What has Jerry Seinfeld said now?
Nostalgia is a popular topic of discussion at the moment, as everyone from the general public to media and culture makers grapple with the allure and comfort of nostalgia, why it’s so prevalent, and the impact it has on society.
It was a point of discussion for Jerry Seinfeld’s interview with Bari Weiss on the podcast Honestly last week.
Seinfeld explains in his youth he had a desire to be a “real man”, looking up to the likes of Muhammad Ali, President John F. Kennedy and Sean Connery, who he still thinks represent an ideal of manhood.
“I miss a dominant masculinity,” Seinfeld told Weiss. “I like a real man.”
He attributes some of the appeal of the 1960s to this construct of manhood, explaining it is “part of what makes that moment attractive” while reminiscing about a stratified society. “There’s another element there that I think is the key element, and that is an agreed-upon hierarchy, which I think is absolutely vaporised in today’s moment.”
How did people react?
Seinfeld’s comments on masculinity have been picked up by everyone from Variety, CNN and the Guardian to Deadline, People and Unilad, with columnists weighing in on the statements.
CNN opinion writer Nicole Hemmer argues Seinfeld’s vision of gender and masculinity is deeply political whether he likes it or not. “Its prominence in the comedy world bolsters the retrograde politics now flourishing in many parts of the US.” Hemmer argues punchlines about women have a long history in stand-up comedy, and the medium has shifted its focus to “the emasculation of men”.
Social media has seen a slew of criticism and memes, many deploying humour and pointing out contradictions with past work.
Users excavated Seinfeld’s famous frilly pirate shirt from the second episode of the show’s fifth season, the plotline of which — though the show was famously about “nothing” — was a comment on masculinity and clothing conventions at the time.
People also pointed to other gender tropes the show subverted during its run, including Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus)
Other social media users have taken a more serious route of criticism around gender hierarchies, raising a relationship that a then-38-year-old Seinfeld had with a 17-year-old high school student in the 1990s.
Commenters on a YouTube video of the episode applauded the interview.
Has he done this before?
Seinfeld appeared frequently in the media ecosystem this year as he promotes various projects during interviews and appearances — guest staring on Saturday Night Live last month, he was introduced as the “man who did too much press” — and he’s given plenty of fodder, with comments spun off into news stories and headlines.
In April a clip from a New Yorker interview proliferated across social media and was shared by high-profile figures like Elon Musk, who posted the clip on X, formerly Twitter, alongside the “Make comedy legal again!”
In it, Seinfeld suggests good comedy no longer existed, and blamed “wokeness” for what he saw as a departure from the popular television shows of decades past, like M.A.S.H. “This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
NBC’s Angela Yang labelled the interview “the latest flashpoint in the internet’s larger culture war over ‘wokeness’,” while NPR TV critic Eric Deggans argued “there’s lots of other possible reasons for why there aren’t as many sitcoms on network TV and no evidence that wokeness has killed anything”.
Seinfeld’s thoughts on public sensitivity aren’t new, and they’re something he discussed with the NZ Herald’s Karl Puschmann back in 2017. “It’s fake upset,” he said. “They’re not really upset. Nobody really cares about anything anybody says. They just yell out what they think on the internet.”
Will this affect his popularity?
While Seinfeld positioned itself as apolitical, in recent years the comedian has leaned into a straight-talking public persona and rejected political correctness.
During a May appearance on Newstalk ZB, Seinfeld disagreed with Mike Hosking’s question it’s a “tricky time to be funny in America”. “No, because audiences are always telling you exactly where the lines are and aren’t,” he said. “[With] stand-up comedy, you get a sense of exactly where the public is in everything.”
A veteran of stand-up and screen, Seinfeld knows how to play to his base and turn sentiment into material.
He did that on his namesake show, and he’s doing it now too, as society grapples with an increasingly distant, and different, past — change doesn’t always feel good. He also knows the power of a soundbite and identity markers, and how easily these are spread on digital media, so using these in recent comments is certainly intentional. It generates stories like this one.
Is all publicity good publicity?
Writing for the Telegraph, Alexander Larman says Seinfeld’s Unfrosted publicity campaign “has not exactly been winning fans”, and instead “offending those on both sides of the political divide”.
Meanwhile the Chicago Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper has criticised the movie itself, calling Unfrosted “one of the worst films of the decade so far”.
Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story is screening on Netflix. Jerry Seinfeld will bring his comedy tour to New Zealand this month, performing at Auckland’s Spark Arena on June 24, and Christchurch’s Wolfbrook Arena on June 26.
Emma Gleason is the New Zealand Herald’s lifestyle and entertainment deputy editor. Based in Auckland, she covers entertainment and culture.
