I mean, it is offensive. Everyone knows it (I hope).
The actor of Kramer was even caught throwing racist insults in public so you know.
An actor saying the N word and the show being offensive are not anyhow related.
The show is certainly reflective of its time. If someone is offended by it, I won’t tell them that they’re wrong, but I don’t see it as offensive.
“Reflective of its time” so of a time where being offensive and discriminatory was seen as fine or even cool. The show is more offensive than the first Star Trek that was decades earlier. Being offensive has nothing to do with the time period, if people were fine with it, it doesn’t mean that it is fine and not offensive.
And this show was mostly made of jokes targeting a minority or showing horrible behaviours as funny. Seems like enough to call it offensive.
This is simply not true, at least for the vast majority of the show. Any jokes that might be read as punching down are generally being told by characters who are themselves the actual butt of the joke. Example: the episode where Jerry and George keep getting misinterpreted as being a gay couple. The jokes are all built around their embarrassment about the fact, and the punchline is never “lol gay people exist”.
Can I get some specific examples of the jokes from the show that you find offensive?
Ummmm, the whole point of the show was that the people were horrible.
The show ended with them jailed after they made fun of a guy who was getting mugged.
The gang on It’s Always Sunny is worse but they are obviously not people we’re supposed to empathise with. It’s quite a bit less obvious on Seinfeld.
I feel like the distinction is that on Sunny the gang is “punished” for their shitty behavior, and on Seinfeld they basically never were. (I don’t include the season finale because that was just a cop-out to give the show an ending.)
I might be overthinking it but feel like Seinfeld was more a show about normal people who sometimes do shitty things - just like real life. I can’t think of anything truly horrible any of them did on the show, just a bunch of “social” wrongdoing. Telling a secret, sleeping at work, the perfect comeback, etc. It’s famously a show about “nothing”
Then IASIP is about a bunch of assholes riling each other up to be horrible for their own benefit.
I think Seinfeld is the more “important” in the grand scheme of television for it’s groundbreaking approach but in a vacuum, IAS is the better show.
Jerry purposely drugging his girlfriend so he could play with her toys was pretty shitty AND horrible.
Yes, but that’s season 9, which is after Larry David left as writer. While Larry David was there thru season 7 the characters were quirky regular people who sometimes made bad choices like all humans do sometimes. After Larry David left and Jerry Seinfeld was writing the show by himself from season 8 forward, the characters became much more fucked up, and the show was also way less funny
The show is still a very 90s show with 90s sensibilities. There is a lot of media from that time that hasn’t aged well.
If 90s shows make you clutch your pearls god help you if you catch something from the 80s or 70s.
I think that 90s media may be a bit more problematic because it was more willing to have the kinds of discussions that 80s media would never had.
We were the ones watching it when it was first airing. I don’t think there was anyone in my highschool that wasn’t watching it.
Millenial here, I always just thought it was shit!
Even when it aired, it was walking the line of generally offensive. That line didn’t have to move far to tip the show out of favour on average. Seinfeld himself addressed it, initially being upset that his brand of comedy was falling out of favour, but eventually coming to terms with the fact that he himself was out of touch and would benefit from adapting.
Has he? Last I heard he was still complaining that “yOu CoUlDnT dO sEiNfElD tOdAy BeCaUsE wOkE” with Rob McElhenney begging to differ.
Hopefully that link isn’t broken or bad. But yeah, he basically said he was wrong and out of touch. And that he could stand to make an effort to get with the times.
His style of comedy has always been about finding where the current edge is and seeing how far you can cross it and still be funny. But the drawback is that the edge moves. So you have to keep seeing where it is, and what you said 10 years ago probably isn’t funny anymore. It’s normal to get frustrated when something you put effort and work into is no longer seen as a good thing even though it was liked well enough at the time. But he really should have expected that result. And I think he knew that when he made it, but had since got caught up in the false validation that can come from being out of touch.
Gosh. I am unironically impressed, it’s rare for people to actually take stuff back and say they were wrong. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Aside:
Representatives for Seinfeld did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Weird how it’s impossible for celebrities to just be taken at their word without a representative being contacted for clarification.