Someone who knows I was, and am, a big fan of the 90’s show Seinfeld sent me an email the other day. “Hey Matt, just saw that Jerry Seinfeld is coming to the Coachella Valley near you next September. You must be stoked!”
Why? Why should this excite me? It’s not like the show is coming (to a theater nearby in Rancho Mirage that is ironically named “The Show”); Elaine won’t be there. Chances are George won’t be there, and neither will Kramer with his crazy ideas…
KRAMER: I’m telling you this pizza idea is really going to happen.
GEORGE: This is the thing where you go and you have to make your own pizza?
KRAMER: Yah, we give you the dough – you smash it you pound it you fling it up in the air, and then you get to put your sauce and you get to sprinkle your cheese and then you slide it into the oven.
GEORGE: You know you have to know how to do that – you can’t have people shoving their arms into a 600° oven.
KRAMER: It’s all supervised!
GEORGE: Oh, well.
Seinfeld (the show) was truly the sum of its parts. It was eponymous, yes, but Jerry alone could not have carried it. More to the point, I’ve seen his stand-up act on Netflix and YouTube over the intervening years since the show concluded, and he’s not funny. He comes across as angry, “like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli” (George, “The Marine Biologist,” Season 5, Episode 14).
Of course, by now we’ve all seen the cell phone video of that infamous night at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles where the actor/comedian who so brilliantly portrayed the crazy neighbor Kramer, Michael Richards, responded to a heckler with a racist tirade, going so far as to repeatedly yell, “He’s a n****r! He’s a n****r!” at the audience member. Next to Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe Buffay, Jason Alexander created one of the most iconic characters in the history of television sitcoms – Seinfeld’s George Costanza – but, like Phoebe, George, as the balding, overweight, loser, nothing-ever-goes-right-for-him, best friend from Jerry’s childhood, was such a presence on screen (albeit a pathetic one) that anything I saw Jason Alexander in after that… well, I saw George, even when he played a disturbed college professor who kidnaps people and tortures/kills them while taunting the police with clues based on the Fibonacci sequence about their whereabouts.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine, fared better than her counterparts post-Seinfeld with 5 seasons of The New Adventures of Old Christine and of course 7 seasons of Armando Iannucci’s satirical take on the first female US vice president Veep eight years before Kamala Harris, receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2018 and the National Medal of Arts in 2021.
But Jerry leaves me cold. I tried to get into his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee talk show, but found I was more interested in his guests (and the car for that episode) than I was in him, especially the Barack Obama and Ricky Gervais episodes.
I have watched and rewatched the 180 episodes of Seinfeld’s 9 seasons so many times, I can quote dialog like I’m doing chapter and verse from the Bible.
UNDATEABLE! Then how are all these people getting together?
Have you been to the motor vehicle bureau? It’s a leper colony down there.
Is it statue or statute? Yah, it’s a sculpture of limitations.
People… they’re the worst.
In my mind, the only thing that comes close to this level of comic genius are the 12 episodes of John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers. Then it dawned on me.
Fawlty Towers works because of Cleese’s character Basil and his silly/outrageous interactions with his wife Sybil, the maid Polly, and the waiter Manuel (“he’s from Barcelona”). It’s the ensemble.
Something about that combination of characters in that place at that time in that situation just works, Fawlty Towers being another show I can watch over and over never tiring of it despite knowing the outcome, and quote with a religious, some might even go so far as to call it “disturbing,” fervor.
So no, I don’t think I shall be availing myself of tickets to see Jerry Seinfeld just down the road at The Show in Rancho Mirage. Now, if I hear that he’s bringing Elaine, George, and Kramer along, and maybe Mr. Peterman, that would change things.