I have to assume that Seinfeld lives at the bottom of the Marianas Trench where he has no TV reception.
We frankly live in a great age for TV comedy, in part because we can watch all the old ones, but also, there’s a goatload of channels and they all want comedies.
So I am going to rant as a Gen Xer.
A lot of my generation are shitty comedians. And they’re shitty because in the 90s, the shitstorm of the 2000s hadn’t happened yet. A lot of 90s comedians basically had a pathetic manchild schtick that worked in the nineties, but no longer works but none of them know how to fucking grow up. I’ll be fair - that was not the essence of Seinfeld (it’s the essence of Adam Sandler, who if not forced to be good, reverts to the pathetic manchild schtick that doesn’t work for a man his age). But the essence of Seinfeld was apolitical cynicism, the kind that can be afforded by well off white men. It’s the heart of Seinfeld and of South Park, the idea that caring about things makes you history’s greatest monster, and that your comedy should stand for nothing.
Some things need cynicism applied to them - South Park is at its best when deflating bloated egos and scams, like when it took on Scientology. Seinfeld spent a lot of time tearing apart sitcom cliches; in the eighties, everyone had to learn a lesson; the essence of Seinfeld is that no one ever learns anything.
But this cynicism became an attitude that if there’s a political conflict, both sides are equally terrible and comedy shouldn’t ever advocate for anything positive. And that’s why a lot of 90s comedians turned to crap.
When a comedian whines about PC, what they really mean is ‘I can’t make cruel jokes about those being punched in the face by society’ and also ‘I don’t actually know shit about anyone but wealthy white men because I don’t even interact with non-rich white men anymore’
The Inside Baseball Problem.
In the past, the Inside Baseball Problem was minimized because every comedian assumed middle class white men were their audience (or they operated purely inside a minority group they belonged to). This is no longer the case but it was when Gen X comedians like Seinfeld were coming up.
What is the Inside Baseball Problem? The best comedy requires you and the comedian to share deep knowledge of something. Baseball. Being Jewish. Being a Middle Class New Yorker in the 90s. (The title comes from a sports show that was great if you loved baseball and incomprehensible if not.) But lots of topics are not well known by enough people to work with the random audiences a comedian faces now. This creates a great temptation to stick to broad stereotypes. But those stereotypes were generally created to dunk on people.
They’ve also largely been beaten to death by overuse.
A lot of successful comedians fall into this trap because they stop interacting with anyone normal and don’t know how to make jokes about normal experiences any more. And all their material on various groups is old, moldy, ill-intentioned stereotypes.
So that’s basically the Seinfeld situation.
