In his ongoing rally against the culture of political correctness, Jerry Seinfeld says that there is plenty of material on his namesake show that couldn’t get made today – and he’s not talking about the Soup Nazi.
As far as moments that Seinfeld doesn’t think could make the show had it been made in today’s climate, he said, “We did an episode of the series in the nineties where Kramer decides to start a business of having homeless people pull rickshaws because, as he says, ‘They’re outside anyway.’ Do you think I could get that episode on the air today?” He added that things would have to be far more PC, referring to season nine’s “The Bookstore.” “We would write a different joke with Kramer and the rickshaw today. We wouldn’t do that joke. We’d come up with another joke.” Seinfeld could have listed a wealth of other episodes, but two have garnered more controversy than any other: season nine’s “The Puerto Rican Day”, which was pulled from syndication initially for remarks and depictions, and “The Bet” aka “The Gun”, which was deemed too dark to even film.
As for Seinfeld’s spiritual successor Curb Your Enthusiasm – which had plenty of non-PC moments during its 12-season run – Jerry Seinfeld said that Larry David was essentially “grandfathered” in. “If Larry was thirty-five, he couldn’t get away with the watermelon stuff and Palestinian chicken…and HBO knows that’s what people come here for, but they’re not smart enough to figure out, How do we do this now? Do we take the heat, or just not be funny? And what they’ve decided to be is, Well, we’re not going to do comedies anymore. There were no sitcoms picked up on the fall season of all four networks. Not one. No new sitcoms.”
If network execs aren’t keen on boasting more sitcoms, then who can be the ones to champion challenging comedy? Not surprisingly, Seinfeld has bestowed that role to stand-up comedians, saying, “With certain comedians now, people are having fun with them stepping over the line and us all laughing about it. But, again, it’s the standups that really have the freedom to do it because no one else gets the blame if it doesn’t go down well. He or she can take all the blame themself”, as opposed to a stream of producers and suits who could be in trouble for one passed offensive joke.
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What’s Not Allowed