Extraordinary that no-one has produced an ironic comedy about Woke which, let’s face it, is so inherently funny, that it would be an immediate hit

Who could have guessed that youngsters might eventually realise that life is better when “comedy” is written to make you laugh.
For the sake of the younger generations, I sincerely hope that someone has the capability to develop the next Cheers – and some broadcaster has the intelligence to screen it.

Yadda, yadda, yadda 😉

I am still waiting for the teenage rebellion against all this. Surely now that pronouns and virtue signalling are force fed to them in school they will push back. I can’t understand how they tolerate this treacly nonsense. When are they going to just state obvious things like men in skirts are creeps, worshipping billionaire do-Gooders is lame, and my pronouns are $&@& and $&&$! Come on kids – get cynical.

“When George does get engaged, he spends the bulk of a season regretting it and trying to break it off.”

One of my favourite scenes is when George comes up with the genius idea to demand that his fiance signs a prenup, the intended outcome being that she’ll react badly and angrily end the engagement. Instead of course she bursts out laughing, telling him she’s got more money than him, “Sure, bring me the prenup, I’ll sign it” amid fits of derisive giggling.

George’s expression of weary defeat was pure gold.

I watched ‘Friends’ (actually a Gen ‘X’ comedy, not Millennial) primarily because (a) I fancied Jennifer Aniston and (b) the writing was sharp. I wonder what Nicholas would make of ‘Black Books’, a British comedy which makes Seinfeld look like an episode of ‘The Brady Bunch’.
I’m not saying America doesn’t do great sitcom (it does), but I think the UK is better. America, OTOH, does far better drama. Give me Toast, Darkplace, The IT Crowd, Father Ted, Black Books, Spaced (etc), basically anything prior to the 2016/17 Woken-Krieg. Surreal, cynical and funny.

I’m on my 5th rerun of Seinfeld…. I am so shallow.

The author should try On The Buses next.

I appreciated this take, perhaps because mine is different, so it made me think constructively.
I’m an elder Millennial who disliked Friends as a teenager and only recently discovered Seinfeld myself (my family was like that — but now we all like it). Harris talks about Gen Z’s “preoccupation with moral sincerity,” with its “iterative performance of goodness.” This struck me because lately I’ve been seeking what I would have called moral sincerity in reaction to the what seems to me an obvious performance. Granted, I’ve gone more toward exploring an earnest virtue ethic in response to all this sanctimonous, performative crap, but the author made me consider whether I might be in a smaller cultural space than I had thought.
At any rate, humor is essential in life. People’s reactions to good-natured teasing about their foibles tells us something quite important about them. And this certainly does say something about the path of the golden mean and a truly moral life.
Thanks for the thought-provoking piece!

The best thing to come out of Seinfeld was Curb Your Enthusiasm.

“We inspect artists and writers for actionable wrongdoing.”
Artists and writers must as a matter of critical emergency engage in as much actionable wrongdoing as possible.

Lots of opinions about other TV shows and their merits or lack thereof but not a lot of opinion about the article itself. I thought the piece was very well written and perceptive. I kept wondering where this stream of insight was coming from. If original thought, then congrats to the author.

British fans couldn’t even watch it reliably when it was airing, if I recall correctly. The BBC used to put episodes on erratically at odd times after 11. Hard to imagine in the days of streaming.

Single-camera sitcoms, and especially The Office US, killed the game for 90s sitcoms in my opinion. As a former Friends fan, I shiver at even trying to re-watch these overstated jokes with long pauses and tracks of imaginary audiences somehow choking of laughter after every utterance from the main characters, and remember I once thought these were the funniest things in the world.
Humour has a life-cycle I guess.

Preferred Larry Sanders tbh.

Gotta love it…..Once again GenX is leading the way past all this woke BS.
Seinfeld IS our generation.
Friends was too, but it was our younger sisters. No…in reality, Friends is what we hoped for and Sienfeld is how we actually lived.
Its why our stomachs turn watching all the virtue signaling, fake niceness, posturing for selfies. It makes us sick to our stomachs watching all these people put on airs and try to feed the world their performative happiness and virtue when we know that they are no less fucked up that the rest of us and no more virtuous either.
Say what you like about GenX, we do not have a lot of tolerance for fake.

HBO’s ” Curb your enthusiasm” and Larry David was a predictor of woke to come, and is similar TV genius…

Seinfeld was great because it didn’t teach any lessons on morality.

My favourite Steinfeld episode was the one where Jerry gets lumbered with a dog left abandoned when its boozed-up dog-loving English owner dies on a plane flight. As someone who loathes dogs and their doting owners it was satisfying to see these animals getting some well-deserved satirical contempt for once.

If only… If only…

In my teens I looked on in wonder at my Dad in hysterics watching Dad’s Army. Eventually I came round and learned to love its cleverness. The never seen Captain Mainwaring’s wife, the anticipation of Fraser’s eyebrows signalling ‘we’re doomed.’ Seinfeld used similar repeated jokes, you knew you were going to laugh. ‘Cheers’ for me lacked that, it spoke to my kids but I’d become too old to empathise, they were just silly neurotic kids where The Big Bang Theory recaptured it for all. They were clever neurotic and, bar Penny, could afford to live in a brownstone. You had to wonder at the Cheers finances.

I don’t really know anything about these programmes, but this was an excellent sharp piece of writing

Yeah. Think about when The Honeymooners in the 1950s, with Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, was about a bus driver, a sewer worker, and their wives.

So glad the younger generation is discovering Seinfeld.
Seinfeld has actually stood the test of time rather well. Friends is still cute but the wit falls a bit flat.

I read a book on this topic when it came out in 2000: “Shows About Nothing; Nihilism in Popular Culture from the Exorcist to Seinfeld,” by Thomas Hobbs. Given that the phrase “about nothing” was in quotes in the third paragrah, one would assume the author was aware of the work and has decided not to credit it. But one of the books central themes involved nihilism and degeneracy, both of which are missing in this article, so I’m not so sure. The article makes some interesting observations butwould have benefitted from more background.

Seinfeld remains a timeless piece of comedy for it’s realism, and I would disagree with the notion that it is postmodern in any sense. It never held pretensions to an ideal (like Friends, which provided a sterile and naive picture of the world) but wrote it’s characters as real people. I’ve often felt that is the key to enduring art – real human beings dealing with the paradoxes of life. I remember reading David Foster Wallace and thinking, “Who the hell are these people?” All the while, Jerry and George are in all of us.

Reading the comments here of the “unwoke” in their little circle jerks are pretty hilarious.