Seinfeld: Wanker or what?

This column goes back to 1996 and may have run in The Australian. Obviously there's a fair amount of envy fuelling the vitriol but the closing paragraph gives the game away and I think JS survived the onslaught.

What is is about Jerry Seinfeld that’s so irritating? Is it the insanely neurotic obsessions: the girlfriend who wouldn’t eat the pie, the masseuse who wouldn’t massage, the woman with the are-they-really-real breasts?

Or is it the way he talks ... that odd sing-song intonation that’s echoed around every dinner party and barbecue for the past 18 months? How did everybody suddenly get Jewish?

Is it the fact that he has the friends that we all want? Who doesn’t dream of living next door to Kramer, or being platonic with Elaine or feeling superior to George?

Is it the obsessive wordplay, the way he and George or Elaine pick up on one little phrase and repeat and repeat it? “Salsa ... seltzer. Seltzer ... salsa.” Aaaargh!

Is it the fame, the wealth, the collection of flashy German cars that make him so despicable?

No, it’s the smug little smile ... kinda crooked but very straight. On screen, that little smile says: “I’m going to say some thing odd and you’ll think it’s funny because that’s what we do. I say odd things ... you laugh. Got that?”

In a magazine picture that smile says, “Bet you wish you were doing this. I wish I wasn’t doing this, but I know you wish you were. That’s as close as we get to irony over here.”

If looks could kill, Seinfeld’s smile would be a poisoned truffle in a chocolate box devoid of anything else but gingers.

And we’re not making the classic confusion between the star and the character they play. Seinfeld refuses to act in the comedy series so the git you see is the git you get.

You have to imagine yourself being murdered. Who would you rather be killed by, Jerry Seinfeld or Jerry Lewis? If it was Jerry Lewis, you’d be able to say to him, “You were always playing crazy and it turned out you really were. How about that!” There would be a logic. (If you got time before he finished you off, you could tell him he was brilliant in King Of Comedy but sucked the big one in Mad About You.)

But with Seinfeld, you’d be looking at him and saying, “I missed something here, didn’t I?” And he’d be smiling his smug little smile and raising those highly educated eyebrows and saying, “Yes, I’m afraid you did.”

Some comedians get us to laugh at them, some to laugh with them. Seinfeld laughs at us and gets us to laugh along.

But we should pity rather than despise him. For, like every truly tragic figure, he carries the seeds of his own doom. For Hamlet, it was the burden of being a nice boy who wanted to be a real muthafucka. For Romeo and Juliet it was lack of communication ... where were Optus when they needed them? And for the Sein, it’s that smug little smile.

Ironically (or is it tragically? I’ve confused myself) the more successful Seinfeld gets, the smugger he becomes and, while he’s enjoyed a good honeymoon, ever since he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone dressed as Elvis he’s been a marked man.

Jerry Seinfeld, the wizard of the one-liner, the Napoleon of nerd, the All-American alliterator, is falling out of favour. The worm is turning for the master of minutae and there’s a growing desire to reconfigure those loquacious lips.

Bobcat Goldthwaite, the cranky comic with the creaky appeared on Denton in a T-Shirt which read “Kill Seinfeld”. His reasoning was patchy but the passion was unmistakable. “People say watch the maturbation episode, it’s really good. Of course it’s good, with a wanker starring in it.”

Back in January, David Letterman put Seinfeld firmly in his place. Jerry was rambling on about something and finally came up with a punchline. “I try them out here and use them on the show later,” said the sitcom king in a half-hearted attempt to be self-effacing.

“Oh no you don’t,” rebutted the L man. “This is the big time, buddy. This ain’t no winter league. This is the real thing, you’re at the top now.”

Seinfeld and Letterman grinned their engaging grins at each other but there was an unmissable hint of steel in the Tonite Show host’s voice. It was Muhammed Ali swatting down Floyd Patterson, Jimmy Connors welcoming the young McEnroe to Wimbledon, Steve Vizard and ... er ... well, that’s enough with the similes.

So why should he be so smug? Here’s why. He looks, talks and dresses like a geek, on his own show his friends are more interesting than he is, he has made an artform out of anal retention and, at the age of 40, he pulled a gorgeous 19-year-old.

He didn’t just pull her, he zenned her. He met her once by accident, wished he’d got her number and, lo and behold, there she was. Seinfeld walked right up to young Ms Shoshanna Lonstein in Central Park, New York, and asked her out. Now, if you or I had done that we would have been assuming the position against a lead-poisoned tree before you could say, “Master of your domain”.

He should have been waving bye-bye to his career, considering that this all happened in the shadow of brownstones occupied by one W. Allen, his erstwhile companion, M. Farrow, and her adopted daughter and occasional photographic model, Soon Yi, who, when she assumed the position for the Woodster, was older that Shoshanna is now.

But Seinfeld became the hero rather than the villain. He symbolised the potency of middle-aged man. For all Harley-riding real estate agents, Celica-driving dentists and power-lunching lawyers, he legitimised using your experience, money and influence to impress the pants off a teenager.

He is frighteningly successful. Seinfeld earns about $60,000 per episode. Over here that would pay for an entire half hour of a sitcom, from the producer’s fee down to the writer’s joke book.

And he’s tall. There was a time when the only careers open to short guys were horse-racing and comedy. Humour was our turf. Short guys were the world’s funny men, from Ronnie Corbett to Woody Allen (would he be copping so much flak if he didn’t have to shorten his Levis?) via Dudley Moore. We tend to be dictators too, but that’s another column.

Then along comes Seinfeld and gets the laughs, the girl and the loot. Of, course that’s only the ridiculously thin-for-a-man-his-age end of the wedge. All of a sudden, all the comics are beanpoles: Jim Carey and ... err ... some other guys who are quite tall are comandeering the comedy slots.

This is Seinfeld’s fault. But is he, in the end, a wanker? Consider this: he, a stand-up comic, stars in a sitcom about a stand-up comic. In the first series of this sitcom, the stand-up comic was trying to write a sitcom. This takes “self-referential” to onanistic extremes.

In fact, it reminds me of Paul McCartney’s very first solo album, on which he played all the instruments. English critic Charlie Gillett described it as “musical masturbation ... McCartney playing with himself.”

But the ultimate insult comes in words intended as praise from his co-writer and occasional warm-up comic Carol Leifer: “He said that if he hadn’t gone into show business he’d probably have gone into advertising. He’d be good at that.”

Jerry Seinfeld with a pony tail? I think I can say, on behalf of all comedy fans (with Letterman shudder), “Euuuuuughhhh!”

Jimmy Thomson is a short, fat professional comedy writer and diehard Seinfeld fan who would badmouth his mother for a quid.