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[Dekalb_Blues]

Re. Seinfeld -- "Serenity Now"

A complexly-layered show that covertly breaks the 4th wall in bizarre ways. For instance, the George Costanza character -- a hilariously sad and angry little man so amazingly enacted by Jason Alexander -- is in fact the alter ego of the show's eccentric creator and writer, Larry David, who has admitted as much. He feeds this real-life multi-persona situation back into his current comedy series, in which various fictional versions of David (playing "himself") and his real-life entourage are even more complexly interlinked in an ongoing metastory that satirizes and caricatures -- even subverts -- almost anything, however conventionally sacrosanct.

All of which makes Seinfeld (and now Curb Your Enthusiasm) redolent of the actual multi-storied play of real life in progress, as presented metaphorically through the unintentionally ludicrous, passionately-pursued but ill-fated doings of a small clannish group (a nascent social memory complex?) of un-self-aware eccentrics, misfits, and neurotics, unable to learn from their constant self-thwartings and self-induced misfortunes. It certainly helps in appreciating Seinfeld's complexities to understand the history and folklore of the Russian/Polish Jewish transplanted-shtetl Yiddish culture in New York City, with its overarching cultural concern with the crucial survival issue of essential identity versus superficial image.







Meanwhile, the character of Frank Costanza is brilliantly enacted by Jerry Stiller, whose career persona seems to have been destined to its apotheosis in Seinfeld. I remember seeing him performing in a duo with his comedienne wife, Anne Meara, on various prime-time television variety shows when I was a wee lad in the early '60s.

 Foreshadowing the "Frank" & "Estelle" vibe, circa 1966 on The Ed Sullivan Show -- note the somewhat daring -- for the era -- presentation of a seemingly-at-odds Jewish/Catholic-Gentile marriage in their celebrated "I Hate You" routine (which, wonderfully, revealed the bickering couple's actual unconquerable love for each other).
[Edit:The despicable YouTube once again its wonders performs in its devolutionary role as cultural-memory-controller, using a certain proprietary algorithm which detects Narrative-disadvantageous off-site usage, blocking this by any means in its bottomless bag of soft-censoring tricks. Alas, there's no other freely available example to be found online of this quintessentially American comedy routine. See this article.]

 

Merry Festivus!