The Books of My Life: Seinfeld

I didn't watch much television in the early and mid-1990s. I didn't have a telly until 1991 while between 1993 and 1995 I was travelling and hiking my way across the Canadian and American Wests with my then friend Lea Danielsen. As a result I didn't see Seinfeld when it debuted on NBC in 1990 and I didn't watch Seinfeld when it was at its height of popularity as one of the shows that was part of NBC's Thursday night "Must See TV", shows that helped make NBC America's top network for a time, from 1992 to 1998. In fact, I didn't, in fact, watch Seinfeld until it was in reruns in the mid-1990s.

I liked Seinfeld. I still do. I also enjoyed reading Nicholas Mirzoeff's critical study of Seinfeld (Seinfeld, BFI TV Classics series, London: BFI, 2007. Though Mirzoeff's book is not grounded in interviews with the shows creators--Mirzoeff says it makes one less critical of a text, which is a fair cop I suppose--and is like so much television, film, and literary criticism today, text centred. Still Mirzoeff has a lot of interesting things to say about Seinfeld.

Mirzoeff, drawing on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Raymond Williams concept of flow, Aristotle's theory of comedy, Sigmund Freud's theory of displacement, Gustav Faubert's realism, Harold Pinter's theatre of the everyday, and the history of Jewish comedy, argues that Seinfeld is visually traditional and verbally innovative, that Seinfeld was meant to make money through advertising revenue for NBC, that Seinfeld is a comedy of manners, a comedy of social rules and social behaviour, a comedy of relationships, a comedy of the absurdities of everyday life, a comedy of spite, rather than a romantic comedy like most other American situation comedies, and a comedy heavily influenced by vaudeville and the Yiddish theatre that is focused around "four adolescent infants" trying to figure out the social rules of everyday life in the era of the Oslo Accords. This "too Jewish" comedy reflects, Mirzoeff asserts, the Jewish movement into the White American mainstream beginning in the 1950s and a late twentieth century concern about masculinity and gender. It depends for its comedy, Mirzoeff maintains, on its audience getting the get, as he calls it, involves the audience, in other words, filling in the social and cultural intertextuality or references.

One of the things I thought about as I was reading Mirzoeff's book was the current state of television and film theory. As some of you may know television and film theory has been grounded, at least in part, in Freudian theory and Lacan's reworking of Freudian theory, thanks to the notion quite common in academia that television and films are akin to a dream that can be decoded by the in the know analysand. I have never, however, found Freudian theory and its Lacanian variant particularly compelling and I have never believed that television and film are akin to a dream. I think it more useful to take a more sociological approach to television and cinema than a psychoanalytic one. It is obvious, to me anyway, that, sociologically speaking, all societies, their culture, their forms of socialisation, of which the media is one, are socially and culturally constructed and, as such, reflect the social and cultural ideologies, the civil religion or the myths, at the heart of that society and culture. It is obvious to me that these ideologies, this civil religion, and these myths have been fetishised by specific societies and cultures. It is thus not surprising that the media, including television, mirrors these societies and cultures and, on occasion, the fractions--class, gender, ethnic--within those societies and cultures. We need less Freud or Lacan in the exploration of television and more Marx and Weber and their heirs to help us understand the nature and function of television.

As I said, I enjoyed Mirzoeff's book and recommend it to intellectuals and scholars interested in American television and American situation comedy. I did have one historical quibbles with the book. Historically speaking it helps, I think, to put Seinfeld within the context of earlier "too Jewish" television shows like Your Show of Shows (NBC, 1950-1954) and The Dick van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961-1966, which was created by an alumni of Your Show of Shows. The Dick van Dyke Show, in particular, had elements of the comedy of relationships, the comedy of manners, the comedy of the absurdities of everyday life, and the workplace comedy which it shared with Seinfeld and I wish Mirzoeff had explored these precedents more.