You couldn’t make Seinfeld today. That’s because Julia Louis-Dreyfus is busy being awesome in other things, but Jerry Seinfeld seems to think it’s because of [world’s longest sigh] cancel culture.
The comedian recently spoke to The New Yorker about how the “extreme left” is ruining comedy. “It used to be, you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M*A*S*H is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.’ You just expected, There’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well, guess what — where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people,” he said.
The death of the sitcom monoculture, where 30 million people would watch the same episode at the same time, isn’t because streaming services destroyed the concept of timeslots, you see. According to Seinfeld, it’s the woke mob’s fault.
Seinfeld continued, “Now they’re going to see standup comics because we are not policed by anyone. The audience polices us. We know when we’re off track. We know instantly and we adjust to it instantly. But when you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups — ‘Here’s our thought about this joke.’ Well, that’s the end of your comedy.”
The Unfrosted director later named a Seinfeld plot, from season nine’s “The Bookstore,” that he thinks wouldn’t fly in today’s culture.
“We did an episode of the series in the nineties where Kramer decides to start a business of having homeless people pull rickshaws because, as he says, ‘They’re outside anyway.’ Do you think I could get that episode on the air today?… We would write a different joke with Kramer and the rickshaw today. We wouldn’t do that joke. We’d come up with another joke. They move the gates like in the slalom.”
Seinfeld pointed out that “there were no sitcoms picked up on the fall season of all four networks,” and that is a big bummer. But I’m not sure if it has to do with “P.C. crap.” It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Bottoms, to use two recent examples, are delightfully tasteless comedies that are popular with the younger, more culturally sensitive generations. Seinfeld seems hung up on the way things were, rather than the way they are.
Give Hacks a shot, Jerry. You’ll like it!
(Via The New Yorker)