Seinfeld's Next Move - a Movie?

Sitcom king takes a chance at the big screen - Thanks for the laughs, Jerry!

No single person has been responsible for more laughter in our household than Jerry Seinfeld. One of the best Christmas presents I bought for John was the Seinfeld Box Set (shaped like a refrigerator). We've seen him three times, most memorably at Ruby Diamond as a Christmas surprise. Will his new movie work??? (IT DOES!!)

SEINFELD’S NEXT MOVE

They were sitting in their Buick Riviera on the Las Vegas strip when memory spoke. “1977,” veteran comedian George Wallace said. “And we went to see Bob Newhart.” “That’s right,” the driver of the car, Jerry Seinfeld, said, recalling their visit 37 years earlier.

“He told that joke about the two Polish airplane pilots,” Seinfeld continued. “And he closed the show with it. It was two Polish airplane pilots and they were bringing the plane in for a landing. The plane hit the runway, they didn’t have enough room to stop, they smashed through the lights and one pilot said, ‘Man, that was a short runway.”

“And the copilot said,” Wallace adds. “But it was wide, though, wasn’t it?” Seinfeld says, bringing the punchline in for a perfect landing. Then both repeat it and laugh. “It was wide though, wasn’t it?”

On hearing the two of them share Newhart’s show-closing joke about the Polish pilot’s confusing the vertical with the horizontal on “Comedians In Cars Drinking Coffee” brought instantaneous laughs from my son and I. My wife, however, looked puzzled. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

I am Polish but it didn’t even occur to me to be offended by the line. Would Newhart or Seinfeld tell that joke now in this overly sensitive climate? Does the joke work if you take the “Polish” out of it?

We are in a weird place in American humor. On the one hand, it seems that any and everything anybody says is under extreme scrutiny. Well, maybe not the Defendant. But most of the rest of us are on guard.

On the other hand, we have Larry David’s wildly successful “Curb Your Enthusiasm” which recently concluded it’s lengthy watch-me-upset-the-apple-cart run on HBO. Offending the viewers seemed to be the goal, whether it was profanity by the truckload, particularly off the censor-defying saucy tongue of Susie Essman or jokes and pranks about race, sex, social graces (or the lack of them), David would find something about the world or the people in it that irritated him and he would concoct a plot to throw it in the viewer’s face, laughing all the way. He took unlikability to such an extreme, you ended up loving him for it.

Is that where we are now? With social media providing an outlet for anybody to say anything about anybody for any reason, with TV stations now having to decide whether or not there’s enough truth in what someone is saying in order to air it – that actually happened, in case you forgot, at the end of the Defendant’s term - what’s going on?

David, of course, was also a key player for almost all of the remarkable nine-season run of “Seinfeld,” the incredible sitcom that, unlike just about every other TV comedy, refuses to die. It is always on TV. David, who co-wrote the series with Seinfeld, found a way to create a series that defied all previous sitcom logic with the motto they agreed on: “No hugging, no learning.”

With superb writing, an extraordinarily complex story-telling style, finding a way to tell four intertwining stories in 22 minutes, “Seinfeld” not only won all sorts of Emmy Awards, it changed the game. Though they haven’t aired a new episode since May 14, 1998, you just about can’t find a day that it isn’t on somewhere. Just checking on my Direct TV menu today, there are four episodes in a row from 4-to-6 on the Comedy Channel, from 5-to-8:30 on Comedy Channel 1. It also shows on TV Land and TBS and the entire series is available on Netflix. Remember: All these shows are 25-30 years old! What staying power! What residuals!

Unlike “Curb” there was no profanity on “Seinfeld” but plenty of complaining, whining, objecting, betrayals, no happy endings, a world that seemed unjust – except for Jerry, who always seemed to break even. (They even wrote an entire episode about that!)

Now we’ll see if that Seinfeldian formula will work on the big screen. Seinfeld has made his own movie, which debuts on Netflix on May 3. “Unfrosted,” a cartoony look at the great battle of Battle Creek, Michigan, the breakfast capitol of the world, between Kellogg’s and Post over the invention of Pop-Tarts, an item Seinfeld had milked for years – pardon the breakfast pun – in his standup act.

Other than a voiceover in the middling success “Bee Movie,” this is Seinfeld’s first attempt at an actual movie. Having solved the sitcom format with “Seinfeld” as well as offering a few terrific Netflix shows and the fun series “Comedians in Cars,” branching out into a movie will be interesting for him – and us.

Will his clean, playful, ironic style work in a movie format? Can you satirize something like a Pop-Tart, mocking America’s great 1960’s need for exploration and innovation with a new breakfast treat? Will people want to watch a movie without superheroes or robots or time-travel or talking animals or somebody shooting somebody or the end of the world or even a country?

What will it take to make America laugh? For a long time, Jerry Seinfeld seemed to have the inside track on that. But what about now? Can we all put our grievances and differences in this nasty political climate aside and just laugh for an hour or so?

I, for one, will be watching to see how he lands this plane.