Posts Tagged ‘Seinfeld’
One reason I have always loved the Seinfeld show (I purchased the complete nine year set) is because it never worried about breaching, in a funny way, the social barriers of controversial subjects. In other words, the political correctness monster never managed to infect the scripts. Generally, if you were going to publicly discuss a certain sensitive subject, let’s say ethnicity, then PCness required its own script. Seinfeld and his writers never submitted. On Seinfeld you were fat, never weight-challenged. Witness the Chinese Woman (ethnic identity), for example, and The Couch (abortion issue), The Bubble Boy and The Lip Reader (the handicapped) , The Outing and The Cheever Letters (gay), The Old Man (aging). There is no doubt in my mind that Jerry Seinfeld, a clean comedian, was far more effective in promoting free speech than, say, George Carlin who usually got the credit simply because he used four-letter words, as if that was the essence of free speech. Far from the show “being about nothing,” it was about everything.
Immigration issue? Here’s Seinfeld’s closing monologue in The VISA:
“”I am for open immigration but that sign we have on the front of the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…’, can’t we just say, ‘Hey, the door’s open, we’ll take whoever you got.’? Do we have to specify the wretched refuse? I mean, why don’t we just say, ‘Give us the unhappy, the sad, the slow, the ugly, people that can’t drive, that they have trouble merging, if they can’t stay in their lane, if they don’t signal, they can’t parallel park, if they’re sneezing, if they’re stuffed up, if they’re clogged, if they have bad penmanship, don’t return calls, if they have dandruff, food between their teeth, if they have bad credit, if they have no credit, missed a spot shaving, in other words any dysfunctional defective slob that you can somehow cattle prod onto a wagon, send them over, we want ‘em.’ “
