There’s this great Jerry Seinfeld bit about how we treat our “important” friends on our smartphones: “They don’t seem very important, not the way you scroll through their names on your contact list like a gay French king.” And Mr. Seinfeld flipped his wrist in a motion of dismissal. “Who pleases me today?”
Well, Seinfeld is not pleasing the woke. Not today. Not The Washington Post’s Brian Broome.
“Wake up, Mr. Seinfeld. Mean-spirited humor isn’t cool anymore,” is Mr. Broome’s title. And his opinion is that times change, and meanie Mr. Seinfeld is a has-been for making fun of marginalized people.
You may have judged Jerry Seinfeld as one of the lighter, cleaner comics, his act almost universal. Broome says you’re wrong. “I have never found Jerry Seinfeld funny,” he explains. “Even in the ’90s when his show was all the rage, I didn’t get why people thought it was hilarious. It always seemed to me to be about immigrants being odd or unhygienic or making fun of women’s faces or body parts. The show always seemed mean-spirited to me, and that’s just not my kind of humor.”
O, shall thy pearls be clutched!
Wasn’t the self-described “show about nothing” really a comedy of manners where the main characters, George Costanza, Elaine Benes, Cosmo Kramer, and Jerry himself served as the actual butts of the jokes? These four egoists fretted over their ultra-liberal concerns about good manners but always behaved badly. And we always knew it. And somehow still liked them — because Seinfeld was not mean-spirited!
Broome characteristically ends on a vindictive note: “So, yes, if you make ham-fisted jokes about women or the LGBTQ+ community or people living with disabilities or the French, someone will come for you.” Thus, the mob beheaded the king. And the priest. All with
Would Broome think the point of the “gay French king” joke was to make fun of gays? But recall the actual
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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