![]() ![]() In later seasons, these standup clips became less frequent. By this device the distinction between the actor Jerry Seinfeld and the character who is portrayed by him is deliberately blurred. In fact, many characters were not employed at all.Īccording to Bruce Fretts' 1993 The "Entertainment Weekly" "Seinfeld" Companion, Seinfeld’s audience was, "TV-literate, demographically desirable urbanites, for the most part-who look forward to each weekly episode in the Life of Jerry with a baby-boomer generation's self-involved eagerness." Likewise, in episodes adhering to the original concept, the show featured clips of Seinfeld himself delivering a standup routine at the beginning and end of each episode, the theme of which relates to the events depicted in the plot. Previous shows on television were almost always family or co-worker driven, but Seinfeld holds itself up as being a then-rare example of a sitcom wherein none of the characters were related by blood or employed in the same building or business. The show's creators made a conscious effort to reflect the activities of real people, rather than the idealized escapist characters often seen on television, although many of the show's plots involve intricate, and often cyclical strings of events that converge in the end to form a grand irony. However, themes of illogical social graces and customs, neurotic and obsessive behavior, and the mysterious workings of relationships ran in numerous episodes, making it possible to categorize the show as a comedy of manners. In contrast to many other sitcoms, the allowing of scenes to lapse into sentimentality was generally avoided, and Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David's dictum of "no hugging, no learning" gave the show its distinctively cold and cynical tone. ![]() However, it should be noted that a common motif concerns characters' attempts to do nice things for people, only to have them backfire exponentially. The characters have also been described as utterly selfish and amoral the show stood out by depicting these traits in a comedic fashion. Seinfeld himself notes that his original premise - and the purpose for the standup excerpts that bookended each show - was that the show would be about how a comedian gathers material for his act. The show has been famously described as "the show about nothing" (a self-referential phrase from an episode describing Jerry and George's attempt to create a sitcom idea), as most of the comedy was based around the largely inconsequential minutiae of every-day life, and often involved petty rivalries and elaborate schemes to gain the smallest advantage over other individuals. ![]()
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