Jerry Seinfeld Is a Hack

The only two things I’m actually qualified to write about are television and art—and then really just painting. I used to think I was qualified to write about mental illness, but that’s like lasagna claiming to be a food critic.

I’m trying to post here more, which requires being less precious. A smart man told me people enjoy a look behind the curtain. They like lists. “If they like you,” he said, “then they want to know what you like.” I like things, and I’m capable of writing lists, so I’m testing his suggestion. I’m going to go off on a great TV show, and share some bonkers paintings, in 3 installments.

THE THREE GREATEST TELEVISION SITCOMS OF ALL TIME

I’ve watched a shit ton of television during my life, including this week—including today. The runners-up are numerous, and include:

Barney Miller, Northern Exposure, Soap (created by Susan Harris, mother of irritating atheist Sam Harris), Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, The Golden Girls (also created by Susan Harris), Designing Women, The Jeffersons, All in the Family, The Cosby Show, Arrested Development, Murphy Brown, The Larry Sanders Show, Veep, The Newsroom, and 30 Rock. The winners are:

SEINFELD

There are countless reasons to dislike Jerry Seinfeld. Maybe you don’t like his dumb haircut, which makes him resemble the “chain-smoking stenographer from Staten Island” referred to by Elaine in the 149th episode of Seinfeld. Maybe you don’t like his awful style, his gigantic shirts and first-day-of-tenth-grade-blue-jeans. Maybe you don’t like that he started dating Shoshanna Gruss when she was 17 and he was 39, or maybe you don’t like that last February he said “I don’t care about Palestine,” as Palestinians were being massacred out of existence. Not me. I don’t like Jerry Seinfeld because he’s not funny.

The longer I’ve watched Curb Your Enthusiasm (which would be in my top three were I including cable shows longer than 30 minutes) the more I’ve realized Jerry Seinfeld is a hack. Seinfeld, the television show, though, is funny—very funny. But this has very little to do with its namesake and everything to do with the man portrayed by Jason Alexander: George Costanza, AKA Larry David.

Jerry Seinfeld the character (and, one would assume, the performer) is a loathsome, self-satisfied prick. There are countless examples on the show of his superiority complex. He finds it so funny to be hostile to telemarketers (working-class people) that it’s featured in two episodes. He says “dancing is stupid.” He proclaims singing stupid by asking, “Who sings?” He compares the DMV to a leper colony. He shits on people with health issues who require golf carts to traverse airports. In a monologue he claims the snooze button is “the worst invention in human history,” and that people who use it should be “given a bottle of booze and the want ads.” Dancing is dumb, singing is dumb, doing ‘the wave’ at sports events is dumb, and waiting in line to get your driver’s license renewed offends him. He wishes people would stop saying “Don’t go there.” Anything ordinary working-class people do to get through their days, Jerry Seinfeld finds objectionable. I lost track of the number of times he insults people for being overweight. The strangely non-Black and Brown Manhattan he inhabits is another story. For a Jewish guy from Queens, Jerry Seinfeld sounds a lot like a rich WASP from New England, like a rich kid, and often just like a kid. He consistently displays the traits of a man stuck in the mindset of a high school sophomore.

In multiple episodes Seinfeld claims not to be able to tell if a man is attractive, as if doing so might mean he’s gay. He notoriously dates a different woman each week, and his only interest in them is physical. On Season 9, Episode 16, “The Burning,” Jerry’s girlfriend-of-the-week reveals she has gonorrhea (which, poor thing, her previous boyfriend convinced her she contracted by riding a tractor in her bikini), to which Jerry responds, “All right, that’s it for me!” while backing away, washing his hands of her. Just the kind of supportive partner every girl dreams about. The entirety of Jerry’s cultural consumption involves Looney Tunes, The Three Stooges, and Superman comics. He wants his parents’ approval, he wants his dick sucked by models, and he wants people to believe he wears size 31 pants, when he’s really a 33. He’s not funny, as evidenced by the monologue that opens each show, which typically involves the kind of facile observations you’d hear at any comedy club’s open mic night.