![]() Then came Season 2, more of the same and twice as long, with Kramer sitting on the couch shovelling cantaloupe into his mouth, George trying to break up with his girlfriend, and Jerry doing a set about the indignity of waiting rooms. By the end of the first week, I was finished with Season 1, all five episodes. There was Kramer, pulling two slices of bread from his bathrobe pockets, asking Jerry, “You got any meat?” There was George, flustered again, inventing the figure of Art Vandelay, importer-exporter. I was bored, perplexed, and mostly unamused-this is what all the fuss was about?-trying my best to find purchase among silly story lines and quirky characters. It was slow going for me in the beginning. “Why we’re here? To be out.” This was followed a few minutes later by a scene in a laundromat with Jerry trying to convince an increasingly frustrated George that there was a misconception about clothes being “overdry.” “You can’t ‘overdry,’ ” Jerry explains, “the same reason you can’t ‘overwet.’ ” This was the entire essence of the show in the first ten minutes: the wordplay, the observational humor, the low stakes-and, through the wonders of societal osmosis, much of it was already completely familiar, including the theme music. ![]() library where I would go every day to write, sitting in a cubicle amid college students who had been born after “Seinfeld” but probably knew more about it than I did.Īnd so I began to watch, circa twelve o’clock on an October afternoon, nearly thirty years after the fact, Season 1, Episode 1, eating my sandwich, while Jerry, as his standup-comedic persona, opened the series with a set about the universal need that people have to “go out,” and then, once “out,” the need to “get back.” “Do you know what this is all about?” he asked of the delighted audience. It also conveniently gave me something to occupy myself with during my lunch break in the basement of the N.Y.U. Until one day, two decades later, I decided that I would take matters into my own hands: I would watch the show once and for all, every episode of the show, from start to finish, one episode a day, and that meant, for the record, a hundred and eighty days of “Seinfeld.” This was pre- pandemic, when such an undertaking would have been seen, at least by me, as an indulgent waste of time, but I justified it as a form of self-improvement. ![]() ![]() Often, I would find myself on the periphery of a group of friends or co-workers, perennial outsider that I was, waiting for the laughter to subside, as they discussed what had been said or done the night before by Jerry or whomever if I had been a bit more liberated, I perhaps could have admitted that the scenarios did seem somewhat funny in the recounting.īut, even when the show finally ended, there was no discernible abating of its cultural impact in syndication, and the years continued to pass with catchphrases still quoted, scenes still described, and me still standing on the sideline completely clueless. It would have been impossible, of course, for me to ever fully outrun the wide reach of the show, as it was being referred to by everyone everywhere, with catchphrases quoted, yada yada, etc., and scenes described, and jokes retold. Of all the pop-culture phenomena that I have managed to miss out on in my life-and there have been many-no lapse might be greater than having never watched a single episode of “Seinfeld.” In the final decade of the twentieth century, this was no small feat, and it was accomplished, in part, because I didn’t own a television set-only high art for me-but mostly because I harbored a long-simmering antagonism toward mainstream America, with the notable exception of professional sports.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |