Now — before you get the wrong idea — let me note that the bleakness of Seinfeld was not the lone explanation for the program’s success. There were many, many other factors. One was the unadulterated weirdness of so many of its subplots (Kramer’s desire to cover his body in butter, the enigmatic involvement of Keith Hernandez, et cetera). Another was the accidental profundity of its absurdity (most notably, George’s realization that his life would be more successful if he simply did the opposite of whatever his natural instinct suggested). Still another was its conversational singularity (if I’m flipping through channels and catch just five seconds of dialogue from any Seinfeld scene, I can inevitably recall everything else about the entire episode, almost instantaneously). Because it was filmed like a play and did not emphasize realism, it ages better than any comparable three-camera sitcom; because its narratives were so often built around absurd problems that symbolized basic problems, the ideas continue to feel more relevant than logic would dictate. It was an unusually adult TV comedy, produced in an era when that was still rare. But the darkness did matter. It played a massive role. By the end of the show’s tenure, it was so self-consciously dark that it started to resemble shtick; if interpreted as satire, the final season (and especially its finale) was too obvious and much less effective. But that does not negate all the previous antihumanism that was slipped into conversations and congenially consumed as playful.
This is a compliment.
Take “The Raincoats” from season five, a two-part episode that primarily revolves around the doomed possibility of Kramer going into the vintage-clothing business with Jerry’s father (who was visiting from Florida). A secondary plot involved Elaine dating a character played by Judge Reinhold. Initially, Reinhold’s alleged flaw is that he is a “close talker,” who invades people’s personal space during conversation. However, this pales in comparison to his greater transgression: He becomes obsessed with spending time with Jerry’s visiting parents. He takes them all over Manhattan, invites them to dinner, and loves their company.
“Don’t you think it’s odd,” Elaine asks Jerry over coffee, “that a thirty-five-year-old man is going to these lengths to see that someone else’s parents are having a good time? And I can’t even say anything, because he’s just being nice. But no one’s this nice. This is certifiably nice.”
“You’re right,” responds Jerry. “He’s insane.”
Now, do I agree with those sentiments? Yes. I do. I would absolutely think a person who wants to spend all his free time with the parents of his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend should be classified as insane. I assume most rational people would feel the same way. But here’s the thing: Every single aspect of this episode is insane. The whole idea of Kramer going into business with Jerry’s dad is insane. Another “Raincoats” subplot requires George to take a little boy he barely knows to France; still another examines the ethics of making out while watching Schindler’s List. Every element of “The Raincoats” is nuts. But only Reinhold’s insane niceness is a problem. It’s the only thing that prompts Jerry and Elaine to have a straightforward conversation about how such behavior is unacceptable. It’s the one action they can’t accept. The idea of someone being nice for no reason is enough to make Judge Reinhold “undatable,” which places him in the same category (according to Jerry) as 95 percent of the planet. In another episode, Jerry specifically breaks up with a woman because she’s “too good.” Here, again, he says this directly: “She’s giving and caring and genuinely concerned about the welfare of others. I can’t be with someone like that.” Because he’s so candid about this distaste, it feels like a traditional joke. But it’s not a traditional joke. It’s an omnipresent worldview that informs everything else, and it’s what made audiences feel like they were watching the most sinister (and the most authentic) versions of themselves.
The acridness of Seinfeld was never hidden. It was certainly not something no one else realized, even as it was happening. “Meanness is celebrated,” wrote Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Examiner in the run-up to Seinfeld’s 1998 finale. “Nobody is living an examined life. Getting yours is the goal. Anger and bitterness supplant happiness. Emotionless sex wins out over love, and the mundane is king.” There were periodic complaints about the show throughout its existence, always for this approximate reason (it made fun of the disabled, it played the death of a minor character for laughs, it made casual racism hilarious, et al). I’m not breaking new ground here. But I’ve noticed something peculiar in the years that have passed since it went into syndication. I’ve noticed that the living memory of Seinfeld has changed. It’s now consumed like a conventional situation comedy; the emphasis has shifted toward the memorable catchphrases it spawned and the low-stakes comfort of its nonserialized storytelling. It’s become more akin to I Love Lucy or Night Court: an amusing distraction from a bygone age. But that perception underrates its significance. It feels weird to classify one of the most popular TV shows of all time as “underrated,” but the program’s raw popularity latently misdirected its more significant directive. Seinfeld mainstreamed day-to-day villainy. It made America a different place. A meaner, funnier place.
I love the show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, mostly because it’s a straight-up hybrid of Seinfeld and Cheers (vulcanized by PEDs and the Internet). The humor on It’s Always Sunny is — technically — crueler than anything Jerry or George would have ever said to anyone. Its antagonism is less nuanced. But there’s another key difference that matters way more: Everyone involved with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is hyper-conscious of the cruelty (including the audience). None of the characters talk like real people; we always know they’re supposed to be understood as sociopaths. You need to know they’re crazy in order to appreciate what they do. And that’s not how it was on Seinfeld. On Seinfeld, the psychopathy felt normal — almost boring. The people just talked like people. They sat in a coffee shop and casually discussed how civilization was awful and existence is meaningless, and twenty-two million people watched it every week. It opened a window while pulling down the shades, and we can’t go back. This is the world now. This is the world.
“I AM PERPLEXED” [THIS IS WHY, THIS IS WHY, THIS IS WHY THEY HATE YOU]
It was a good question that seemed like a bad question: An unsmiling nineteen-year-old man asked me why he hated Fred Durst. He did not ask me if I hated Fred Durst; he asked me why he hated Fred Durst. I said, “Isn’t that a question I should be asking you?” He said, “No, I want you to tell me.” I asked if this was supposed to be a guessing game. He said, “No, I don’t know the answer. Tell me the answer.”
I said, “Well, you probably hate the music of Limp Bizkit [Durst’s despised, platinum-selling rap-rock band], so you unconsciously direct that vitriol at the person singing the lyrics.”
“No,” he replied. “The music is okay. I don’t listen to it, but it’s not terrible. That song ‘Break Stuff’ is funny. But I still hate Fred Durst. Explain this to me. Explain why I hate him.”
I started telling a story about something that happened when I worked at Spin magazine in 2004: The art department had received a paparazzi photo of Durst, taken at the premiere of the Tarantino film Kill Bill: Volume 2. Durst was wearing a T-shirt promoting the Smiths, the defunct British pop band fronted by Morrissey and defined by their fey, alienated aesthetic. Everyone in the office immediately made the same joke. “Oh, look — Fred Durst wants to go back to high school so he can kick his own ass.” Maybe this is the reason, I argued. Maybe it’s the fact that Durst seems insincere about both the menacing persona he projects in Limp Bizkit and the thoughtful artistic persona he projects as a celebrity.
“No, not really,” said the nineteen-year-old. “I mean, aren’t the Smiths supposed to be good? Why would that make me hate him? Shouldn’t that make me like him?”
He had a point (and I still did not). I attempted to make a more academic argument about how the Limp Bizkit song “Nookie” was misogynist for suggesting th
at the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend should inject a cookie into her vagina (or maybe that she should somehow fold her vagina into her rectum — the specific lyrics have never been clear). However, I quit halfway through my lecture. Even as I was talking, I could instantly imagine how this kid would respond. He’d probably say, “But Biggie Smalls has a song about kidnapping the teenage daughter of a federal prosecutor and tying her up in a Brooklyn basement, and everybody still loves him. The Rolling Stones song ‘Under My Thumb’ is so sexist that Rush Limbaugh was fired from his college radio job for playing it too much, and they’re the most popular band in the history of the world. James Taylor seems like the worst husband of the seventies. James Brown literally punched women in the face. How is Fred Durst worse for wearing a backwards baseball cap and singing about cookies and birth canals?”
I gave up.
“I don’t know,” I slowly concluded. “Maybe you don’t actually hate him. Maybe you just think you do. Maybe you secretly love him, and that’s the thing that bothers you.”
“No,” he said. “I hate Fred Durst. That’s the one thing I know for sure.”
“But how can you be certain?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was crazy, and then he walked away.
They Hate You Because You Hate Yourself. In 2002, the Friars Club of New York City sponsored a roast for Chevy Chase. It was subsequently aired on Comedy Central, but only once — the participants were so cruel that it didn’t feel funny. Making matters worse was a general lack of participation from the many major stars Chase worked with throughout his career, thereby suggesting that people hate Chevy Chase so much they wouldn’t even show up to ridicule him. The book Live From New York, a comprehensive oral history of Saturday Night Live, is littered with people taking direct and veiled shots at Chase, most memorably through a description of a fistfight between Chevy and Bill Murray that concluded with Murray spitting the epithet, “Medium talent.” This remains the greatest possible insult you can throw at any creative person: It suggests that the individual is both overrated and underachieving at the same time.
Chase’s confrontation with Murray happened backstage at SNL in 1978, long before the public knew much about who these people really were; as such, the first wave of Chevy Haters were more exasperated by his personality than his perception. The conventional wisdom is that the early SNL performers disliked Chase because of a) their jealousy and b) his arrogance and sexism. When he returned to guest-host the program in 1985, he was described by cast members as a “monster” who wanted to do material considerably darker than the show’s traditionally unadventurous counterculture posturing (for example, he wanted to do a skit about AIDS). Chase remains a problematic genius that other problematic geniuses despise (most notably Community creator Dan Harmon, who worked with him for three seasons before publicly declaring him an asshole). He’s possibly just a standard jerk, unless every single person in Hollywood is lying. But there’s something deeper here; there’s something about Chevy Chase’s view of himself that makes him villainous to people who will never meet him and have no reason to feel anything personal: He is a man who consciously risks nothing, seemingly as punishment for whatever it is he believes he is not.
Virtually all funny people have a subterranean desire to be taken seriously. Nobody can explain why this happens, but funny people understand it intuitively. This is true for all of Chevy’s peers: His nemesis Murray pursued that goal once as a young man (1984’s The Razor’s Edge) and compulsively as an older one (2005’s Broken Flowers, 2009’s Get Low, 2012’s Hyde Park on the Hudson). At the height of his comedic powers, Steve Martin starred in the 1981 musical Pennies from Heaven. Dan Aykroyd was in Driving Miss Daisy. John Belushi made Continental Divide and played it straight. Tom Hanks got serious with Philadelphia and eventually dominated the seriousness field. Jim Carrey is still trying. Robin Williams spent half his life making this transition, eventually winning an Oscar for Good Will Hunting; Eddie Murphy made his attempt with Dreamgirls but only got the Golden Globe. It’s something all mainstream comedians inevitably attempt — but not Chevy Chase. He has never taken a serious role (supposedly, the closest he ever came was turning down Richard Gere’s role in American Gigolo). What makes this especially strange is how natural Chase would have been as a leading man: Of all the seventies comedians, he was the most classically handsome and the least emotively manic. He could have killed any role that required understatement; deadpan is his default setting. But this did not intrigue him. For the most part, he never tries to act at all. He just plays himself as a golfer (or as a detective, or as a bad father, or as an invisible man, or as whatever). When described as a professional worldview, that artistic choice seems admirable: It sounds less fake, less needy, and more self-aware. But that’s not how it comes across. It’s important not to take oneself too seriously, but Chevy refused to take himself seriously at all. It was as if he saw his own career as too ridiculous to care about. And something about that attitude slowly insults people. They feel as if the performer is mocking their support for his art, which even the performer views as meaningless. The fear with Chevy Chase is that every role is just another manifestation of “the Real Chevy” — that all these identical characters reflect the person he truly is, and that all his alleged arrogance is the product of believing he’s the only person smart enough to recognize how everything is a clumsy joke, including love and death and unedited emotion. He’s the only person smart enough not to care about anything. That’s what he means when he says, “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” It’s not something he’s happy about.
I see all of Chevy’s worst qualities in myself. But none of his good ones.
They hate you because you always need to be right. And ultimately, Howard Cosell was (not always in the specific, but usually in the abstract). Since his death in 1995, Cosell’s reputation as a broadcaster has exponentially increased; he is now regarded almost as highly as he incessantly insisted he deserved. If you list the titans of sports media, he’s always in the top five and often number one, depending on the degree to which you see “polarization” as an indication of import. But even that designation is imperfect, since “polarization” suggests there were two equal, diametrically opposed views of Howard Cosell. This is not really how it was: He was hated with uniformity. During the apex of his reign, troglodytes would go to bars and drunkenly throw bricks at TV sets during Monday Night Football telecasts (a company later manufactured Styrofoam bricks so that people could do this at home without damaging the family Sylvania). Dumb people hated Cosell for talking like the lawyer that he was, but smart people hated him, too. They hated him for being shallow and self-absorbed. Historian David Halberstam called him “the classic modern telecelebrity,” which — considering the source — was far more insulting than it might appear on the surface.
The entire spectrum of these insults bothered Cosell. He saw all criticisms as equal. All his professional colleagues have at least one story of Cosell hopelessly railing against some random snipe from a fifth-tier newspaper columnist living in a town he’d never deign to visit — had Howard lived in the age of Google Alert, he might have stroked out before turning fifty. But not all of those snipes were minor: People threatened to bomb stadiums where he was scheduled to announce meaningless football games. It would have been easy to feel sympathy for him were it not for his strident inability to fake humility: “There’s one thing about this business [of broadcasting],” he said in 1967. “There is no place in it for talent. That’s why I don’t belong. I lack sufficient mediocrity.”
Because the Internet cannot disappear, there will always be a searchable archive for the gallons of haterade dumped upon twenty-first century sportscasters: Jay Mariotti, Skip Bayless, Joe Morgan, Chris Berman. Their eviscerations are constant and crude. Yet the composite distaste for all those figures is just a fraction of the pathological, unpublished hate directed at Cosell throughout the 1970s. The proof of that math will fade over t
ime, simply because the main detritus will end up being the nice things about his life: his cameo in Woody Allen’s Bananas, his political support for Muhammad Ali, and the singularity of his nasal delivery (“Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!”). In this way, Howard prevailed; it’s hard to imagine people who still hate Cosell today or what their motive would be. And this is too bad. It’s too bad because that hatred was the most important thing about him. It made him important. He was, for more than a decade, the conduit through which working-class American males wrestled with the concept of anti-intellectualism. He was the single best argument for and against that particular mind-set. Everything he said had multiple meanings, most of which had nothing to do with sport. He usually mattered more than the subjects he covered. I remember watching a Monday Night Football game with my elderly uncle, who casually referred to Cosell as “a New York Jew.” The revelation blew my mind. “How does my uncle know that Howard Cosell is Jewish?” my nine-year-old self wondered silently. “Does he talk about his religious views at halftime?” In 1982, Cosell covered a brutal heavyweight boxing match between Larry Holmes and Randall “Tex” Cobb; for fifteen rounds, Holmes pummeled the outclassed Cobb so relentlessly that Cosell vowed to never announce another fight. It was an ethical decision based on justifiable criteria, but it made him look buffoonish to the common man: The still-healing Cobb quipped that he’d let Holmes punch him in the face for another fifteen rounds if Howard promised to quit covering football, too.
It never mattered if Cosell was lecturing on a subject he understood deeply (such as Ali’s constitutional rights as a pacifist) or something he did not understand at all (like the strategic nuances of baseball). His reasoning was always circular: “What I’m saying is true because I am the person saying it.” Of course, Cosell would have never expressed anything that clearly: “The veracity of my pellucid acumen is validated not by the words alone, but by the indomitable vanguard who uttered them at their inception.” This was his thing, as much as anything else — the obfuscation of language (which, I suppose, I am equally guilty of, particularly when I use words like obfuscation). But that habit meant something profound when placed in the context of a football game or a boxing match. If you hated Cosell, it seemed like he was trying to complicate something visceral in order to compensate for his own weakness; if you were charmed by Cosell, you still got the sense he was condescending to his subject in order to showcase his obvious superiority. Nobody thought Howard Cosell was only okay. The very smart believed he was fake smart; the semi-smart thought he was too smart for his own good; the not-so-smart assumed he was an idiot (and sometimes they were right, which is why all of those opinions mattered to Howard equally).