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Jerry Seinfeld thinks stand-up comedy is booming because fans are bored with the current state of television comedy, which he says has been sanitized by “P.C.” culture.
In an interview with The New Yorker, the 70-year-old Seinfeld co-creator claimed TV comedy is an endangered species due to “the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
“[In decades past, people] just expected there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight,” Seinfeld said. “Well, guess what — where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
He argued that people are now turning to stand-up comics “because we are not policed by anyone. The audience polices us. We know when we’re off track. We know instantly and we adjust to it instantly.”
“But when you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups — ‘Here’s our thought about this joke.’ Well, that’s the end of your comedy,” he added.
Seinfeld touched on Curb Your Enthusiasm, the hit HBO comedy from his Seinfeld co-creator, Larry David, which he acknowledged was able to get away with some edgy material. But he said that was because the 76-year-old David was “grandfathered in” and that if he was younger, those same jokes wouldn’t fly today.
“We did an episode of [Seinfeld] where Kramer decides to start a business of having homeless people pull rickshaws because, as he says, ‘They’re outside anyway,’” Seinfeld noted. “Do you think I could get that episode on the air today? We would write a different joke with Kramer and the rickshaw today. We wouldn’t do that joke. We’d come up with another joke.”
For what it’s worth, Seinfeld went into syndication in 1998 and is regularly repeated across cable. In addition, streaming rights for all 180 episodes transferred from Hulu to Netflix in 2021.
The comedian also referenced some jokes he believed David wouldn’t get away with today if he was younger.
“If Larry was 35, he couldn’t get away with watermelon stuff and Palestinian chicken… and HBO knows that’s what people come here for, but they’re not smart enough to figure out, ‘How do we do this now? Do we take the heat, or just not be funny?”
“And what they’ve decided to be is, ‘Well, we’re not going to do comedies anymore.’ There were no sitcoms picked up on the fall season of all four networks. Not one. No new sitcoms,” he continued.
HBO currently has three comedy series in its line-up, The Righteous Gemstones, The Rehearsal, and Somebody Somewhere, all of which have been renewed. There is also a third season of the comedy-drama anthology series The White Lotus in the works.
Despite his pessimism toward current TV comedy, Seinfeld admitted he sees “a slight movement” when it comes to cultural sensitivity.
“With certain comedians now, people are having fun with them stepping over the line and us all laughing about it. But, again, it’s the stand-ups that really have the freedom to do it because no one else gets the blame if it doesn’t go down well,” he said. “He or she can take all the blame themself.”
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