Larry David as Frank's lawyer "The Man In The Cape."
MASTER OF THE DOMAIN: WITH HIS CREATIVE PARTNER LARRY DAVID GONE, WILL
JERRY SEINFELD STILL EMBODY THE NEUROTIC NINETIES?
New York Observer September 16, 1996
Written by Jim Windolf
TO NEUROTIC NEW YORK, SEINFELD IS NEWS AT 11
Reruns of Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer Are Dark Nightcap for a Weary
City, But Can Slick Comic Keep Quality Up Without Demonic Genius Buddy Larry
David?
I am struck by how seriously - religiously, indeed - New Yorkers watch television.
In other parts of the country, television is taken as an escape from reality;
in New York, all things being relative, it is considered a window into reality.
- John Updike
Each weeknight at 11, before a shrunken audience, Chuck and Sue are still
doing their old routine on Channel 4, John Johnson and Michelle Marsh continue
to smile their way through their own ratings apocalypse on Channel 2, and
over on Channel 7, Bill Beutel keeps trying to impose his own grim sense
of social order on an unruly city. But in the last year, the anchors have
lost a good number of viewers, and even some of their authority, to a mere
rerun.
That is because the rerun in question is Seinfeld, and Seinfeld delivers
the real news for a city marked by cutthroat ambition and the accompanying
fear of success. The strong pull of Seinfeld at 11 also explains the halting
cadence that creeps into your phone conversations around 10:58 each night.
In the gamey warmth of good old brown-hued Channel 11, WPIX-TV, Seinfeld
gives the city the same nightly dose of clarity and community that an ideal
newscast would provide. Since Seinfeld debuted as a rerun last September
in the old Cheers slot, it has made local television history as the station's
first 11 P.M. show to beat all three newscasts in the ratings, pulling off
this feat more than once.
Seinfeld's characters have made themselves experts in the urban arts of
lying, betrayal, dognapping, sexual skullduggery and alternate-side-off-the-street
parking as they halfheartedly chase after love and success. For millions
of New Yorkers who are daily compromised by the personal and professional
demands of the meanest city since Gibbon's Rome, Seinfeld's tales of the
bourgeois urbanite in trouble make the case that you can be both morally
wretched and somewhat lovable.
"I like taking the worst qualities that a person has and trying to
make something funny out of it," said Larry David, the show's obsessive
head writer for the last seven seasons. "Doesn't everybody do terrible
things and have terrible thoughts? Just by trying to be as funny as you
can, you're going to deal with a lot of things that are real - so the show's
really about something. The whole thing about the show being about nothing
is ridiculous. I'm sounding like a pompous idiot. Don't use any of this,
I'm begging you."
MASTERS OF OUR DOMAIN
Every night at 11 on Channel 11, Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer tell us
we can be both morally wretched and somewhat lovable. JIM WINDOLF talks
with the sitcom's departing mad genius (and George Costanza doppelganger)
Larry David.
The show that Mr. David used to run before he quit last spring provides
a rock-solid alibi for any New Yorker driven to casual acts of cruelty at
work and in love. As a late-night rerun, it simultaneously gives its viewers
a comforting bedtime tale and an opportunity for a little end-of-the-day
reflection and self-flagellation. It's al so good for a belly laugh in a
way that David Letterman isn't anymore.
With Seinfeld, Mr. David came up with a way to address the pitiful generation
that came of age in the 60's and 70's, the end-of-the-baby-boom kids whose
fathers had suffered through the stiff-upper-lip work of realizing the American
dream in the 50's and 60's. Mr. David would probably agree with Bob Dole's
San Diego convention comment that the Clinton generation "never grew
up, never did anything real."
"There's not one thing I've ever done in my life that I could picture
my father doing," said Mr. David, who is 49. He was a man. He had a
cigar, he went to work, he came home at night. You never saw him hanging
out with his friends."
So you get a wimpy, information-age man-child like Jerry Seinfeld, who starts
an abortion debate in a restaurant for his own amusement and plays games
with women. When Elaine Benes tells him she's enthralled with her new boyfriend
because he "doesn't play games," Jerry asks, "Then how do
you know who's winning?" Or you get a coward like George Costanza,
who sprints out of a child's birthday party when a fire breaks out in the
kitchen, knocking over an old lady with a walker on his way out. When the
fireman asks George how he lives with himself, he says, "It's not easy,
it's not easy." Later, in Mr. David's final episode, George can't quite
bring himself to mourn the sudden demise of his fiancee, Susan, who died
while licking envelopes for their wedding invitations. Soon after her death,
George calls Marisa Tomei (playing herself, as a friend of Susan's) to see
if she's free to do something after the funeral. A number of critics said
Mr. David went too far in his swan song.
"I mean, it was obvious how he felt," Mr. David said. "He'd
been trying to break up with her, but he couldn't break up with her. He
didn't have the intestinal fortitude. He mentioned the thing about the plane
crash earlier, so it was totally set up so that, when it comes, do people
expect him to feign some bereavement? It would have been dishonest to make
him upset, and that's why it's funny. Somebody showed me something in some
magazine where they wrote this was a 'fuck you' to the network. Why would
I do something like that? Why a fuck you, when all they did was let me do
whatever I wanted for seven years? If anything, I was totally appreciative
of everything they did. So where's the fuck you?"
None of the stuff that makes Seinfeld part of the New Yorker's nightly ritual
would exist without Mr. David. He gave the show its ugly depiction of sexual
politics and situational ethics. More specifically, he gave Seinfeld George,
who is alternately self-loathing and preeningly vain (and who is based on
Mr. David himself); and he gave the show George's mother, Estelle Costanza,
the humorless kvetcher partly based on Mr. David's own mother; and Jerry
Seinfeld's father, Morty Seinfeld, the no-nonsense retired garment worker
(like Mr. David's own father) who served as president of a Florida condominium
(as does Mr. David's own father). Not to mention a host of minor characters
who share names with people Mr. David has known. And Cosmo Kramer is based
on Kenny Kramer, how a 52 year old Manhattan resident; he lived 20 floors
above Mr. David in the 70's and then across the hall from him for six years
and eight months in the 80's. The real Kramer has watched the show closely
since it started and used to talk regularly with Mr. David about what worked
and what didn't in a given episode.
"These are the most shallow, superficial, self-indulgent people - people
who mug old ladies, burn down log cabins, break up other couples, think
about it!" Mr. Kramer said, referring to the sitcom's four main characters.
"Horrible, despicable human beings. But we see there's a little of
us in them, our own dark character." And Mr. David considers himself
just as despicable. "Larry once told me he has the two worst traits
a person could have - a vicious temper combined with no guts," said
Mr. Kramer.
Discussing an episode from last season - the one in which Elaine interviews
a boyfriend to see if he's worth the use of one of her precious last contraceptive
sponges - Mr. Kramer said, "Think about Elaine, with 'sponge-worthy.'
All she cares about is her sponge and not getting pregnant. I mean, she'll
fuck anybody, doesn't care about diseases, AIDS, doesn't care about anything.
Think of the body of Larry's work - the masturbation episode, the blabbermouth
rabbit, the episode trivializing the whole abortion issue, the one that
trivialized the AIDS ribbon. The beauty of it is he's disguised this thing
as family entertainment!"
The show's one strong hint of optimism, what keeps it from being an exercise
in misanthropy, is the bond among Elaine, George, Kramer and Jerry. Although
they betray each other all the time, they have reached the highest plane
of friendship - the sharing of the apartment keys. The long friendship between
Mr. David and the real Mr. Kramer (who is an expert guide through Seinfeld
lore in his Reality Tour, call 268-5525) existed at perhaps an even more
rarefied place: The two men had just one good pair of dress pants between
them, and they shared it for years, reserving it well in advance.
Seinfeld at 11 liberated us from having to watch the skull-bashing local
nightly news shows, with their creepy five minutes of death stories and
creepy 10 minutes of "funny" sports and weather and the two-minute
clip at the end usually involving an animal getting loose in Florida.
Seinfeld doesn't turn away from the sad fact of adult masturbation ("treating
your body like an amusement park," to quote a line from a Larry David
stand-up routine that made it to the show) or men failing to pull off the
trick of cunnilingus (George Costanza gets "the tap" from a woman
he is trying to please, a signal for him to quit fooling around down there;
Elaine drives a sax player to blow a big gig on the night he decides to
add "everything" to his sexual repertoire) or the role that long
minutes spent on the pot play in our fates (George emerges from Jerry's
bathroom with his pants around his ankles, but too late to get the phone
call that would have meant employment for him; in another episode, George
loses a girlfriend because he emerges from her bathroom without his shirt
on - he needs room when he sits on the pot, and this time he forgot to get
dressed afterward) or bouts of impotence (Jerry can't function when in be
with Elaine, even after bragging that he can satisfy her in 15 minutes;
a despairing George looks downward while in bed, preparing to give the unwilling
body part a backhanded slap) or the inadequacy that adults born in the 50's
feel in comparing themselves to their fathers (Jerry telling George that
they have been acting like children their whole lives, without wives, without
children - a scolding that George takes to heart, leading to his doomed
engagement) or the hell of domestic bliss (Kramer reminding Jerry that living
with a woman entails having to respond to the question, "How was your
day?"; George being forced to watch a videotaped episode of Mad About
You in bed with his fiancee, just as a Yankee game is being broadcast from
California) or sheer pettiness (Kramer gets in a slap fight with a chimpanzee,
saying, "He started it!") or greed (Elaine purring for Jerry when
she sees how much he earned for a show) or spinelessness (Elaine agreeing
to date a creepy clerk simply because he went to the trouble of special-ordering
a hard-to-find-pen) or pure evil ("Newman!") or even death (TV
executive Russell Dalrymple dies at sea in his attempt to impress Elaine
as a Greenpeace warrior; George's fiancee Susan, who had been monopolizing
the time George would have spent in Monk's Cafe, discussing Aquaman and
Ponce de Leon).
In a 1961 essay, Philip Roth argued that novelists would inevitably lose
out in a world dominated by news events that were beyond the imagination.
But back then, Mr. Roth couldn't imagine that the mad events of the nightly
news would come to overwhelm the human need for a good yarn. He was probably
right in suggesting that novelists will never again have the cultural power
they exercised at mid-century - but at least Mr. David's writing for Seinfeld
(a show that's exactly halfway between Portnoy's Complaint and the nightly
news) has filled the void, proving that even journalism in a sensational
age can't outstrip pure storytelling. The Olympics bomber on top of the
Unabomber on top of Oklahoma City on top of the World Trade Center bombing,
with O.J. Simpson, David Koresh and the brothers Menendez in the muck at
the bottom of the scrum, has proved to be more of a media clusterfuck than
the story of how we live now. These are distant, television-ready disasters,
with seemingly no relevance to the time New Yorkers spend standing on line
for good soup or fighting one another for good parking spots. To counter
the television news notion that the world has gone suddenly magical-realist,
a nation has turned its lonely eyes to Joe DiMaggio, dunking his doughnut
at the coffee shop counter (episode No.18).
The chronicles of Seinfeld's four main characters' mundane encounters and
offhandedly evil deeds show that those global catastrophes take place in
miniature oat the local level. Which brings us back to the fevered brain
of Mr. David. If he had written two Off-Broadway plays with the comic snap
and dark undercurrents of Seinfeld, rather than just having had a hand in
134 episodes of a lowly sitcom, then he would be the toast of the Arts &
Leisure pages in The New York Times.
Seinfeld certainly wouldn't have been possible without the cold charms of
its title character, but the show's ruling intelligence is Larry David.
Or it was Larry David, before he finally succeeded in quitting after five
years of threats ("I'm afraid of challenges," he said, explaining
why he left. "My tendency is to run away from challenges.") He's
now at work on a screenplay in the Los Angeles office of Castle Rock Entertainment,
the company that produces Seinfeld for NBC; if it gets made, he'll direct
it.
Asked what Mr. David brought to Seinfeld, Castle Rock television president
Glenn Padnick said, "Oh, come on!" His meaning was clear - a meaning
made explicit by Mr. Kramer in a separate interview: "What Larry David
brought to the show was the show."
But in the collaborative culture of Hollywood television, it is considered
uncouth for any one person) with the exception of Steven Bochco) to sit
up on his hind legs and say, "Look at me, I'm the auteur!" Mr.
David himself gave this reporter a pre-emptive tongue-lashing in an attempt
to knock anything out of the article that would slight the show's wiring
staff and stars. But his tendency for muscling a script has been a sore
point for a Seinfeld writer or two and a blessing for the show's viewers.
Even Mr. Padnick, the Castle Rock executive whose company still has a big
financial stake in Seinfeld, did not sound altogether sanguine about the
coming eighth season of the show (scheduled to make its debut Sept. 19).
"I don't think people across America are going to say, What happened
to Seinfeld?' when they see the three shows we have in fact done for this
season," Mr. Padnick said. "But the loss of Larry is the loss
of the unknown. The certain thing he could have come up with, you don't
know what you're missing."
In the mid-70's, Mr. David was famous among his fellow comedians for his
tendency to go down in flames at comedy clubs in Manhattan. "I was
extremely temperamental on stage," said Mr. David, "and I didn't
handle adversity well. Lots of times, the audience thought I was kidding
around when I was screaming, but I wasn't."
Mr. Kramer recalled a show at Catch a Rising Star in the 70's when a female
heckler was riding Mr. David, to the delight of the audience. Every time
she hollered something out, the audience would laugh it up, and there was
Mr. David getting very small on stage, absolutely mum, without a comeback.
But the time he finally came up with something to say, it was more a self-loathing
observation than aggressive counterattack. "You know," he began,
"the worst part of this is I'm looking at your boobs, thinking I would
still date you."
That is the stuff of Seinfeld, the same impulse that causes George to leave
one girlfriend to devote himself to impressing Jerry's girlfriend, a woman
who hates him so much that George is tantalized.
Another time, when Mr. David found himself performing for an audience that
wasn't paying attention, he cried out in his booming baritone (the same
voice that serves as the voice of George Steinbrenner on Seinfeld), "This
is pearls before swine here! What is this? Fuck you!" and he threw
down the microphone and stomped off stage.
"Larry could do a show so vile that it would just vacuum the laughs
out of the room," Mr. Kramer said. "Richard Pryor could come on
next and there would be nothing."
Mr. David did some stand-up that he described as "very confessional."
In one routine, the man who would go on to write the classic Seinfeld episode
about refraining from masturbation ("The Contest") put himself
on trial as a 14-year old freak for the crime of self-abuse. He played five
different parts in this one-man sketch. In the voice of a vaguely continental
defense attorney, Mr. David asked, with greasy sincerity, "Is it a
crime to love yourself? And if it is a crime to love yourself, will it one
day be a crime to love others? And then how long will it be before it's
a crime to love soup?" He also had a routine where he played Hitler
being very entertained by a magician. After the magic act, Hitler goes backstage
to find out what the magician has done with the rabbit. In a wildly angry
diatribe, Hitler demands, in his German accent, to see the little bunny;
but the magician, mindful of the magician's code, refuses the Fuhrer's request.
In the 80's, during a hiatus from stand-up comedy, he was a writer-performer
for Fridays, the most lame Saturday Night Live knockoff that lasted two
seasons on ABC. The Mr. David wrote for Saturday Night Live, where only
one of his sketches was used in a full season of turning in comedy bit after
comedy bit. All the while, he was writing screenplays that were optioned
but never produced. But NBC took him on, anyway, even after being less than
thrilled when he actually pitched Seinfeld as a "show about nothing."
as did his television alter-ego, George Costanza, in the 1992-93 season.
Mr. David, who grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and Mr. Seinfeld, who
grew up in Massapequa, L.I., made a strange pair. Take a few lines from
their stand-up acts to show how different their sensibilities were.
Mr. David, on women: "I don't go out with women. I find them to be
too effeminate."
Mr. Seinfeld, on the lug competition in the winter Olympics: "The only
sport where people could be competing against their will and you wouldn't
know it."
Mr. David, on the one good time he ever had with a woman: "I was hugging
a woman and we were jumping up and down and embracing and then I realized
that it wasn't love but the Yankees had just won the World Series."
Mr. Seinfeld, on the phenomenon of parakeets flying into mirrors: "Even
if he thinks the mirror is another room, why doesn't he avoid hitting the
other parakeet?"
Mr. David, on what he likes in a woman: "I look for someone who has
large breasts and likes to throw rocks at deer."
So here's Mr. Seinfeld's ability to spin almost any topic into a fine joke,
and Mr. David's absurdity mixed with a crazed take on sex. Mr. Seinfeld
was the pro, while Mr. David was a crash-and-burn genius lucky to make a
living.