincerity, that Seinfeld successfully and unproblematically expresses what it’s like to be Jerry Seinfeld starring in an eponymous sitcom and Larry David producing in the background, while actually tearing down the illusion that the infinitely deferred essence, the essence infinitely different from the words used to describe it—the life of Jerry Seinfeld and his friends—is a television show.    A reoccurring joke appears in this episode that functions as a perfect symbol for this tension: George has convinced himself that he cannot be happy, that if the show succeeds God will strike him dead; moments before Jerry is performed and filmed for the first time he calls the doctor for the results of a test on a discoloration on his lip; he is told the results were “negative” and is crushed and begins to freak out because he thinks the news is bad—“negative”—and that he has cancer, not that it is not cancer—i.e. “negative.”  David wrote a screenplay in the ‘80s that was never produced called Prognosis Negative; it is also the name of a film which figures prominently in an early storyline; the movie is terrible.  This makes what is a simple joke—the double meaning of “double”—an indecidable paradox of conflicting meanings: the essential binary (positive/negative) is called into question and for a moment George lives in a world where “yes” means “no” and vice versa; the absurd neuroses of George suddenly prefigure the episode’s ultimate irony that the show is not picked up—the very show we thought we were watching is not produced: George’s feeling that his success would signify his death again reverses positive with negative: a positive test for cancer would represent the positive outcome for the show: his death would signify his success; instead the result is not just negative: it is a black hole of ecriture in which George is, negatively,  diagnosed as positive for a neurotic hypochondriac in the moment he is, positively,  diagnosed as negative for skin cancer, an eventuality no one really took seriously. Prognosis Negative represents the negative potential of Jerry: while Seinfeld describes its doppelganger’s failure simultaneous with its own success, Prognosis Negative is produced and widely released in Seinfeld when it was never produced in real life. [1]

What is ultimately at work here is a discussion between the written and the spoken, words in a book and words on a stage, what is conceived in solitude by a lonely genius and what is developed through conversation by a charismatic luminary, what is revised by word processors and erasers and what improves by groans and heckles, whether Jerry’s ultimate contribution comes from a made-up mythical world in which he pretends to interact in earnest or whether Jerry’s significance is the keen observation that transcends all context.

When I told her, in my simple, direct Spanish that I was writing a book she asked me what it was about.  I said it was about the process of understanding something.  This answer seemed to satisfy her and I didn’t want to talk about it any more either.

---

[1] “The Outing” provides us with a similarly brilliant symbol for the unity of perfect opposites in a two-line phone given to Jerry for his birthday by Kramer: It does not privilege Jerry to control two distinct dialogues; he thinks he has on hold a woman reporter, previously convinced of his and George’s homosexuality, he tells George that she will not imply in her article that they are a gay couple, joking that they had “fooled her”; however, Kramer’s gift allows the other caller to hear the other conversation and Jerry’s joke, in a context he hadn’t anticipated, means the opposite of his ironic intent: and that they are indeed gay; she hangs up and decides to “play up that angle of the story”; “The Wink” very succinctly provides George with the problem of winking his eye, that early in the episode was breached by grapefruit pulp, at a moment that would undermine what he sincerely was trying to say and expressing the exact opposite.

The Pitch and the Ticket

Fig. 1 (See "And 'The Pitch'..." and "Jerry, George and Kramer Pitch Things to NBC") This map illustrates how the episodes' structure puts in parallel several concepts: 1. That Kramer's vomiting on Susan is the third in a series of opinions on Jerry's television show; 2. That Jerry and George's collaborative pitch to the executives of NBC is akin to Newman and Kramer's phony testimony to the judge (that Newman was speeding because he needed to stop Kramer from killing himself because he never became a banker), and vice versa; 3. That the showed pitched to NBC would, if the authorities could be duped, be "about nothing," (as described to the executives in scene six at the end of the first cycle) but has storylines and likable characters as a necessary compromise (as described to the executives in scene sixteen at the end of the second cycle).  And that the coffeeshop is a black hole that consumes all the storylines into its infinite nothing.

Call Me a Marine Biologist

“Mr Kramer, let me tell you a story. In nineteen-seventy-nine I ticketed a brown Dodge Diplomat for parking in a Church zone. That fine was never paid, and since then that scofflaw has piled up more parking tickets than anyone in New York City. For sixteen years I pursued him, only to see him give me the slip, time and time again. I never got a clean look at his face, but he's become my ‘white whale.’ Mr. Kramer, that day was yesterday! But thanks to you, I don't know if I'll ever get that chance again!”

 

—Cop with eyepatch to Kramer, “The Scofflaw”

The botched Kenny Kramer interview put me in a week long depression, and suddenly everything contributed to this hopelessness to the book about Seinfeld.  What was once a brilliant insight—George Costanza is Ishmael—ready to be transcribed into an essay entitled “Call me a marine biologist”[1] became the perfect illustration of my grasp on reality.  My contributions to Wikipedia concerning the show were deleted: The Merchant of Venice entry was once again too important to note the reference of a situation comedy to its most famous speech, and my most recent qualification to the show’s main article, that dubiously cited my own blog, of the notion that Seinfeld “is arguably consistent with the philosophy of nihilism,” amending that some view it, not as nihilist but, as a deconstructionist critique of the superficiality of network television and, on another level, on univocal meaning.   I also finished reading Confederacy of Dunces for the first time and was quite disconcerted to the parallels between myself, my residence with my parents, and my literary project with that of Ignatius J. Reilly, his burdening of his mother, and his, in progress, epic reworking of Boethius.   I was a fat, delusional, hypocritical, unemployed affliction on my mother, suspended in idealistic clueless adolescence, convinced of my own genius, at least when I was reading the book and cringing to myself. 

            This translated to all out despair one afternoon when I got out of the shower after working in the front yard of my parents’ house all day, heard the phone ring, hurried to pick it up in a towel, and sat in the front room of the house, still in the towel, and talked to my friend Ian—a white truck drove up to the house and I could see a woman in the passenger seat scowling at the mounds of dirt that were our front yard, and then her husband got out and walked toward the front door, and rang the bell.  In a panic, thinking he had already seen me in the front room, I told Ian I had to go answer the door and went, in the towel, to chat with this fellow who had something to say to our house and it’s residents.

He asked for my father, I obviously did not strike him as a home owner, even the fact that I lived there seemed strange to him, though I regretted to inform him that he was out of town.  I soon picked up that he was not a friend of my father but rather of the type who don’t let their wives drive, left them in the car, and asked to speak to the man of the house, and that he was of the home owners’ association.  I asked if it was about the front yard and he said to me throwing his hands up, as though seeking my sympathy in the absurdity of the situation, “what’s, ha ha, the deal.”  I explained that I was in a towel and that my father would be back within the week, closed the door, called Ian back and cursed the fascists among whom I lived. 

To be fair we had taken out our magnolia tree over a year before to put the tree out of its misery and worked slowly on landscaping the rooty and dirty wasteland ourselves instead of hiring Mexicans to do it for us in a week.  And worst of all, in that time, black people had rented the house next to us, another domino in the end of our neighborhood, begun by our unkempt yard.  Whatever one’s perspective is on the situation, in that moment this republican misogynist who intruded on my pleasant phone conversation was questioning my very essence: “What’s, ha ha, the deal,” for I was the one who worked in the yard all day, and there I was practically naked in front of him, and it didn’t help that that tree was the veritable pen by which I began this book one year before, that I oscillated between this ludicrous project in the front yard and this one inside the house.  Well, I didn’t know what the fucking deal was, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing inside or outside the house.  All I knew was that wikipedia didn’t think what I was doing was of value, the neighbors were dubious, Kenny Kramer not only doubted my book but didn’t understand a word I said, and I was all alone with the biggest skeptic of myself in existence: me. 

I was happy to be leaving the house within the week.  And I didn’t need Myrna to rescue me: unlike Ignatius Reilly I was not afraid of the Greyhound.

---

[1] “your insular city of the Manhattoes”; and while a failure in the 19^th century’s understanding of whales made Ishmael uncertain of whale classification, it is George’s nostalgia for the anachronistic that causes him to refer to mammal as a fish; both are great storytellers, and George’s finest moment came in his account of his moment as a marine biologist, beginning, “the sea was angry that day like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli”; each receives this narrative capacity from his detachment from the professional world; each is at the bottom of the ladder, with the least investment in the task at hand because, symbolized by whale as spiritual, other-worldly ambition; George is not a Marine Biologist, though he is passionate about being one, while Ishmael is a whaler though far from officially being one: his passion for talking about it gives him the title; Costanza is constantly in these “certain queer times and occasions,” while they are only occasional to Ishmael—

 

A ‘90s World Whose Defining Boundaries Have Been Deformed by Electric Signal

I have overdosed on television, I am unresponsive and cyanotic, revive me in your shower of gelid light and walk me through your piazza which is made of elegant slabs of time.

—Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

  

Seinfeld is ashamed of being television.  It resides in that New Yorker mindset that David Foster Wallace describes in “E Unibus Pluram”—“weary contempt for television as a creative product and cultural force, combined with beady-eyed fascination about the actual behind-the-glass mechanics of making that product and projecting that force.”   This contemptible fascination emerges in a multitude of forms through the series whether it is a secret love of Melrose Place—that Jerry goes so far as to deny on a polygraph machine to maintain what he considers to be his dignity that would be compromised by openly enjoying the show—or openly mocking the process of creating a television show:

Jerry: “So you're saying, I go in to NBC, and tell them I got this idea for a show about nothing.”

George: “We go into NBC.”

Jerry: “We? Since when are you a writer?”

George: “Writer. We're talking about a sitcom.”

* * *

Jerry’s mom: “Since when is George a writer.”

Jerry: “What writer? It’s a sitcom!”

            Wallace warns of the monster of television’s appropriation of meta-fiction’s sophisticated ironies, the challenging literary approaches of John Barth, Donald Barthelme and other avant-garde authors of the ‘60s have been co-opted by mainstream consumer culture: “the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch. The fact is that for at least ten years now, television has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very same cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of Low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative.”   It is not just that television has co-opted what was once radical, he argues: what was radical is indebted to television—

For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemesis, Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. This high-cultural postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of television and the metastasis of self-conscious watching.  And (I claim) American fiction remains deeply informed by television ... especially those strains of fiction with roots in postmodernism, which even at its rebellious Metafictional zenith was less a "response to" televisual culture than a kind of abiding-in-TV. Even back then, the borders were starting to come down.

What Wallace describes at the moment Seinfeld was in its initial production the necessity for Seinfeld, though Infinite Jest was that which Wallace ultimately decided to provide us.  It is not Mark Leyner and his superficial television-mirroring prose that shall undermine television’s hold on American culture and aesthetics and free us to once again be free-thinking individuals: it is a television that ironizes irony, jokes about joking, makes fun of making fun of television, is ashamed to describe the shame of watching and creating television programming, a show that presents on one level the most popular comedy to ever appear on television, yet, on another level, challenges us with the most explicit—though often infinitely subtle—critique of network television’s mediocrity, proclaiming that because it is on network television it is mediocre though because it is able to say this on network television it is genius, and because American literature has collapsed under its own pretensions and snobbishness about television that television has replaced it, and that that is incredibly hilarious.

The End

One of the great clichés of the situation comedy is its desperate final attempts to make its mark, or simply regain a portion of its once larger audience, by including gimmicks, having protagonists unexpectedly, or finally, consummate the deep love that’s always been right in front of them, or in some way compromise the integrity of the show in order to regain relevance, what has become known as “jumping the shark” due to a later episode of Happy Days in which the Fonz, on a visit to Hollywood, water-skiing and wearing his leather jacket, jumps over a shark.   For example, Family Matters—which began and ended the same years as Seinfeld—had brought in Steve Urkel, the Winslow’s dorky neighbor played by the comically talented Jaleel White, partway through its first season and he slowly took the focus of the Winslow Family Matters.  And by its eighth season 3J (the streetwise orphan taken in by the Winslow’s) had been introduced along with two additional characters played by White: Stefan Urquelle (Steve Urkel’s smooth alter-ego) and Myrtle Urkel (Urkel’s cousin).  And, by the ninth and final season, which earned the show’s worst ratings, the actress playing Harriette Winslow had left and been replaced, the show was picked up by CBS and left ABC’s TGIF line-up, and Original Gangster Dawg (O.G.D.), again played by White, entered the Winslow’s universe. 

This is one way a situation comedy can go out.  However, Seinfeld managed to go off with the audience wanting more, as any good showman would do, whether it’s Sinatra, a sit com, or a smart ass at an office meeting who makes a well-received comment, as Jerry advises George at the coffeeshop five weeks before the series ends:

George, “I lost them.  I can usually come up with one good comment during a meeting but by the end it's buried under a pile of gaffs and bad puns.”



Jerry, “Showmanship, George. When you hit that high note, you say goodnight and walk off.”


George, “I can't just leave.”



Jerry, “That's the way they do it in Vegas.”

 

The final two seasons are informed by this cliché, and, like the rest of the series, manages to comment on this phenomenon as a self-aware discussion of the show’s descent from it’s peak (Larry David has already left the veritable Vegas stage), at the very moment it is making more money than it ever has while, at the same time, resorting to a more gimmicky and surreal style.

            In the beginning of the series the show existed in a more literal and less allegorical sense than it did in the last two seasons.  This approach lasted up until its characters pitched and created Jerry.   Up to this point attacks on artists and intellectuals are limited to quips made by the characters against them; and the more subtle jabs only reach as far as stand-up comedians and writers of sitcoms.  Everything changes, however, when the pilot episode of their show airs for the entire world to see, even though no more episodes are made—Jerry and George, along with the content of their lives, are both a part of the entertainment business and ostracized from it, and by the end there is absolutely no separation of the characters and any level of celebrity: Kramer is Merv Griffin; George is giving a show in Vegas during an office meeting; Jerry is a big shot Hollywood director bootlegging movies with a handheld camera; and on and on.

            The show jumps jumping the shark by knowing and subverting how shows fail.  By abandoning its realism it admits to its own decline, but by admitting to its own decline it maintains the glory that it never really lost.

(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.

It's Not a Lie If You Believe It

That Elaine refers to herself as a “beard” in the episode of the same name illustrates perfectly how each of the four characters falsify a fourth of the show: as Elaine pretends to be the date of a gay man for the benefit of his boss, George wears a toupee, as though the cover-up was just turned ninety degrees, ninety more with Jerry’s rouse, and Kramer falsifying the last plane.  What lies underneath all this false hair are four simple facts: Elaine is attracted to a gay man, George is bald, Jerry watches Melrose Place, and Kramer is not a criminal.   Two are forcefully revealed, each with a ripping motion: Elaine rips off George’s toupee and throws it out the window, disgusted with the narcissistic, arrogant person it had revealed by covering up; and Jerry rips off the sensors of the lie detector that detected that he watches Melrose Place.  And so each comes to terms with who he is, and it ends with all four watching Melrose Place, with George’s scalp proudly displayed.  In the words of George, “when she threw that toupee out the window, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I feel like my old self again: totally inadequate, completely insecure, paranoid, neurotic, it's a pleasure.” 

            The truth with Kramer and Elaine is not so simple.  Kramer’s role as a beard comes with his recruitment to stand in a police line-up, to pretend to have been picked up as a suspect.   The previous ending is whimsically subverted when a homeless man spites Kramer by picking him out of the line-up, to which he responds in panic, “Me?!”  Pretending, it seems, can lead, at least for the purposes of the joke, to being.   And this is Elaine’s hope: that she can convert her pretend heterosexual date to an actual one.  This doesn’t work in the end, though a sincere effort is made by both parties.  The explanation is not that he’s gay, oddly enough—it’s that Elaine doesn’t have enough experience with “the equipment,” and that her male competitors have “access” to it all of the time and she thus has no chance at bringing him to her side.  “That’s why they lose so few players,” says Jerry. 

            But what kind of explanation is this?  In the nineties was everyone bisexual, simply choosing one side or the other?  Is the gay/straight binary an invention that has nothing to do with the deconstructed world at the end of the 20^th century?  If a man receives a massage from another man and “it moves” does that mean his heterosexuality falls to pieces?  Is it a lie if you believe it?

First Base Coach

No real world phenomenon enters the Seinfeld universe with as much consistency as baseball.  The fallout of “The Pony Remark” is so significant because it jeopardizes Jerry’s softball game; Elaine’s attempted “conversion” of a homosexual is likened to luring a star second baseman away from his team; Elaine dates retired first-baseman Keith Hernandez and the two make double-entendres about rounding bases; Kramer sees Joe Dimaggio eating donuts and says that he dunks his donut in his coffee with the same concentration that he devoted to his hitting; in "The Wink" Paul O'Neill becomes John Goodman's Babe Ruth in a parody of The Babe's promise of knocking out three home runs (2 for O'Neill) for a sick kid, a challenge accepted by Kramer so he could get a card back from a boy in the hospital; and of course George gets a job with the Yankees which, in a sense, institutionalizes the baseball reference.  

The reality of a baseball game is very important to that of Seinfeld and its critique of American consciousness—and not just because of the often religious reverence often held for the game and its players.   That there are rules to everything, that someone must win and someone must lose, and that it all exists with an audience consisting of fans and enemies, with commentary and with coaching, is the conceit of Seinfeld, and the actuality of baseball.   Keith Hernandez’s appearance in the show highlights the parallel between Jerry, the stand-up comedian, with the ball player as they are both fans of each other and both admire and wish they could do what the other does.  George is one level removed from the action—he wishes at one point to be an announcer, he eventually works in the front office of the Yankees, and he is constantly coaching Jerry, whether by providing arbitrary rules, advising in a lie (“remember: it’s not a lie if you believe it”), providing him with an idea for his sitcom, concocting a scheme by which Jerry can break-up with his girlfriend in order to date her roommate, or being Jerry’s assistant in dating a demanding woman.

“The Understudy” literalizes this metaphor when Jerry and George’s softball team plays against that of Rochelle, Rochelle: The Musical.   Bette Midler plays the title character of the play and Jerry is dating her understudy who bursts into tears at moments that seem unacceptable to Jerry, such as at the end of Beaches, a problem which he brings to the attention of George—“It was Beaches for god’s sake.”   When her hot dog falls out of its bun onto the ground before the baseball game and she starts bawling we see the line between baseball and the absurdity of Seinfeld disappear: to the side Jerry rolls his eyes as George motions for him to comfort her about her fallen hot dog, which he eventually does.  George is further removed from the field and looks like a third base coach, still wearing the uniform but not athletic enough to be in the game; Jerry, who was a star in the first game of “the Pony Remark,” fits the part of the ballplayer and joins the understudy wearing the uniform of the opposing team as she laments the tragedy of the hot dog a little closer to the third base line, a spot more ambiguously between the baseball diamond and the outside world. 

Baseball players have no free will.  A signal comes from the dugout through a series of signs to the pitcher.  Under this guidance he hurls the ball to the batter. He tries to hit it, or, if the opposing dugout decides, bunt, or if it’s no good, take as a ball.  The coach tells the players where to stand, and they only react to what happens.  The runners don’t choose: they follow base-running directions.   The cliché that romance is baseball, that sexual progress is akin to rounding the bases, is subject to this determinism in Seinfeld’s rendering of it—the characters live in a superficial world devoid of real choice.  The understudy delivers her absurd emotion and Jerry can either engage and try to make it to first and open the possibility of scoring (women just “play defense” in the words of Elaine).  Or he can fail to comfort her, strike out, and be sent back to the dugout.  Or, as Jerry does so many times, he could just walk away from the game and wait to see who’s pitching the next game.  George decides for him, sagely keeping his player’s batting average up, and Jerry goes in to comfort her. 

The world is more complicated than this and there exists no set of rules to describe every possible occurrence.  It’s an adolescent fantasy that love can be like baseball, that sex is a home run, that there are clear-cut winners and losers, that choice may be deferred to those more experienced and more removed from the situation, that one keeps his girl at an emotional distance of 60 feet 6 inches, and that there’s always another at bat coming up, and another game after that, and that little difference exists between one and the next.  Marriage destroys this fantasy—a serious commitment would compromise the recreational, transitory nature of the relationship.  When George gets tired of the adolescent game and wishes to remove himself from it and become a man he proposes to Susan who eventually accepts.  The episode ends with George already longing for the easy, superficial life he just gave up and sitting up in bed with Susan.  Jerry calls and tells him to watch the baseball game but Susan wants to watch Mad About You, the sentimental sitcom about newlyweds working together through their problems, talking to each other and not receiving tips from the coaches on their teams.  George is miserable, trying to join the real world while being locked in the superficial Seinfeld reality that recurs day after day with its 18 70 second half innings, that unfailingly will never end in a tie.

Moses Was a Picker

Today I found myself in the wikipedia entry for the Merchant of Venice for some superficial fact-checking and was curious to see if the "references" section had "the Pick"'s brilliant parody of Shylock's final speech.  It did not, although the reference is catalogued in the "Trivia" section of the page for "the Pick." This did not seem fair that Shakespeare is good enough for Seinfeld but that Seinfeld is not good enough for Shakespeare.  The situation is rectified as long as the collaborative authorities let it stand:

"The Pick" episode of the sitcom Seinfeld parodies the antisemitism of the play with an extended joke that Moses picked his nose, making it inherent in jewishness. When Jerry is persecuted for picking his nose he parodies Shylock's speech with a plea to a crowd "If we pick, do we not bleed?"

This appropriation of the infamous moment of Shakespeare's most unsettling comedy is by no means a straightforward joke, a humorous collision of high and low culture, changing the beautiful plea "if you prick us do we not bleed?" into a discussion of nose-picking.   Shylock's presence in the play deconstructs its existence as a straight-forward comedy.  His tragic end unsettles the marriages that make up the otherwise typical happy ending, and the antisemitism of the characters makes us doubt whether we want them to live happily ever after.  "The Pick" creates the parallel between jewishness and nose-picking when George justifies picking when Jerry's (anglo) girlfriend thinks she "caught [him] in a pick"

Jerry, "Is that so unforgivable? Is that like breaking a commandment? Did God say to Moses thou shalt not pick?"

George, "I guarantee you that Moses was a picker. You wander through the desert for forty years with that dry air. Are you telling me you're not going to have occasion to clean house a little bit."

However, everything ends badly in Seinfeld—Elaine's relationship ends because the guy she's seeing doesn't want to be with someone whose nipple was exposed on her Christmas card (a failed attempt to reach out and be accepted by anglo culture), and Jerry's ends because of the pick.  It is not simply that Jerry's jewishness leads to his persecution in an anglo comedic context: the entire show is a compromise between jewish tragedy and anglo comedy.  While the situation comedy began in the firmly WASP tradition of Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver and Seinfeld places a jewish comedian in this context, the show deconstructs its tradition at every turn, it foils the happy, clean ending, the lesson with which the initial folly provides us.  If we read the Merchant of Venice as Seinfeld wants us to this cycle of folly, punishment, redemption falls apart because Shylock receives no redemption and the merchants receive no punishment for their humiliation of Shylock.  

Those who judge and have the authority to provide the lessons, the fathers as the early suburban sitcom, are worse than those who have erred.  Jerry's girlfriend is shallow, superficial, and ashamed of Jerry's jewishness, as symbolized by his supposed pick, and the man who stops calling Elaine is revealed more crassly than she ever was:

I did not bare myself deliberately, but I tell you, I wish now that I had! Because it is not me that has been exposed, but you! For I have seen the nipple on your soul!

The Différance that David Makes

…the final section on Seinfeld, despite your obvious fondness for it, is an excrescence that should be lopped off and replaced with a true conclusion.

— Will Pritchard, concerning “Derrida, de Man and the Dunciad: The Scriblerian Deconstruction of Economic Logocentrism” 

 

I have often endeavoured to establish a friendship among all men of genius, and would fain have it done.  They are seldom above three or four contemporaries, and, if they could be united, would drive the world before them. 

—Jonathon Swift to Alexander Pope

September 20, 1723 

In 1989 when Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld worked as stand-up comedians, one was considered successful based on his or her presence on television.  This tradition began with the comedian Andy Griffith’s fictional role in the 1960s; by the 1980s comedians had begun to play “themselves,” such as Rosanne Barr in Rosanne; and Bill Cosby’s rise to the top in the situation comedy The Cosby Show epitomized the path of a successful comedian.  In other words, the “powerful intermediary” that booksellers were in the beginning of the 18^th century is what network television became at the end of the 20^th.  Economic logocentrism is even more widespread in television as a show must prove to be immediately popular–that is to say sufficiently profitable—to even be allowed to be fully presented to the public, that is to have one’s presence fully broadcasted.  An unknown comedian gets a break by turning their identity into a five-minute monologue for The Tonight Show.   It is in this atmosphere that David and Seinfeld were allowed to produce Seinfeld, a situation comedy that masquerades as another clichéd dramatization of a celebrity living in “the real world.”

Seinfeld, like Pope’s poisoning and Dunciad, is construed in (at least) two forms which cannot be completely differentiated from one another: the implied production of the show that puts it on television, and the fictionalized version—Jerry—that the protagonists, “Jerry Seinfeld” and George Costanza, try to produce. Because the comedian-gets-sitcom motif was so tired, dull, and economically logocentric this doubled the  presentation of their story, and the differences and similarities between them, and allows the show to satirize the production industry and the mode of the situation comedy itself.  The moment that Seinfeld and David present their “show about nothing,” i.e. Seinfeld, is Pope’s real-life poisoning of Curll—they accept “the bag of sack” that they assume to be to their benefit—and the moment that “Seinfeld” and Costanza pitch their “show about nothing,” i.e. Jerry, is the “Account” of it.   From there the two are set free to make countless jokes against network television in its prime slots with the consent of NBC, not because the network understood the satiric levels of the show but, because it made them money.

To what extent Seinfeld is “Seinfeld” and what extent David is Costanza is under constant revision in the show, for we assume, at the beginning, that Seinfeld is “Seinfeld,” and that Costanza is a fictional, joking addition, like Scriblerus.  However, as more heavily annotated editions come out we see that David is Costanza more than Seinfeld is “Seinfeld,” for example in the DVDs and their “Notes about Nothing” that describe the real-life material from which David got his ideas.  His later overtly-autobiographical show Curb Your Enthusiasm further demonstrates how much Seinfeld was a satire on David for making Seinfeld, most notably in a scene between David and the actor who played Costanza in which the latter claims his character on Seinfeld could not be considered a respectable, decent human being, and the former looks very uncomfortable by the significance of what is said.  Seinfeld exists with the Dunciad Variorum as “the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself,” and we can never know to what extent the presence of Costanza in one work inscribes the absence of its author, how inscribed Pope is in Scriblerus, or how justified any attack is, be it in print, on television, or with poison.