If comedy gives lessons, you're doing it wrong

The strangest long-standing misconception I ever had was that Jerry Seinfeld was Greek. I believed this for many years — this despite being myself a Jewish New Yorker, who would have been expected to recognize others of the type. In fact, I didn't really register that Seinfeld and his crew were a particular type. They just seemed like ordinary people. Self-absorbed, dishonest, scheming ordinary people. I don't remember how I got the idea of Seinfeld's Greekness, but it persisted, and when people would mention Seinfeld's Jewish humor I would mentally correct them, thinking smugly, "Actually, he's Greek." I took it for granted that the appeal of Seinfeld was universal. It came from the central law of all comedy: Thou shalt not lecture. Virtually all the behavior on "Seinfeld" was awful, but viewers were largely supposed to understand that for themselves. 

These days, Jerry Seinfeld wonders if his show would ever have gotten through all the committees set up to make sure comedy will not cause offense (see, for instance, his interview with The New Yorker). I'm not sure I would go quite that far. Seinfeld's co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus went on to serve most of seven seasons as the U.S. vice president in Veep from 2012 to 2019, and there was plenty of hilariously offensive material in that. And I'm not eager to climb on a "things were funnier in the old days" bandwagon. But I do think that comedy has gotten harder. Seinfeld came out of the age of anti-moralizing. Comedy didn't come with lessons (my senior year of high school saw the release of Heathers, the most morally suspect teen movie of all time). Recent years, though, have insistently demanded lessons from comedy (hello, The Good Place), and from other arts too. The funny thing about timeless moral lessons is that they come with a short shelf life, and Seinfeld still works because it consistently skips them. Morals change, standards change. But human folly, served without moralistic garnish, stays funny forever.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine. 

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