On Friday, Paul Jacob provided some vivisection services to a review of Jerry Seinfeld’s stance on what the woke have done to comedy, in “The French King Flip Flap.” On May Day, in “They Don’t Get It,” Paul had dealt with the same subject, Mr. Seinfeld’s long-running beef with the woke.
But the current context — the one that led to Friday’s target, an article in The Washington Post by Brian Broome — is the new movie on Netflix, Unfrosted, directed by Seinfeld and co-written by him with Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, and Barry Marder.
Is it funny?
This is of course something everyone must judge for him- or herself. The intent is clear, a retelling of the “wars” between the breakfast cereal companies to create a new breakfast product — what has become known as a “Pop Tart” — in a zany, cartoonish fashion. It is designed as a silly movie. Mostly good clean fun. Family fare.
But a survey of critics and audiences at Rotten Tomatoes gives us an indicator to how it’s doing: Early reactions were that the movie stinks. But now that more people have seen it, we are seeing something like a “ratioed” split, with an average of critics’ responses placing it in the splatted green tomato (rotten tomato) range, at 40 percent approval, while audience scores have run higher, at 55 percent.
In recent years, the audiences have split with critics at much wider margins, on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics giving low scores for unwoke creative products, while audiences have given ultra-high scores, and vice versa.
Sometimes it’s not Wokianity at issue, but simply orthodox religion: Aronofsky’s Noah (2014), for example, which yielded a 75 percent positive for the critics and a 41 percent negative for the audience. Noah owed as much to The Book of Enoch as to Genesis.
But 2019’s Captain Marvel was indeed about the woke issue, and audiences judged the movie at a weak 45 percent, while critics placed it pretty high, at 79 percent. Even more dramatic, in the same vein, went on with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi (2019), which critics raved about at 91 percent, but audiences yawned at 42 percent.
But the ultimate split between audiences and critics may be Amy Schumer’s 2023 Netflix stand-up special, with critics granting the comic a whopping 100 percent approval, while audiences scorned her product with jeers at a mere 18 percent. The split in appreciation was an epochal moment in the current culture wars.
Ms. Schumer plays Marjorie Post in the new Seinfeld flick.
