The critic Leslie Fiedler once wrote that among Jews words have “the impact of actions, not merely overheard but felt, like kisses or blows.”
Meat loaf is good”), the forehead-slapping lamentations are all Jewish in their idioms. The sparring rhythms of the talk, the sudden excitations sliding into shrugging acceptance (“Meat loaf, then. . . . Indeed, save for Richards’ lurching Frankenstein-monster entrances and Louis-Dreyfus’s “gotcha!” flashes of glee, “Seinfeld” is a show that could play in a dark room without much being missed. Week after week, the show displays an amazing verbal agility. “The Puffy Shirt,” the dashing white blouse Jerry wore for his interview with Bryant Gumbel, only to have everyone make pirate jokes at his expense. Elaine’s nickname, Nip, earned when she exposed a nipple in her Christmas-card photo. “Mulva.” “Master of Your Domain,” said of anyone who refrains from masturbation.
Jerry seinfeld quote master of my domain code#
To be a “Seinfeld” fan is to have command of its pet code words. What has made the show a cult hit for literate viewers is its knack of creating instant catchphrases. In one episode, he couldn’t remember his date’s name, only that it rhymed with a part of the female anatomy. Just as he’s about to reach the land of milk and honey-whoops! An ill-chosen remark about panties or padded bras sends the woman fuming out the door.
For Seinfeld himself, faulty communications lead inevitably to coitus interruptus. The show plugs into the feeling-out process of singles on the dating scene, the constant vamping toward the C-word-commitment. Career and romance are the two lazy hands of their clock. The brisk pace provides an ironic counterpoint to the lives of Jerry and his pals, Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), George (Jason Alexander), and Kramer (Michael Richards), whose bachelor(ette) status affords them vast quantities of unstructured time. Channel-surfing is almost redundant, the scenes click by so fast. Instead of having a single story line, “Seinfeld” is built with small blocks of oddball incidents which eventually interlock.
It does boast an ingenious modular design. His series, co-created by Larry David, prides itself on being about “nothing.” Zero concept, zero content. As in: “D’ja ever notice how one sock droops before the other one does? Why is that?” Here is a man who could do ten minutes on lint. Seinfeld has always been one of those sedate, drip-dry doodlers, the type known in the trade as an “observational” comic-a D’ja-ever-notice? guy. Unlike such Jewish bad-boy bathroom-graffiti artists as Lenny Bruce, Andrew “Dice” Clay, and Howard Stern, he doesn’t hurl hot gobs of shock material at the audience. Seinfeld himself is a walking diagram of minor quirks. “Right now cute Jewish is ‘in,’ ” Tom Snyder commented one night on his CNBC talk show, to explain the popularity of “Seinfeld.” The NBC sitcom, which stars the standup comedian Jerry Seinfeld, does make little cricket noises.
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