What Is the Deal With Jerry Seinfeld?

Remember Bizarro Jerry? In the eighth season of Seinfeld, when the ubiquitous, insanely popular sitcom was edging away from the quotidian and into the surreal, Elaine broke up with a nice boyfriend named Kevin who declared himself perfectly happy to remain friends. He was reliable, considerate—“your exact opposite,” she told Jerry. Soon Elaine found herself ensconced in Kevin’s group of pals, including a bizarro George (bald, glasses, but generous) and a bizarro Kramer (tall, his ideas are pragmatic).

So well trained were we, the audience of Seinfeld, to expect the worst from every person on the show that the Bizarro group’s kindness and intellectual curiosity seemed freakish and unnatural. We simply could not process it. Elaine, in the episode, is thrown into a crisis. Now that she’s been shown an alternative, her everyday existence—the show Seinfeld, that is—suddenly seems unbearable. “I can’t spend the rest of my life,” she tells Jerry, “coming into this stinking apartment every 10 minutes to pore over the excruciating minutiae of every single daily event.”

“The whole system is breaking down!” Jerry exclaims as she walks out the door.

Seinfeld, the show, was a kind of system, a machine calibrated to manufacture laughs out of the worst of human behavior. The joke of the episode—it’s a good one—is not only Elaine’s inability to adapt to these well-mannered friends who respect one another’s boundaries, exchange hugs, and read books. It’s the way the very existence of such people breaks the show itself, stripping bare the gears that made it run.

Seinfeld made Jerry Seinfeld unthinkably wealthy and famous, and in the decades since, he’s never really done another thing. At least nothing similarly ambitious. He sort of made another TV show, about him riding around in fancy cars with other comedians. He sort of made a movie—he voiced an animated bee who was exactly like Jerry Seinfeld, an incredible flex in the post-Seinfeld era. (Somehow, Bee Movie grossed almost $300 million worldwide.) Mostly, he retreated to the art form he likes best: stand-up. He fills arenas and theaters still, musing on his obsessions (cereal, childhood, the weirdness of language, the irritations of modern life) to loyal crowds who scream with laughter when he unleashes the patented Seinfeld whine, the leap into his higher register that signals an intensity of annoyance that’s—IT’S OFF THE SCALE!

This month, Seinfeld finally released his next thing: Unfrosted, a comedy about the invention of the Pop-Tart, which Seinfeld directed, co-wrote, and stars in for Netflix. With Unfrosted’s splashy rollout has come a flood of Seinfeld interviews, the most Jerry the ordinary public has been subjected to since the 1990s. “I need to stop,” he admitted in an appearance on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update as “A Man Who Did Too Much Press.” The SNL appearance was charming and self-deprecating, but the headlines from a lot of the other press hits have presented a new version of Seinfeld: Jerry the old grump. “The movie business is over,” he told GQ. There are no new network sitcoms because of “the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people,” he groused to the New Yorker. (David Remnick pushed back ever so gently, but if ever there were a situation that called for Isaac Chotiner …) Predictably, his New Yorker comments were praised by dummies on the right—“Make comedy legal again!” tweeted Elon Musk—and dismissed by many actual TV creators and critics.

Seinfeld’s comment about “P.C. crap” came in response to a good question from Remnick. In light of the Israel-Gaza war, Remnick asked how, in “a very dark time,” the weight of the world might affect Seinfeld’s comedy. The baloney about P.C. was a dodge: Seinfeld doesn’t want the weight of the world acknowledged in comedy. (A typical Seinfeld “political” bit is to complain about how dumb it is that the Democrats use a donkey and the Republicans use an elephant.) He’s a purist, convinced that the role of comedy is to carry people away from the serious troubles of the world, generally by complaining about the most petty of them. Not incidentally, that canny credo helped make his hyperspecific show about neurotic New Yorkers so broadly popular that 76 million Americans watched its finale. Seinfeld seems aware that, to paraphrase another ’90s icon, Republicans buy comedy too.

But as he’s gotten older and richer, he’s become more and more likely to speak his opinions about the world—if not always in the work, then in his interviews. The blitz of the past month has been many Americans’ first encounters with points he’s been making for some time. As the Times points out, he’s even started embracing his Judaism more publicly, and in December traveled to Tel Aviv to visit the families of Hamas hostages. Who can fault a Jewish celebrity for calling attention to the dead and missing of Israel? Yet he’s notably not commented on the Netanyahu government, condemned the war, or discussed the suffering of Gazans—omissions that seem likely to draw attention this weekend, as he visits an elite college campus to deliver the commencement address at Duke.

It’s unclear whether Seinfeld cares when he faces criticism. Even before his money insulated him from any possible unpleasantness, he acted blithe about how he came off. “The only validation I’ve ever cared about as a human being,” he says in his 2017 special Jerry Before Seinfeld, has been to get the laughs. “I didn’t really care if they liked me or not.” In many ways, this is what being a billionaire ought to buy you: the ability to simply do what you want to do, say what you want to say, and not care about the results. Sometimes, the results are as mediocre as Unfrosted.

Unfrosted was born in a bit Seinfeld’s been performing for a while; it appears in his 2020 stand-up special 23 Hours to Kill. “When they invented the Pop-Tart, the back of my head blew right off,” he reminisced, comparing it to primitive pre-1960s breakfast technology like frozen orange juice concentrate and shredded wheat. Battle Creek, Michigan, the home of Kellogg’s and Post, seemed to him “like a cereal Silicon Valley … breakfast super-scientists conceiving of a frosted fruit-filled heatable rectangle in the same shape as the box it comes in.” Working with the writers Spike Feresten, Barry Marder, and Andy Robin—the same team that wrote Bee Movie—Seinfeld inflated the gag into 93 minutes of cereal jokes, celebrity cameos, The Right Stuff homages, and an unlikely Jan. 6 parody.

The movie, which has lived at or near the peak of Netflix’s Top Movies list since its release, is inoffensively bad—a little more ambitious than one of those Adam Sandler projects where he just gets to hang out with his friends, but still offering that paid-vacation feel. Like Seinfeld and his stand-up, it does function as a genuine tour inside Jerry Seinfeld’s head. There are Seinfeld’s friends and preoccupations right there up on the screen. You’d think there are no more jokes to be made about breakfast, but you’d be wrong. “The magic of cereal,” Seinfeld’s character, Kellogg’s bigwig Bob Cabana, says, “is you’re eatin’ and drinkin’ at the same time with one hand!”

Just about the only performers in the movie who aren’t famous are the two kids who play neighborhood rapscallions Cathy and Butchie, whom Cabana finds in a dumpster, feasting on the “goo” produced by rival Post’s development of a new breakfast pastry. As Cabana’s dream team of “taste pilots” tries to develop its own version, the kids become the real experts, hauled into Kellogg’s HQ to test their prototypes. Cathy (Eleanor Sweeney) even gets Seinfeld’s line: When she tasted the new pastry, she proclaims, “it blew the back of my head right off!”

Cathy and Butchie are the Seinfeld surrogates, feral and sociopathic in the way Seinfeld’s stand-up has always presented his own young self. (He’s got a bit in Jerry Before Seinfeld about the way parents viewed kids in that era: “They didn’t even know our names! I was like a raccoon to my parents!”) They call to mind Seinfeld’s great creations of yesteryear, those adults in various states of suspended childhood: George the raging toddler, unable to stop himself from saying exactly what’s in his head, no matter how stupid; Kramer the gawky kindergartner, off in his own world, tripping over his own feet; Elaine the elementary schooler, prissy and snooty and a slave to her impulses. And Jerry himself, a weird mix of teenager and octogenarian, finicky and germophobic, yet so arrested in his development that all he stocks his shelves with is breakfast cereal.

Seinfeld’s finale, famously, took these child-monsters and forced them at last to face the consequences of their actions, as they were prosecuted in a small town for violating a Good Samaritan law. (They saw a man being robbed and, instead of helping him, made fun of him.) At the time, the finale was reviled, though I’ve always considered it a kind of masterpiece by Seinfeld and Larry David. How else could this show end but with a splash of cold water? I found it thrilling, almost diabolically so, to watch the four leads’ faces as the district attorney told the jury that their lives—that is, the show—was “a history of selfishness, self-absorption, immaturity, and greed.” Jerry and his friends were antiheroes before antiheroes were a staple of prestige TV, and cheering for the bad guys for nine seasons ought to have consequences too.

David’s recent Curb Your Enthusiasm finale revisited—indeed, essentially restaged—the Seinfeld finale, and even brought back Jerry to commiserate with Larry about his plight. The one difference, of course, was that instead of being prosecuted for doing something cruel that was, incidentally, illegal, Larry was on trial for doing something kind—giving water to a person in line to vote. (In doing so, he violated Georgia’s election laws.) The trial replays some of Larry’s most gruesome misdeeds, though quite often those misdeeds stem not from immaturity or selfishness but from over-adherence to a slightly bananas moral code. “A pure, decent human being is all you’re trying to be,” Jerry tells Larry in the finale. He doesn’t sound that impressed.

“Larry David used to always say I don’t get enough credit for my misanthropy,” Seinfeld told Variety in the run-up to Unfrosted. It’s striking how determined Seinfeld seems, in his recent stand-up, to make sure everyone gives him that credit. He has released himself from any pretense of niceness, or even civility. Yes, he’s still playing with language and pointing out the foibles of modern society. But his most recent special opened with a bravura, seven-minute riff on what a drag it is to do things with your friends. It’s pretty funny, and also fundamentally sour and unpleasant. “Why are your friends so annoying?” he asks. “You’d get rid of all of them in a second—if it wasn’t a bigger pain in the ass to find new people.”

In the episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the actress who played Elaine all those years ago riffs with Seinfeld about the banality of niceness. (As it happens, the episodes of that show featuring his former co-stars—the friends he hasn’t gotten rid of—are about the nicest I’ve ever seen Jerry Seinfeld be.) “Do you think I’m nice?” Seinfeld asks Louis-Dreyfus.

“I think you can be nice,” she replies.

“Anyone can be nice,” he protests. “Hitler can be nice.”

“Well,” she says tartly. “You’re nicer than Hitler.”

Once upon a time, Jerry Seinfeld was a young grump. I found something deeply refreshing in his cynicism, which felt in tune with its era. (Seinfeld, 70 last month, may be a boomer, but temperamentally he’s kind of Gen X.) Now he’s an old grump, as are many of us, the ones who watched his show so religiously that the sudden appearance of kind and friendly characters blew our minds the way Pop-Tarts blew young Jerry’s. I look in the mirror now, and it’s my whininess, my resistance to change, my smug dissatisfaction with everyone else that I find least appealing about myself. Seinfeld embraces his misanthropy, as he always has—he’s never pretended to anything different—but it feels different now, in a darker world. Is a pure, decent human being really so bad?