Is "Seinfeld" Offensive Now?

I've mentioned once how my huge love of the Andy Serkis Planet of the Apes movies has managed to never come up in my blog entries before. Something else that I've never mentioned being a huge fan of is the 1990's sitcom Seinfeld. I don't know why, given my taste in movies, but somehow Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David's magnum opus about the silly, meaningless details of everyday life is my absolute favorite TV show.

Well, a friend of mine recently sent me a link to a YouTube show called "Does It Hold Up?", in which modern-day young viewers are shown episodes of older TV shows and asked if they think the shows are still relevant today. The episode my friend sent me had these viewers watching episodes of Seinfeld, and the majority of them found it too offensive to hold up today.

Here's a link to the video if you want to watch it yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5BxjUmzPPA


And for the record, here's a list of the Seinfeld episodes it discusses:

"The Merv Griffin Show": Jerry, George, and Elaine repeatedly give Jerry's girlfriend medication that makes her drowsy so they can play with her antique toy collection while she's sleeping.

"The Contest": Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer have a bet to see who can go the longest without masturbating. The three men make Elaine bet more money than them because "it's easier for a woman not to do it."

"The Soup Nazi": Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer frequent a dining establishment run by a short-tempered, ethnically questionable foreign chef.

"The Cigar Store Indian": Jerry keeps accidentally offending his Native American girlfriend and other people of different ethnicities.

"The Hamptons": Jerry's girlfriend accidentally sees George naked after he went swimming and he and Jerry ask Elaine if women know about "shrinkage."

"The Outing": A muckraking reporter believes that Jerry and George are a gay couple and they vehemently deny it while always disclaiming, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

~

As you can imagine, my knee-jerk reaction while watching the above video was to yell "Serenity Now!" every time someone complained about Seinfeld. My friend even questioned if the group of viewers chosen were a fair representation of modern audiences or if they were just picked because they had the most dramatic reactions. Now that I've had some time to think it over, I want to discuss this more in depth.

For starters, I don't really think you can gauge how well something "holds up" by how offensive it is. Watch any episode of Seinfeld back-to-back with any episode of the currently running sitcom Family Guy. I don't think anyone's going to find Seinfeld more offensive just because it's the older of the two shows. You can argue of course that Family Guy has more leeway because it's a cartoon and that the offensive jokes on that show are more exaggerated and deliberate, whereas Seinfeld's offensive jokes are more grounded and reflective of then-current cultural views. That's not to say that one show is funnier than the other, since humor is subjective and always offensive to some degree. It's just that not every show is made for the same audience.

What does make Seinfeld feel dated at times is the technology depicted onscreen, since things like cell phones, online streaming services, and self-adhesive postage stamps weren't commonplace when the series was made. Jerry not being able to find his friends in a movie theater because they can't text each other isn't offensive, though. What's more, I don't think that featuring outdated technology really lessens a movie or show's entertainment value. Heck, Marvel Studios just released a superhero movie that's a period piece set in the 1990's, and while I have heard complaints about the film, none of them have been about that aspect of it.

Second, I think a lot of people who do find Seinfeld offensive are just missing the point of the show. That point is that you're supposed to laugh at the main characters, not with them. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are selfish, ignorant, immature people, and the humor comes from how much those flaws hinder them when solving trivial, everyday problems. The show usually calls them out for their bad behavior one way or another, even when they don't get a proper comeuppance; other characters tell them how ridiculous they're being, their significant others dump them when the bad behavior comes to light, and sometimes their bad deeds from older episodes come back to haunt them.

It's like that scene from the movie Borat where the title character spends the night at a B&B run by a Jewish couple, and his antisemitism causes him to frantically throw dollar bills at two insects in his room because he thinks they're the couple who've shape-shifted to sneak in and kill him. It's making fun of ignorant racists like Borat, not the people they're prejudiced against. By the same logic, Seinfeld is making fun of people like Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer who are too morally inept to function in society, not the people they wrong in each episode. That's why the series ends with all four of them in prison.

The only episode I can think of that is unapologetically offensive is The Bubble Boy from Season 4. Jerry, Elaine, and George are asked to visit a young man with immune deficiency who has to live in a germ-free plastic enclosure, and because of George's childish stupidity, problems ensue. Not only does the show never address that the three are wrong to be uncomfortable about the "Bubble Boy's" condition (it even mocks the characters who do show him support and sympathy) it also depicts the "Bubble Boy" himself as a nasty, entitled brat who deserves what happens to him. I know that his condition is extremely rare, so not many people would take offense to this episode personally. I also know that Seinfeld wasn't trying to promote ableism with this episode, but the fact that it never really works a disclaimer into the script like most other episodes do is a bit irresponsible for them. Still, one mishandled message doesn't ruin an entire series -- and really, that episode is still funny.

And at the end of the day, I think that's the most important thing to take away from this: the tone of the series overall. You can't get an accurate view of a nine-season sitcom by just watching a handful of cherry-picked episodes. I'll admit that the producers of "Does It Hold Up?" could have shown their subjects far more triggering episodes than the ones they did, but there are plenty of less triggering episodes that they could have shown too. We need to view things in as full of a scope as possible before properly judging them, and TV sitcoms, while mainly a source of entertainment, are no exception. Fortunately, it's easy to view as much of Seinfeld as possible because it still aires daily on practically every TV channel known to man.

And if a show is still doing that more than two decades after it ended, it probably isn't offending too many people.