Images of people in New York crowding a park and not wearing masks went viral this weekend. Here’s what coronavirus experts say about parks and beach trips.
Previously on the Best and Worst of Raw: Jinder Mahal returned, Drew McIntyre told Seth Rollins he was completely full of shit, and Apollo Crews died on the way back to his home planet.
One more thing: Hit those share buttons! Spread the word about the column on Facebook, Twitter and whatever else you use. Be sure to leave us a comment in our comment section below as well. I know we always ask this, and that this part is copy and pasted in every week, but we appreciate it every week. Up next is Wrestler On The Roof.
And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for May 4, 2020.
Worst: Whatever This Was
You know, there’s a lot I could say about this segment. I think the thing that gets to me the most is the fact that Shayna Baszler and Asuka each got their own full couch, but Nia Jax, who is twice the size of either of them, got stuck squatting on a small, square table. What is that, an end table? If it had wheels on the bottom it’d be one of those little scooters you used to roll around on in kindergarten. It’s only there so Nia can easily fall back onto it, break it, and fall over at the end of the segment. It’s the WWE equivalent of in old cartoons where you know which object someone’s about to pick up because it’s drawn on top of the background.
Asuka screaming BIG BOOTY at Jax (and just being Asuka in general) is delightful, but not quite enough to get us through concurrent Shayna and Nia promos. They should’ve had Liv Morgan interrupt from one side of the building and Natalya interrupt from the other and had everyone talk at once to see if it opens the door to the Rock of Eternity.
Worst: A 40-Minute Match In Front Of Nobody That Wouldn’t Have Gone Over Great In Front Of A Crowd
Gauntlet matches without a crowd are the pits. It’s usually hard to enjoy gauntlet matches even with a crowd, because they don’t make any structural sense — who decided the order of these entrants if your scripted sports organization runs on “momentum” instead of rankings or observable statistics, and who gets over if your finalists are always a loser who worked hard, and a winner who didn’t? — and because the way these matches are booked lets everyone watching know the early falls don’t, won’t, and can’t matter.
Here’s the full rundown of participants:
Titus O’Neil, whose 45 seconds of gauntlet-opening wrestling might be the longest we’ve seen him in the ring in years
Akira Tozawa, who hits two moves that do nothing and then bounces off the ropes specifically so Lashley could spear him
Shelton Benjamin, who is like Titus O’Neil and Akira Tozawa did the Fusion Dance
Bobby Lashley, who easily runs through three opponents just to get himself disqualified like a complete moron
Humberto Carrillo, who gets beaten up during and after his fall and only advances because Lashley kicked too much of his ass
Angel Garza and Austin Theory, who are so dedicated to being Raw’s Sami Zayn and Shinsuke Nakamura that they lose two straight falls to an injured guy
and, because the winner in WWE gauntlet matches is always the guy who comes in last …
Your winner is AJ Styles, who is a ghost, returning to Raw and feeling sort of angry but ready to move on about the whole “watching his friends get actually murdered and then being buried alive and murdered himself” thing from WrestleMania. I’m not sure I’m asking for him to show up repackaged as a wrestling zombie or even for him to be constantly covered in a thin layer of dirt he’s unable to wash off, I just wanted, you know, for something to matter. Styles being totally fine and unchanged here means even a cinematic match at the biggest show of the year starring the most legendary character in the company and ending in multiple homicides doesn’t mean anything and has no consequences.
He doesn’t even feel BAD about it. He brushes off HIS ON-SCREEN DEATH with “that was then, this is now!” For fuck’s sakes. He also didn’t lose the Boneyard Match at all, because, “there’s no rules in a boneyard match!” “I got buried, so what!” “That doesn’t mean I lost, that doesn’t mean I lost anything!” Cool, I’ll remember not to give a shit next time you have a match. “None of this matters, who even cares,” is the lead talking point for the flagship show of the biggest wrestling promotion in the world. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised considering that Triple H Appreciation Week on Smackdown ended with the owner of the company turning off the lights on a show Fox paid a billion dollars for because it’s boring and sucks.
AJ wins by tapping out an already extremely injured guy who’d wrestled three people, but needing over 10 minutes to do it. I hope they explain that he came back to life due to his close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
In Other Money In The Bank News
Congratulations to Janitor’s Closet Satan for being accepted into Starfleet Academy.
Note: If Seth Rollins is trying to be Joseph Seed, Aleister Black is 100% trying to be Jacob. They have the same beard, the same voice, and cut the same promos.
Rey Mysterio is VERY WORRIED about falling off the roof of WWE Headquarters at Money in the Bank. Somebody convinced the Superstars that the top of a building is like a balance beam, and not 110,000 square feet.
The only scenarios I’ll accept for someone falling off Titan Towers are as follows:
If it’s AJ Styles, and WWE’s going to start dramatically murdering him at every pay-per-view only for him to show up fine a week later, like they’re South Park and he’s Kenny McCormick, or
They have Big Show participate and try to grab the briefcase, only for Hulk Hogan to appear and knock him off the roof again
Worst, Oh My God, Stop It: Challenger Has Pinned The Champions! You’ve Got To Think That Puts Them Into Contention For A Future Title Shot!
1. Viking Raiders do embarrassing karaoke
2. challenger pins the champion (again) instead of doing an actual feud to build a match
3. ???
4. Profit
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. WWE is goddamn obsessed with this. Just having a challenger pin a champion in a non-title match to earn a title shot, instead of writing something or having the characters do something interesting or anything resembling effort or a desire to write an episode that’s not exactly like every other show you’ve written for the past DECADE. If you want to know the last time they did this match you’ll have to turn back the clock all the way to Friday, when the Forgotten Sons pinned the Smackdown Tag Team Champions.
STOP DOING THIS OVER AND OVER AND OVER YOU LAZY MOTHER FUCKERS . THIS IS GARBAGE. STOP IT. YOU HAVE THE ENTIRETY OF HUMAN CREATIVITY AT YOUR FINGERTIPS, POWERED BY THE BEST ROSTER OF WRESTLING TALENT AND WRESTLING MINDS AND PRODUCTION TALENT AND BUSINESS MINDS OF A GENERATION, NOT TO MENTION SEVEN HOURS OF PRIME-TIME TV EVERY WEEK AND UNLIMITED RESOURCES, WHY IS THIS ALWAYS THE SAME . YOU’RE MAKING ME LOSE MY MIND. NOW I’M JUST ANGRY CLAPPING .
If I never see another WWE match where a challenger pins a champion to “build momentum” and get “in contention for a future title shot” I’ll be too soon. And by “too soon” I mean “this Friday, on Smackdown.”
Vink, Man
In other tag team news, Ricochet has gone from challenging Brock Lesnar for the WWE Championship on a Network live special to getting dunked on by Brendan Vink in the middle of an empty Performance Center Raw in the span of like two months. Two months and a week. Nothing says modern WWE quite like obsessing over how much momentum everybody’s built up, and then cutting off your performers at the knees as soon as they start building up momentum.
Shane Thorne and Brendan Vink, who are managed by MVP except when they’re participating in wrestling matches apparently, score what loosely equates to an “upset win on Main Event” after Vink hits Ricochet with the Andrew Martin Driver ’99. Sad to see the Jaguar Tribe get humiliated by the Wallaby Tribe like this.
Best: Liv Morgan, Amnesiac
Sure, Liv Morgan’s getting better in the ring (and is certainly being given a ton of chances and resources with which to do so), but I’m increasingly interested in her amnesiac gimmick. There’s a difference in taking a step back and realizing you don’t want to be the infantilized third wheel in a jobber girl gang and spending several months talking about how you’re “trying to figure out who you are.” Even Charlotte Flair’s out here like, “you don’t know who you are!” Can someone get Liv a glass of water and some help?
Morgan/Flair — fun side note, Ric Flair’s middle name is Morgan — is a fairly solid 11 minutes, because Charlotte’s good enough to carry someone like Liv to something more watchable than she’s used to. Flair’s character also provides a number of bad faith contexts that make it feel like Liv’s being fed into a professional wood-chipper after several weeks of improvement and, you know, momentum. But even though I’ll probably tell you the opposite at some point when I get worked and frustrated with the product, I think some characters benefit from being truly “holier than thou.” Charlotte should completely body Liv Morgan in a match, and the fact that Liv could hang with her at all is a testament to Liv’s improvement. It’s a bigger version of the thing they did with Liv and Asuka. Liv’s doing better every time she tries to be a part of something bigger than herself, and I think she’ll really blossom once she remembers where she lives, and how she got here.
Exactly What You’d Expect: The Main Event
Me listening to a Seth Rollins interview:
Frinkiac
The main event plays out exactly like you thought it would the second you saw “Drew McIntyre vs. Murphy” announced. Murphy’s dope and McIntyre’s probably excited to work with somebody who isn’t a giant mess, so they’ll give us a good five or six minutes before Drew Mac Claymores him into obsolescence. Then Seth Rollins will try to pick a fight with Drew, Drew will be stressfully gung ho about it, and Rollins will bail only to sneak back in and attack him from behind. But both because Drew McIntyre and because Seth Rollins, Rollins will get too confident and McIntyre will fire up and kick his ass. Rollins is a weird coward now despite being KINGSLAYER and BEASTSLAYER because if you don’t like the fans you’re a bottom-feeding scumbag, and McIntyre is basically Hogan in his prime. You could shoot Drew McIntyre in the chest with a pistol right now and he’d just reach into his chest, pull out the bullet, and throw it at you so hard you died. I don’t hate it.
Let’s hope Rollins doesn’t do anything to get himself edited out of any Money in the Bank highlight videos.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week
EvilDucky
Plot twist – SAMOA JOE LEAVES THE TABLE TO MURDER EVERYONE IN THE RING, SECURING THE LAST MITB SPOT
AddMayne
WWE right now:
JayBone2
NXT ratings are down – give Flair the title
Raw ratings are down – give Flair the mic.
Smackdown ratings are down – let Tamina have a shot at the title.
GIPHY
Clay Quartermain
Rollins: “ I do this for the Greater Good…”
the Neighborhood Watch Alliance: “THE GREATER GOOD.”
Birdman
Phillips: “AJ Styles is back!”
Samoa Joe: *Under his breath* “He’s still not getting his wife back”
Saxton: “What was that Joe?”
Samoa Joe: “Nothing!!”
Baron Von Raschke
Why am I picturing Vince in the back going, “I thought I let that guy go.” each time someone’s music plays during this gauntlet match?
MachiavelliX
I want the final spot to go to that tire that Lashley humiliated. Everyone likes a good redemption story.
Jae-Su
FeltLuke
So McIntyre was a hapless goon until finally getting a good singles run. Murphy was having a good singles run (at least allowed to look good) until he became a hapless goon. The WWE formula!
AshBlue
There should be at least one Escape Room in MitB that some people get stuck in for a while.
CFCarboni
What’s AJ going to do when he gets to the roof of the WWE HQ building and he sees the horizon?
Anyway, as always you can help us out tremendously right now by sharing the column on social media, as well as dropping down into our comments section to let us know what you thought of the show. I will keep trying to watch these and say something constructive about them, but if I fall into existential, nihilistic despair waiting for real episodes with fans to return, try to laugh at my thinly-veiled cries for help.
Join us here this weekend for our full Money On Top Of The Bank coverage, and again next week for Randy Orton and Edge, who will save the ratings. Hooray!
“Music isn’t sports, no matter how much we want to rank and score it,” Grayson Haver Currin wrote late last year in a brilliant piece about how year-end lists might be losing their utility. And while I generally agree with this sentiment, lately I’ve been thinking about how music IS like sports, whether we like it or not. And it’s not just Billboard charts or Pitchfork scores that make it that way. It’s the constant competition for the public’s limited attention, where artists need to push themselves in relation to their peers to rise to the top, in hopes that quality and creativity reign, rather than being the loudest or best promoted.
In the recently omnipresent livestreaming space, it’s particularly tempting to compare efforts in relation to each other, and that makes the best music livestream moments stand out. On Friday, for example, YouTube was the place for a weekend dance party unlike any other. Producer extraordinaire Mark Ronson offered up his Love Lockdown: Video Mixtape, a 90-minute fundraiser for the World Health Organization that saw him spinning records from his past (or that he simply enjoys) with guest appearances from a number of the tunes’ contributors. A song like his latest (excellent) album’s title track, “Late Night Feelings,” found vocalist Lykke Li beaming in from her cell phone to give an intimate, psychedelic interpretation. There was a selfie-stick sporting “Dancing On My Own” rendition that saw Robyn rolling around on the floor, Dua Lipa presenting “Electricity” from what appeared to be her backyard, and even an Inception-style DJ set within a DJ set from A-Trak that would impress even Christopher Nolan.
Whether it was incorporating something as simple as the Kanye West music video from which the endeavor’s title was taken or something as batshit as Jurrasic Park‘s Sam Neill covering “Uptown Funk,” Ronson’s offering hit on elements missing from many of the livestreams that have populated the pandemic world. It demonstrated thinking outside the box. It sounded great. It used unprecedented times to create something that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. It felt necessary and fun. It was worth sharing with friends, worth experiencing as a community, and provided lasting value that could stretch beyond this quarantined moment of human history.
If that sounds like a knock on the rest of music livestreams, it’s not meant to be. Since touring effectively ended in the middle of March, musicians big and small have been faced with their own unprecedented crisis. Fledging artists have seen a primary revenue stream disappear, while larger ones have rallied around their extensive teams suddenly facing financial uncertainty. And since then, many have been tirelessly offered up everything from solo acoustic performances and DJ sets to IG Live interviews and beat battles. Tegan And Sara started a project where they discuss Sara’s garden with fans. Erykah Badu is providing guided mediation. Even our own People’s Party debuted a live series, bringing the great interview style of Talib Kweli to an audience suddenly lacking for new content.
To criticize the livestream experiments that fall short feels both ungrateful and mean-spirited. Much of it looks to either serve fans or literally raise money for those in need. Most of the artists are offering up their time and creativity without expectations of personal monetary compensation. And while the most cynical lens can easily (and probably deservedly) mock Gal Gadot’s “Imagine” debacle or the recent UK-centric Foo Fighters cover that saw participants ranging from Sean Paul to Rag’n’Bone Man, doing so undercuts the environment that’s spawning such work. The world is frightening on levels that most have never experienced, and musicians are throwing everything they have against the wall to see what sticks.
There have been clear highlights over the last couple of months. Death Cab For Cutie leader Ben Gibbard has taken the time to give his catalog a close look for comforting home sets. The Verzuz series and Club Quarantine quickly captured social media’s attention by mixing viral moments with star-spotting in ways that feel as close to a real club experience as you can get without leaving your couch. Travis Scott’s next-level Fortnite appearance launched a now-No. 1 single. Virtual festival experiences like Warner’s PlayOn Fest or 100 Gecs’ Minecraft festival gave new meaning to communal moments. Coachella’s new documentary allowed for the world’s best music festival to own its usual weekend despite being postponed until fall. And though people like Mark Ronson are showing that artists are just scratching the surface with regards to what is possible in entertaining the socially isolated, Post Malone recently showed that innovation is only one way to capture the public’s attention and imagination.
On Friday, April 24, America’s favorite genre-defying teddy bear, Post Malone, unveiled his contribution to the livestream world: a Nirvana covers set. When it was announced earlier that week, there was quick brushback from rockists sure that Posty was not meant to hold a candle to the alt-rock titans. Even with Courtney Love giving her blessing for the charity event, plenty were skeptical as to what, if anything, Posty could offer the classic songs. But once the 90-minute performance commenced, it was clear that Post Malone wasn’t just taking up space for bored music fans to wade into the weekend. Instead, he delivered the definitive moment of the quarantine music experience.
Malone showed he meant business with the great backing band, anchored by Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. He crafted a setlist that expanded beyond a few well-known Nirvana hits and showed the depth and breadth of their catalog. He pounded beers, smoked cigarettes, cracked jokes, and featured solid sound and camera work (those last two were particularly refreshing). He simply had a blast sharing the music that he loves, and likewise, people had a blast watching him. Word of mouth quickly spread on social media that this was a performance that had to be seen, with a level of enthusiasm that is rare for livestreams. Fans are surely grateful for all the content musicians had been giving up until that point, but Post Malone showed that the potential to bring people together was still unexplored.
Hello!!!!!! I love you all!!!! I am holding emotions back the whole show.
Post Malone’s Nirvana set was unpretentious and filled with joy, enough so that Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic tweeted out his emotional response during the set. And, it ultimately achieved its goal in raising more than 4.3 million dollars for the WHO. As someone that witnessed one of the rare Nirvana semi-reunion performances, I can honestly say that Post Malone held a candle to the real deal, giving the best interpretations of Nirvana songs that have been heard outside of the original band. Who would have thought that would be something we’d experience together during this genuinely terrible time? And along with Ronson’s inventive set a week later, these appearances argue that we’ve yet to see the limits of what can be achieved by musicians during this particularly dark and weird time. Creativity is the ultimate currency of the artist, and only after several weeks of testing the water and thinking on the fly are we seeing lasting, memorable moments. It’s possible that it won’t be viable to see live music in person for many more months, if even this year. And while the ramifications of that on everyone from the musicians to the extended members of the music industry is hard to overstate (in short: it’s bad), there is some solace in the fact that there will continue to be livestream creations that extend what we have thought is possible.
We’re about two weeks out from another quarantine milestone: Charli XCX is releasing a collaborative effort that she has crafted with her fans entirely during social isolation. Whereas the majority of new songs released in the past couple of months are holdovers from before the pandemic, Charli has very publicly been making an album that couldn’t have existed at any other time. It is to be seen whether the album will be more than just a timestamp from the months that people were confined to their homes, but the music has so far shown an eagerness to transcend that, created in the public eye on social media and with frequent livestreamed updates. Like Ronson and Posty, Charli is trying to take a big step in owning this particular moment, in setting the bar higher, in creating art meant to last and be remembered instead of providing a momentary distraction. It has always felt a bit vapid to look at times of political unrest or, as we are experiencing now, a health and financial crisis, only to ponder “the great art that will come out of it.” But in a time that feels like a content bombardment, there is comfort in knowing that the best is yet to come and that great artists are rising to the occasion. Sports might be generally on pause right now, but in the music world, winners are still emerging.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
As we reported late last week, Sam Lloyd — who played the lovable, down-in-the-dumps lawyer Ted on Scrubs — passed away after a long battle with cancer. It’s another coincidence (an unfortunate one, this time) for Zach Braff and Donald Faison’s new Scrubs rewatch podcast, Fake Doctors, Real Friends, about a sitcom that keeps dovetailing with our reality.
Zach Braff, Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, and others paid tribute to Lloyd on social media on Saturday after learning about Lloyd’s passing. Meanwhile, in Braff and Faison’s first podcast episode since the news broke, the two devoted the first few minutes to Sam Lloyd.
“Sam Lloyd, who plays Ted the lawyer on our show, has passed away,” Faison began. “For me this is really heartbreaking. Sam was a very, very amazing person. He was a part of a band called The Blanks, and I remember realizing that Sam wasn’t just a really funny actor. He was a really talented singer. He was a very good basketball player. He was also a good friend.”
“He was the nicest man I think I have ever met,” Braff added. “He was so sweet and kind, and he just loved to laugh. He would come on, and he would play that super nerdy lawyer character, but we would all just crack up so hard with Sam.”
Despite appearances, Lloyd was also an “amazing” basketball player.
“I used to play in a league [for actors],” Faison added. “I would try to recruit Sam every Sunday to play for my team, but he would say, ‘No, because the Patriots are playing, and I can’t miss the Patriots.’ I always thought he could be such a secret weapon, because no one would have expected that Sam Lloyd could play basketball that well. He was an assassin on the court. A killer on the court.”
Braff also mentioned that, like his character on Scrubs, he found true love later in life, and that he had just had a baby. Before passing, Lloyd was able to be with his son on his first birthday.
“We love him, and we know the fans do, as well,” Braff added, directing listeners to the GoFundMe page devoted to raising money to help care for Lloyd’s wife and son after Lloyd’s death.
Isiah Thomas popped back up in episode five of The Last Dance. The previous week spent a ton of time discussing Thomas and the Bad Boys-era Detroit Pistons, with a special emphasis on that team’s desire to physically and mentally challenge Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls when they’d meet in the postseason. He wasn’t as prominent in this week’s first episode, but Thomas still made a cameo.
One of the main plot lines on Sunday involved the Dream Team, which infamously did not include Thomas even though he was one of the best players in the league. The belief has long been that Jordan specifically demanded that Thomas not make the squad, something Jordan denied. Michael Wilbon, then of the Washington Post, pointed out that a number of players had issues with Thomas, which did not help his case.
Wilbon went onto ESPN’s The Jump on Monday and said that “nine of those guys” on the Dream Team objected to Thomas making it, which is a pretty huge claim, seeing as how 12 players went to Barcelona on the squad. Soon after, Wilbon took to Twitter to apologize to Thomas for getting this “dead wrong.”
My apologies to Isiah Thomas… multiple sources reached out to tell me I’m dead wrong to say 9 members of the Dream Team objected to Isiah being on the ’92 Olympic team. Nowhere near that number objected. My apologies to Isiah for getting it wrong…
While it’s been nearly three decades since the Dream Team took international basketball by storm, it was evident in the episode that Thomas still takes his snub from the squad personally. As a number of people have pointed out, the team’s chemistry was a major reason why it was able to run opponents off the floor, and Thomas very well might have caused issues due to the amount of players with whom he had beef. The real number is unknown, but at the very least, we now know that nine guys did not express an aversion to Thomas making it.
I would have had to have been actively on fire to not take the opportunity to talk with Jerry Seinfeld about his new Netflix special, 23 Hours To Kill (which is streaming now) on a Zoom conference call when it was presented to me. When I was 15, I threw a sad solitary comedy nerd party for the series finale of Seinfeld, thumbing through a copy of some purported “complete” guide to the show during commercials while hoping the end would never come. I also devoured/memorized I’m Telling You For The Last Time, his 1998 HBO special and album/swan song for many of his classic bits. And then I waited (for a while) for whatever was going to come next, delighting in twice nightly reruns of Seinfeld (that doubled and tripled my experience of watching every episode) and blips like the Comedian documentary and Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. But, perhaps more exciting than the opportunity to talk comedy with Seinfeld was the chance to experience Jerry Seinfeld on a Zoom call.
So many questions rush into your mind when you think about the dynamics of that, powered by the perception of his tastes and temperament. Would he be in a very expensive suit or is he secretly an athleisure guy when at home? What does his Zoom bunker look like? Was it an airplane hangar with 74 vintage Porsches? What if he used the Seinfeld living room virtual background? And what about… the stuff? That’s the medicine cabinet snoop for our time — knick-knacks, shelving, and the internal judgment of those things. And, indeed, I did spend too much time staring at the wall unit behind Seinfeld while waiting for my turn as other writers on the call asked him questions.
Here’s what I learned: Jerry Seinfeld appears to have a mammoth vinyl collection. Like, a literal wall of sound. I could only make out two albums that were fronted out for display: Lenny Bruce — Carnegie Hall and The Incomplete Works Of Carl Reiner And Mel Brooks. Given more time and more questions, I might have asked about the import of those specific albums to Seinfeld. Absent that, my takeaway is that they reinforce the idea that he prefers things with a history to them. His near entire post-Seinfeld on-screen career is built on that, blending bafflingly beautiful vintage cars with simple pleasures like a long chat with friends over coffee and shared reverence for the craft and history of comedy in the aforementioned Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. Is he a classicist or is he just uninterested by shiny new things?
In the new special, Seinfeld offers some guidance, but there are holes: “I don’t want to grow, I don’t want to change, I don’t want to improve at anything, expand my interests, meet anyone new, or learn anything I don’t already know,” he says. That sounds utterly curmudgeonly, but here he is virtually in front of me, sitting on a Zoom call, adapting. The special offers additional proof that things aren’t so clear cut. Because the act of releasing something new and trying to make an audience laugh breaks the mirage of gentle misanthropy and qualifies as a strive toward getting better at something. Oh sure, Seinfeld demures over modern conveniences and social quick keys, but he’s also subtly delivering a message that, intentionally or not, cuts through the idea of a bold red generational dividing line. Quite beautifully, while there are certain places where youngs and olds can’t meet in the middle, by and large, we should all realize that we’re unified in our exasperation for so much of life’s petty annoyances, inconveniences, and obligations.
UPROXX
While Seinfeld isn’t directly plugged in to pop culture ephemera, he’s still aware of it. I ask him if he knows that he played a small role in the most recent episode of The Last Dance docuseries and he says that he does, but only because his 14-year-old just told him. In the episode, Seinfeld gets to hang out in the locker room with the great Michael Jordan during his farewell tour (briefly). He also draws light parallels between himself and Jordan when interviewed at that time; a moment when both were allegedly walking away from highly lucrative and celebrated careers. If you’ve seen the series (or his somewhat salty Hall Of Fame speech or read Wright Thompson’s brilliant ESPN profile of him from 2011), you know that Jordan is and always has been somewhat consumed by his competitive nature. His heart, mind, and soul still operate as if they are actively a part of the best basketball player alive, but his body can’t hold up its end of the bargain.
Comedians don’t necessarily fade because their bodies fail them, but it is easy to get cut off by a culture that is designed to drift away from us all, eventually. To not have that happen and to continue making people laugh at a high level, the solution is as simple as it is difficult — you’ve got to paddle harder. And so Seinfeld does, even while being outwardly unimpressed by aspects of the technoculture.
“I’m intensely competitive, but not with other people. I feel like I’m competing against the natural forces of the universe, which is to be lazy, to not work, to coast and not do things that make you nervous,” he tells me before recalling a lesson learned from his father, Kal, who was a sign maker and small business owner on Long Island. “I think inertia is the key physical aspect of human experience… To always be thinking about inertia. My father always used to quote the first law of relativity, Newton’s first law: ‘a body at rest tends to remain at rest.’ But when he said a body, he meant the human body. So yes, I do compete very hard against myself to like, okay, this is how much work you did last week. I want to see more this week. That’s the game I like to play and I’ve gotten more intense about it actually at this stage of my life. Because I feel the end of time more clearly.”
The end of time and, of course, normality, feels like a more clear concern to a lot of us in this frightening and weird moment. Seinfeld sees it and the effect of it, mentioning the work his wife, Jessica, is doing through Good+ to help people already impacted by poverty. And he surely knows comedians that are worried about their future as road warriors. It’s natural to wonder how COVID will continue to influence comedy, specifically, what makes people laugh and if they even want to. This special is, in fact, a bit of a test case, with myriad jokes born from observations about pre-COVID living.
When I ask Seinfeld directly about whether people will want to laugh about the mad experience of quarantines and social distancing when this is all over or whether they’ll want to snap back to laughing about the mundane and terribly missed minutiae of life upon which he has built a career, he doesn’t offer a straight answer. I think, because he doesn’t have one. He’s discussed it with friends, relaying a thought from Colin Quinn about how he thinks “people are going to be sick of it by the time we get into those venues and [they’re] not going to want to hear about it.” But then he adds his own, very simple, and not unexpected addendum. “A great joke is a great joke. If you have a great joke about the virus…”
And then Seinfeld does what he has always done: he sees a topic, he absorbs it, and he spits out a joke like some kind of machine.
“What I’ve been saying about it is I think if I was another virus, I would be intensely jealous of this virus coming up with this two weeks of no symptoms idea. Like the most brilliant bit ever that a virus has thought of. That we can spread without them knowing that we’re in there. And so, yeah, I think, you know, the virus has got some very clever stuff.”
It’s funny, I laugh, and then afterward I realize that, when all is said and done, whether people want to laugh at this moment or something completely unrelated, Jerry Seinfeld will likely fill his time trying to find the right joke.
’23 Hours To Kill’ is available to stream on Netflix now.
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