Seinfeld has publicly supported Israel following the 7 October Hamas attack, and traveled to a kibbutz in December to meet with hostages’ families. He has been “uncharacteristically vocal” about his support during press calls for his new film, Unfrosted, *The New York Times *reported.
The comedian, who was receiving an honorary degree from Duke, largely stayed away from the issue at the centre of the protests during his speech. At one point, he mentioned his Jewish heritage which was met with applause from the crowd.
“I grew up a Jewish boy from New York,” he said. “That is a privilege if you want to be a comedian.”
Outside Duke’s stadium on the Durham campus, Gaza-supporting students chanted: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.”
That’s the biggest part of the reason, but there’s also the fact that he’s been complaining about how the ‘woke left’ has destroyed comedy. That’s not exactly going to endear him to young adults either.
Also, the whole reason he’s complaining about comedy being destroyed is that he hasn’t been relevant in over 25 years. So even ignoring everything, he’s some boring old dude that hasn’t been that relevant the entire life of most of the graduates. They selected someone that the staff might be impressed by, but not someone that is vaguely interesting for the actual graduates.
Exactly. I enjoyed his stand-up comedy back in the 80s and 90s. I enjoyed his sitcom (although that was mostly down to Larry David), but the world has moved on. Comedy evolves. If you can’t evolve with it, you end up being Don Rickles in the world of George Carlin.
Notebooks full of material is literally something every standup comedian has (or at least had before the smartphone era). I still have a good dozen out of the dozens I used to have.
Curb Your Enthusiasm is hilarious and modern while the most popular thing Seinfeld has put out since Seinfeld was the Bee Movie. I think that shows where the talent is. Even when Jerry was in Curb, he was awkward as he’s not a great on-your-feet type comedian. All the other members of the Seinfeld cast fit in far better than him.
As a 24 year old who spent way too much time watching 90s reruns, Seinfeld was just kinda meh. 3rd rock and married with children were better IMO, also the married with children lingerie scene was my sexual awakening.
Funny, at the time, I thought Seinfeld was better (and more innovative) than either of those. Married With Children was mostly just about being as crass as possible, which has been topped significantly since by shows like South Park and Always Sunny, which broadened their shows to not make it just about “how trashy can we get” and Third Rock… eh. Mostly just weird for weirdness’ sake.
Seinfeld had some pretty decent ideas for a sitcom like the episode taking place entirely while waiting in the restaurant entrance for Chinese take-out or the episode which is entirely set in a parking garage. There just wasn’t TV like that back then.
Also, the whole reason he’s complaining about comedy being destroyed is that he hasn’t been relevant in over 25 years.
YouTuber MovieBob absolutely nailed it when he said in his recent review of the new stupid Seinfeld movie that at this point going “anti-woke” is just a marketing move for older washed up comedians. Most of them probably don’t even give a shit but it’s vastly easier to pander to the crowd so desperate for any validation of their hateful rhetoric than it is to write new insightful jokes that resonate with a culture you’re quickly aging out of.
Of course none of this is to defend Seinfeld; if anything being a manipulative conman willing to pander to the worst appetites in America is arguably even worse than genuinely believing the bullshit in the first place.
Seinfeld is a Billionaire. If I ever had 1% of that, I’d never try to force myself to be relevant and happily accept I’m not relevant anymore.
I’d expect that’s in fact the natural trajectory of being in pop culture, that your time of relevance is fleeting, and plan accordingly. No hurt feelings that no one is lining up for your material anymore, it happens to almost every single person in that field. You only can make your legacy worse by trying to force things, exit on a high note.
And the point of a lot of old comedy was based on shitting on other people. The “woke left” is the kids calling us out on being assholes for no reason.
The ironic thing is that the show Seinfeld was more like IASIP than Friends, in that the characters were mostly shitty people, and the joke was usually on them (even though they similarly often destroyed the lives of people around them.)
Jessica Seinfeld, cookbook author and wife to comedian Jerry Seinfeld, is funding a pro-Israel counterprotest at UCLA—where violence broke out Tuesday night after a mob attacked demonstrators inside a pro-Palestine encampment.
A GoFundMe for the effort, which Seinfeld promoted in an Instagram story this week after contributing at least $5,000, has since made the majority of its donations anonymous. The fundraising page has raised more than $93,000 as of Wednesday and also changed its organizer name and description since launching over the weekend.
“I just gave to this GoFundMe to support more allies like yesterday’s at UCLA,” Seinfeld wrote this week. “More cities are being planned so please give what you can. Donations are annonymous [sic]. We will continue to share our light and love, as proud American Jews.”
The guy who said woke (aka not self centered sociopaths) have ruined comedy even though his partner on Seinfeld has had a wildly successful hit comedy series burning everyone for like eight years?
I forget where I heard it but I’ve never forgotten it: Comedy punches up, bullying punches down. The only people who are afraid of getting canceled are the ones who do the latter.
I call mine “A Tale of Two Dissappointments”. Was going for a literary-arthouse vibe. Most of the budget (about $5.13 and a pack of Welch’s-brand fruit snacks) went to wardrobe, leaving little for production (not to mention post-production). It went a surprisingly long way though as the miniature costumes were very light on raw materials and the labor was handled through an unpaid internship given to a student at the local Liberal Arts college that was majoring in Experimental Puppet Theater.
Which coincidentally is the primary reason I've never found him funny. All egotistical assholes I've ever met thought they are hilarious. They are mostly just incredibly cruel and bigoted.
Same goes for Ricky Gervais IMO…shout out to Karl Pilkington who genuinely was the funniest part of Derek before he became fatigued with Ricky’s bullshit.
I kind of liked Gervais at one point, but I realized he was still one of those types, just one I agree with occasionally. So I don’t follow him anymore.
Watching Seinfeld is like watching people endlessly criticize others because they are given license to since they themselves are jokes. Never will you find a heartfelt moment. Never will you see someone reflect on how awful they’ve been to other people.
“No hugging, no learning” was a writing rule for the Seinfeld show. The lack of reflection and heartfelt moments is an intentional response to other sitcoms of the era.
I’m confused. By all accounts Jerry and the entire cast came together to point out their hate for Trump and Republicans. But because he doesn’t agree with one issue he’s been labeled as a right winger? I’m so far left that young leftists think I’m too extreme, to the point where they call be right wing for disagreeing with every tiny thing they say. The young left have become the keepers of “right/wrong think”
Edit: a lot of young people who call themselves left, are doing everything possible to push people away from the left, instead of making them allies.
I’m pro-trans, but I’m not pro-trans people in women’s sports. This makes me a anti-trans nazi in the vast majority of leftie/progressivist people’s eyes, who clearly is a closeted Trump supporter. It’s the whole ‘we must be intolerant of intertolerance’ type fo thing… but they’ve twist it to ‘we must be intolerant of any disagreement whatsoever with our unrealistic ideological agenda that has no basis in a factual reality’.
There is no allowance for variance of reasonable opinion or an objective reality. You are with us, or against us, and therefore the enemy.
Lefties and young folks who are left leaning tend to be as braindead and lockstep as the Trumpers they claim to hate.
My opinion on trans athletes is that I lack the qualifications to have an opinion. What happens to the human body during transition should be pretty well-documented by now, though. I’m sure if there’s any real problem, the doctors who work in gender-affirming care would be pretty vocal about it.
Uh, calm down mate. Maybe you think you’re replying to somebody else? A doctor making their living from providing transgender healthcare is absolutely a biased party, as is any researcher choosing to focus on this topic. That’s reflexivity, it’s quite important to acknowledge.
You would definitely need to acknowledge a physicist’s bias towards the theory they have chosen to research. That’s absolutely a thing! I’m not saying anything controversial here. I don’t even like sociology very much, reflexivity is boring and over-emphasised but it’s a legitimate issue, and it’s a big issue in transgender medicine. Which people are very keen to point out when the research doesn’t agree with their own position.
I haven’t even stated my position. Clearly some people suffer from gender dysphoria and evidently they are happier living as the other sex. They should be free to do so.
The “one issue” happens to be supporting a genocide, so it’s kind of a big one? I haven’t seen anyone calling him right-wing, but you can bet if cops were firing rubber bullets at peaceful student protesters under a republican administration, every lefty from NY to LA would be wringing their hands and crying “fascism”. The times they are a-changing my friend. It’s not just about left or right, and I’m glad these kids understand that.
And the dude openly dated a minor when he was nearly 40, "Shoshanna is a person, not an age. She is extremely bright. She’s funny, sharp, very alert. We just get along. You can hear the click.”
I’m sure you love strawmen, you get to burn down someone whose opinion deviates from yours even a little. We used to call it “wrong think” when we were actually fighting for people’s rights and not just being arrogant assholes, pushing everyone away from the left.
You might not have noticed, but young adults aren’t big Chapelle fans these days either. The whole transphobia thing doesn’t play so well with the under-40s.
You’re not paying attention. I’ve seen him called right wing quite a few times outside of Lemmy, different forums etc. Also lots of articles out there essentially calling him the new right wing mouthpiece.
I’m so sorry to inform you of this, but in the year of our Zord 2024, we are no longer accepting “one of the ten billion apes, bots, advertising agencies, liars, and trolls who are screaming into the Internet at all times said something I disagree with” as a valid source of outrage, controversy, or secondhand conversation.
Please understand that this is not personal, nor is it a judgement on your specific opinion. We would recommend addressing the comment you disagree with directly at its source, if you feel you must address it at all.
I’ve always found the left more annoying than the right. The right are wrong, but the left are self-righteous smug dickheads. Liberals are like a chimera of both and I think that’s why I hate them more than the right even though they’re objectively less bad. That’s my shitty analysis anyway.
Must be true Insaan said it. If you only knew. I didn’t grow up in Western comfort like you, I’ve washed brains off my sidewalk after guerrilla offensives into my town. I’m a native of this continent, not some colonizer remnant. I’ve seen your western brutality and the hypocrisy and patriarchal bullshit that comes with it. All you do is talk on the internet but you don’t actually do Jack shit about anything. Grab your guns and travel to Gaza, that would be a start
he never actually dated anyone under 18. but I’m sure someone will chime in with a slightly different strawman to try to rage at someone else because they hate their own life
They did not start actually dating until she was 18 according to many things I read but people will still die on this hill no matter what I say and no matter what they read.
This was the same era when Bill Clinton claimed he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky because it was only a blow job.
“Dating” just means they claimed not to have had sex until she was 18. He still met her by herself in a park and had private time with her when she was underaged. We call that today Grooming. Jerry Seinfeld is a groomer.
In 2010 or so I went to Cornell for the graduation ceremony of a family member of mine from their business school. The keynote speaker was Rudy Giuliani. His speech about living life with integrity really aged well lol.
The ending of the show kinda makes me think they were the original IASIP gang. Every other character outside of the main group thought they were assholes, and they literally went to jail for it.
There were definitely people who modeled their behavior or at least excused their actions based on Seinfeld. My aunt for instance.
There’s a long, long history of idiots missing the point of various pieces of fiction. The Prince, Fight Club and the original MS Gundam come to mind. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko even felt the need create Gundam: The Origin because too many kids thought Gundam’s message was “War is cool”.
Friends would have been okay with Janice and Gunter. Community only needs the Dean. The big bang theory would have been better with just a black screen.
I mean, technically, yes. It would work but it wouldn’t be Community. Abed is the cornerstone though if set alone wouldn’t work out, you also need sidekick Troy as an audience surrogate so we can all ride along. Troy&Abed on a space station would still be Community with different support characters.
Nothing is obligating you to respond this way other than some amount of respect you have for this bigot. DONT sugar coat your ability to look the other way in the face of bigotry.