I was never a big fan of Seinfeld. Like Cheers before and Friends after, it was a popular but ultimately dull sitcom. It was no more a revolutionary show than Law & Order is/was. Both may be the best expressions of their respective shitty genres, but that doesn’t change the fact that the kind of television they represent is inherently shitty. These days whenever someone says “yada yada yada” the first thing that springs to most people’s minds is Seinfeld. The reason for that is that Seinfeld – at the height of its popularity – based an entire episode (titled…
Tag: Seinfeld
And It’s Not Even Close
Apparently Jerry Seinfeld is coming to Ottawa. This prompted a columnist in The Ottawa Citizen to praise Seinfeld and his show for being second only to Shakespeare in terms of adding “catchphrases” to the language. That’s all well and good, but this paragraph cannot go unremarked upon: Most catchphrases are pure confection and essentially hollow: think of the greatest hits of Seinfeld’s closest competitor in numbers, The Simpsons: “D’oh!” or “don’t have a cow” or “eat my shorts” are memorable, but they don’t really say anything that we didn’t already know how to say ourselves, though perhaps not so memorably.…