I Just Watched Seinfeld for the First Time and, OMG, It Was So Bad That I Can't Even!

When I tell people that I’ve never seen an episode of Seinfeld, they usually look at me like I have a third eye, and there’s a giant-ass boner popping out of it. They’re usually all, “It’s so great! You’ve got to see it.” 

I know it’s supposed to be so amazing and whatever, but sorry, nerds, I don’t go for that old timey shit. I’ve never seen anything with that black and white Buster Chaplin dude, or the fat guy with the anger issues who threatens to beat up his wife on their honeymoon or the one with the Nazi in the wheelchair. 

So I don’t exactly feel guilty about never having watched some old-ass sitcom from a million years ago. But it’s not like I’m completely unfamiliar with Seinfeld or the people involved with it either. I was a fan of Bee Movie memes before they got played out, and my friends tell me I have pretty broad taste in comedy.

I like everything from Adult Swim to South Park to Bojack Horseman. So when the sad sack who runs this site asked me to watch a few episodes of Seinfeld and then write about them from the perspective of a proudly ignorant twenty year old, actively contemptuous of cultural history and brazenly unwilling to do even the most basic research or preparation before sharing my opinions with the world I was like, "Whatever."  

He assured me that this article was most assuredly NOT a cynical piece of clickbait designed to get fans of a more or less universally, and deservedly, beloved pop culture touchstone so filled with rage by a headline that they’re driven to click on the article, hate-read, and then, without thinking about what they’re doing, share it on Facebook or re-tweet it with acidic commentary on its cynicism and worthlessness to like-minded friends and followers, increasing the article’s page-views, cultural reach and commercial value at each step. 

On the contrary, we have much to learn from snarky college-age kids seeing the great art and entertainment of the past solely through the prism of their myopic narcissism, then disseminating their thoughts in a way guaranteed to grab the attention of an outrage-obsessed online public in the most aggressive, odious fashion possible. 

I asked my friend Mike, who’s a total comedy nerd, about the cast of Seinfeld and he said the Kramer dude is a straight up Klansman who got up and called Bill Cosby the N word at the Emmys. He also said Jerry was Alt-Right and dated a twelve year old girl named Shoshannah at the height of the show’s popularity and nobody minded because he was so rich and famous. So you can forgive me for not wanting to support these creeps by knowing anything about them or their life’s work before writing authoritatively about them. 

Can we start by talking about the clothes? I get it: the whole idea of the show was to comment ironically on the fashion of the era by making all the clothes as hideous as possible.

TBH, I think they over-did it! Seriously, Seinfeld is where normcore went to die. It’s amazing that any babies were created during this era because the ugly-ass Sears clothes they wear on this show should have kept anyone from having sex. 

But the characters here do have sex. Lots and lots of sex. Thankfully they don’t do it on camera, because that would cause everyone in the audience to vomit, but fuck they do. 

Oh, and who is doing all that fucking? Some pasty-ass white dudes, that’s who. 

George Costanza (Jason Alexander) looks like a nerdy white M&M with glasses. He can’t hold onto a job. He’s cheap as fuck. He’s practically homeless yet beautiful women practically line up to throw themselves at him. 

Jerry, the show’s title character, is even more of a mulleted fuck monster, with even more gorgeous women flinging themselves at him, but he’s apparently too good to commit any of them even though, if this were real life and he wasn’t famous, he’d be taking the Stroke Train all the way to Jack Off City instead of getting laid constantly. 

This passed for fuckable in the 1990s I guess. 

Yet seemingly every episode of Seinfeld is about how these two gross dudes in shapeless dad jeans are annoyed because the beautiful women they’re sleeping with have some tiny imperfection. 

The show is so sex-crazed that one of their most famous episodes was about how they had to refrain from masturbating, which was tough, because their lives otherwise consist of a never-ending series of powerful orgasms, both self-derived and with the assistance of the impossibly gorgeous women George and Jerry sleep with. 

Is the subtext that a plague killed off the good-looking heterosexual men in New York? Because that’s the only way it would make sense for these douche canoes to score with these kinds of women. 

Watching Seinfeld I found myself distracted by the sounds of braying, artificial laughter. For a moment there I thought I was going mad and that the noises in my head were starting up again but it tuns out that the makers of Seinfeld were so insecure, understandably, about their dumb show with unlikable, badly-dressed actors that they used something called a “laugh track” in an attempt to trick the audience into thinking the show is funny by making them think they’re in a room filled with the sounds of joyous laughter. 

Pretty sure I heard these dudes on the laugh track. 

It turns out that before South Park and Arrested Development brought comedy kicking and screaming into the present, “laugh tracks” were used extensively on multi-camera sitcoms but to me use of laugh tracks represents strike three against the show, after the bad clothes and gross male wish fulfillment. 

This is relatively low on my list of grievances, but how are you gonna make a show that takes place in New York in the 1990s where nobody fucks with the Wu-Tang Clan? Are you really trying to tell me that no one in this corny-ass world was bumping Only Built 4 Cuban Linx? 

My editor told me that maybe I should give the show another try but one and a half episodes is enough. I’m not going to waste anymore of my time trying to force myself to find Seinfeld even remotely amusing. I worry that my fierce contempt for Seinfeld may even taint my enjoyment of Bee Movie memes, however, and that would bee very unfortunate. 

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