Jerry Seinfeld’s New Netflix Special is Bad and You're Part of the Problem

Jerry Seinfeld isn’t funny, and we all have to come to terms with that.

The 63-year-old Brooklyn comedian released this month a one-hour-long Netflix special titled “Jerry Before Seinfeld,” promoted as a revelatory dive into Jerry’s past, his life before he became the Jerry Seinfeld. He dives into his joke archives, retelling old material starting from when he first came up in the 1970s.

Seinfeld teased the show on his Instagram, prior to its release, saying he was going to bare his soul, and he starts the show by stating clearly: “I’ll tell you the whole story. I’ll tell you how it all happened.”

The special falls spectacularly short of that goal. Seinfeld reheats old bits, tries new jokes that are stale out-of-the-box, and shows that he’s still infuriatingly and intentionally tone-deaf when it comes to issues of race, sex, and the LGBTQ community. All the while, other than sparse sepia-toned home footage snippets, we learn very little about Jerry’s life. If the producers wanted to give Seinfeld more contours, they failed. Perhaps the worst part is, you idiots loved it while still recognizing that it was bad.

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The show was filmed at The Comic Strip, the venerable New York club where Seinfeld started his career 40 years ago.

Seinfeld leaps on stage in a navy blue suit, silver tie, and white shoes. His dark hair is buzzed and balding. He’s energetic, and the crowd eats it up.

He starts the gig showcasing what you should already know. His old jokes are ancient, and his new material already sounds old. After all, he’s made a living on recycling the same shtick. Case in point: His first bit is a spellbinding five-minutes about why we say “on” or “in,” depending on the situation. You live “on” Long Island. You get “on” the train, but you get “in” a taxi.

“You never see anybody on top of a train, but that’s how you talk … Why do you get ‘on’ the train, why?” he half-shouts, in his well-known vocal styling. “So you can get off it!”

He continues this thread with a painfully forced nod to millennials.

“What do you do with Uber?” he asks the audience. There is no audible response. Crickets scream into the void.

“You take it! You take Uber! Because there’s no money! It’s like free,” he says gesticulating with open hands, as he does. “I don’t know how it works. Do we pay for that? … It’s like M&Ms in a bowl - you just take ‘em!”

Seinfeld follows this with at least five minutes on cereal. Let me repeat - He fills five minutes of a professionally-produced comedy special, with likely a pricey entrance fee, on eating cereal.

But, as teased, Seinfeld doesn’t just recycle old jokes for sixty minutes. Early in the set, he begins to describe his childhood in the 1960s. It was lawless, he says. No seatbelts, no helicopter moms, no complex nutritional regimens for children. This means five-year-old Jerry could eat whatever sugary breakfast cereal he wanted at any time, an old standard joke of his.

“My parents, they didn’t even know our names!” he says, half-shouting again. “They were ignorant. They were negligent. They were checked out. We grew up like wild dogs in the 60s!”

You learn soon after that it’s all fake, and his insistence that childhood life was tough entirely and intentionally contradicts the interspersed home-video footage that is straining to tell the story of Jerry’s upbringing. After the joke ends, the video cuts to grainy footage of Jerry as a child, messily eating birthday cake and playing with his older sister.

“There was no drama in my life or in my family or in my world,” he says, in a voice-over narration. “My parents were really nice … I had a wonderful older sister. This was a nice family.”

The retrospective lasts maybe ninety seconds, and then we’re back to present-day Jerry at The Comic Strip. The moment is lost, and this pseudo walk down memory lane continues for a painstakingly-long sixty minutes, a carefully-crafted bullshit parade, so as not to hurt the brand. Seinfeld is Forbes’s wealthiest comedian of 2017, and he tells a joke about how difficult it was to not feel self-conscious when he first got a maid. There is nothing to relate to here, and there was never going to be.

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Even worse, aside from being bland, some of his jokes are downright tone-deaf in 2017.

No surprise -- Seinfeld, the show, has been criticized for years for being both sexist and racist. He does a short riff on crime in New York (unfortunately most of his jokes in the special start with “In New York…”) where he questions why police officers assault suspects with nightsticks and chokeholds, only to take special care of them while lowering them into the back of a squad car.

“You don’t want to hit your head on the door, that really stings,” Seinfeld jokes sarcastically, holding his hand to the back of his head and wincing. “It smarts … Be careful!”

It’s baffling to make such a bad joke only one month after President Trump encouraged police officers to be more aggressive when shepherding perps into squad cars. Seinfeld’s joke is, at best, useless and, at worst, crass with severe racist undertones.

He also riffs on why women love flowers, and that men can buy bouquets to apologize for almost anything. (Real heavy shit, Jer.) He quips that floral shops should come with pre-made “your career is important, too” baskets. How thoughtful. He then jokes that telling his parents that he wanted to be a professional comedian was akin to him coming out of the closet.

“It was like my little gay, closet moment,” he said. “I don’t want to be ashamed of it anymore. I want to lead a funny lifestyle now.” (It reminds me of this bizarre bit from his sitcom, which isn’t as funny as it is confusing, where he argues that men are such dullards that they could be unwittingly persuaded into becoming gay.) 

Hiding behind his tried-and-true veil of faux cluelessness, Seinfeld drops these jokes as if he doesn’t know he’s become the prototypical racist old white guy, and as the audience, we accept it as the standard Seinfeld protocol. He’s just observing! He’s not validating! We lap it up and beg for more, like a Dickensian street urchin watching a one-man play about the life and times of Chef Boyardee.

In their review, Vulture writer Matt Zoller Seitz pens “it’s a good collection of jokes and stories.” Chuck Darrow, a contributor for the Philly Voice, recalls fondly seeing Seinfeld almost 40 years ago and says the new special is “a wonderful bit of time travel,” “brilliant,” and that the jokes are “as hilarious today as they were when I first heard them.” The positive reviews are omnipresent. Los Angeles Times: “I laughed a lot during ‘Jerry Before Seinfeld.’” NPR: “[It] makes you laugh - a lot.” The Guardian: “[Seinfeld is] an ultimate laser-precision joke machine,” a six-word assessment that is funnier than Seinfeld’s entire 60-minute charade.

I wonder if you all saw the same show I did, where a professional comedian with forty years of experience tells jokes about why old people move to Florida, or how much it sucks to slog through airport security. In an age of hilarious and profound comedic specials - Chris Gethard: Career Suicide, Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King, et al. - Seinfeld looks embarrassingly amateurish compared to his peers. He is a 10-year-old telling fart jokes behind the monkey bars.

I implore you to take five seconds and forget that, just like me, you used to laugh watching Seinfeld when you were younger and incapable of critical thinking. In Seinfeld’s shtick, it is the marginalized that are the butts of the joke, and their plight is used as a premise to a punchline. Police officers do assault suspects (disproportionately people of color), and women and LGBTQ are still treated unfairly, just as they were forty years ago. What’s the deal with women wanting careers, anyway?

You can’t argue that these are recycled jokes from a different time. This is who Seinfeld is. Just two years ago, he said in ESPN Radio interview that comedy is no place for “political correctness,” which is why he and other comics avoid performing on college campuses. Of young people, Seinfeld said: “They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist’; ‘That’s sexist’; ‘That’s prejudice,’” he told ESPN Radio host Colin Cowherd. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Hyuck hyuck! Why do cops beat people up? I’m just making observations!

Seinfeld can’t be bothered to have a single critical thought, and you idiots don’t care. The crowd is rolling throughout the set, and the show is doing well with online reviews. It’s got a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, 74% on Metacritic, and a 7.1 out of 10 on IMDB.

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Jerry ends the set by saying “Thank you for letting me tell my story,” but he didn’t.

He told zero deeply personal stories. His tales of growing up a hungry comedian in a dirty city always ended in a sarcastic and unsurprising revelation. It’s a vacuum of emotion.

In their review, The AV Club argues that the jokes “while not revelatory, [are] undeniably fun.” Author Dennis Perkins must live on reheated jokes about losing socks and eating cookies for breakfast, all the while glossing over the, ahem, problematic sexism and racism in his act. Perkins accepts the protocol - What did you expect from Jerry Freaking Seinfeld? - while still recognizing that the performance is bad. 

Perkins writes “the intended effect [of showing Jerry’s past in home footage]  is undercut by the sight of the present-day Seinfeld’s obvious comfort in his role as unfathomably wealthy, universally respected comic elder statesman. … The special sets up this performance as a more intimate experience than it turns out to be.” Now watch me shovel this shit into my face hole.

Seitz, the Vulture contributor, acknowledges his own cognitive dissonance, too. “Those hoping for a thorough and surprising documentary about Seinfeld, or even a concert with a heavily confessional bent, will be disappointed,” he writes. “But of course, these same people would need to be unfamiliar with Seinfeld’s work to expect more than that.” Still, Seitz says the show was satisfying and that he “laughed a lot.”

The Guardian, after calling Seinfeld a “joke machine,” says the comedian “is not Louis CK. Even under the heaviest scrutiny, he will not divulge much about the flaws and tics and squandered ambitions of his own life.” The charade continues - Seinfeld is sort of funny, no one questions his problematic content, he’s too guarded to give us anything remotely relatable, and people are OK with that because using your brain is hard. C'mon in, the water's warm. 

All of this matters because this Netflix special had potential to be inspirational. There are two notable moments when it really shines, and I actually did hunger for more. In the first, Jerry is talking about Mad Magazine, and how that inspired him to be a comedian. He realized, via the irreverence of Mad, that you don’t always have to take things so damn seriously. The revelation is simple, but it resonates.

The second moment is, by far, the best part of the show. It’s off-stage, and Seinfeld is seated cross-legged in the middle of a narrow road, sporting a navy blue hoodie and white sneakers. He’s surrounded by sheets of notebook paper, the yellowed pages carefully laid out like cobblestones. It’s all the jokes he’s written since the 70s, mementos of bits that landed. He flips through a few of the pages and recalls the bit, but he doesn’t do the bit. It’s in this setting that he has a decently profound, even if contrived, moment. He says he doesn’t care if people like him. He only cares if they liked the show.

“To feel that your sense of humor is actually being validated, that is the only validation I think I’ve ever really cared about as a human being,” he says.

Then again, Seinfeld never gives us the opportunity to love or hate him as a person, because we’ve learned nothing about him. What could have been an insightful dive into the brain of a universally famous comedian turned out to be just Seinfeld being Seinfeld.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just not funny.