Modified On November 30, 2007
Grab your towel and swim in this pool of bile— It’s a ridiculous, delusional screed penned by Ron Rosenbaum for Slate.com. (It’s dated November 2, but we didn’t get around to reading it until yesterday.)
Rosenbaum bubbled over with white-hot rage as the “publicity-industrial complex began gearing up to force-feed us Jerry Seinfeld‘s sickeningly sweet ‘Bee Movie’.” So he used the occasion to rant against Jerry Seinfeld– while promoting the “corruscatingly obscene, vicious, bitter, self-loathing, world-hating Rick Shapiro” as the anti-Jerry.
The first 242 words of the article set up “A Tale Of Two Cities” as the theme. It’s a jumping-off point, an armature, a skeleton for his comparison of Seinfeld and his “brilliant, twisted, evil twin” Shapiro.
The rest follows perfectly the alt/indy template for pop culture criticism: Ours is great, so yours must suck.
Rosenbaum succumbs to that most piteous and hideous tendency: Denigrate before you elevate!
I was thinking about the two Dickens characters as I was preparing to see Jerry Seinfeld’s massively hyped new animated film, Bee Movie, and comparing my loathing for everything Seinfeldian—Seinfeld the show, Seinfeld the world’s worst stand-up comic, Seinfeldian “observational humor” in general, the Seinfeldian blanding-out of American comedy and culture, even the ridiculous Seinfeld Porsche collection—with the experience of seeing a far, far better comedian a few weeks ago.
A far, far lesser-known comic, the corruscatingly obscene, vicious, bitter, self-loathing, world-hating Rick Shapiro. While Seinfeld spends his billions buying up Porsches and producing insipid children’s movies that are childish rather than childlike (more on Bee Movie anon), Rick Shapiro was killing (as they say) in a half-filled comedy club called the Cutting Room in Manhattan before heading off to a prestigious series of gigs in, yes, Alaska. Frozen out of the big-money, big-time, big-name recognition game.
Even Rosenbaum admits he has made a mini-career out of hating Seinfeld. But the intensity is embarrassing. As is the mangling of facts and history.
After weepily recalling the Steve Martin/New Yorker memoir, which talked about “the birth of a new, original kind of American comedy that he (Martin) and few others were exploring in the ’60s and ’70s,” Rosenbaum spits out the following:
But suddenly almost all that died, and I blame Seinfeld and the so-called “sweater comics” he inspired for killing it off with their smirking frat-boy blandness. Their idiot “observational humor” made a religion out of self-congratulation. Most of the Seinfeld show’s humor was about making fun of anyone who was in any way “different”-— immigrants, people with any kind of accent, any kind of idiosyncrasy, any kind of deviation from the Charles Darnay mold.
All that died suddenly? He blames Seinfeld? “Sweater comics?” “Idiot observational humor?”
Let’s set aside the fact that he’s totally confusing Jerry The Comedian with Jerry The Show. This guy is not up to speed on the facts of Standup Comedy in the Modern Era.
In the world of Ron Rosenbaum, “sweater comics” obliterate all others. It’s a zero-sum game. Comics with “smirking frat-boy blandness” cancel out hip, cool alt comics. In a world where idiot observational humor succeeds, there can’t possibly exist anyone who looks at the world with a skewed view. No! It’s simply not possible! Rosenbaum lives in a world that is calculated to make him miserable. There’s just one problem– he’s dead wrong.
Take a look at the opening of an article by Mark de la Vina in yesterday’s San Jose Merc News, entitled “The Yin and Yang of Comedy in the Bay Area:
Talk about your comedy extremes.
Over the next few days, fans can sample the full range of the comic spectrum, from the stand-up-as-indie-rock flavor of the Comedians of Comedy to the arena-rock vibe of Dane Cook.
On Wednesday, Cook plays HP Pavilion in San Jose– please read our coverage of the comedian in Friday’s Mercury News– with an “in the round” set-up that’s more like a prog-rock extravaganza than a comedy-club show. But the show I’m excited about is the Comedians of Comedy at the Independent in San Francisco on Friday.
de la Vina doesn’t like all kinds of comedy, but he acknowledges that some folks like this kind while others like that kind. And he is happy to live in a world– in a market– that accomodates all kinds. And he is more than happy to wax enthusiastic about his preferred humorists, while telling others, who may not be of the same mind, about theirs.
Sweater comics didn’t ruin the comedy world. Market forces did. To be sure, some “daring innovators with a jaundiced eye and an unerring ability to speak truth to power!” had to go back to pumping gas or selling insurance back in 1994, but so did a bunch of the so-called “sweater comics” that keep Rosenbaum up at night. Comedy life sucked for almost everybody, Ron!
And Jerry Seinfeld may have served as a role model for a cohort of comics with “frat-boy blandness,” but, at the same time, Steven Wright, Andy Kaufmann, Judy Tenuta and Emo Phillips were doing quite well, thank you very much. And they, in turn, inspired an entirely new generation of comedians who… are apparently coming to the Bay Area this weekend.
It’s a big, diverse comedy tapestry out there. Rosenbaum sees nothing but blandness and injustice. He seems fixated on hype. His indignation at hype seems more suited to a 14-year-old. Why get so worked up about something so benign as hype? Dude! Turn the channel when Extra! comes on! Perhaps he thinks that the Seinfelds of the world benefit unfairly from hyperbole used in the service of entertainment publicity. (And, conversely, that his favorites dwell in obscurity merely because they enjoy no such advantage.) Oh, the injustice! (Perhaps Rosenbaum should save his hatred up not for Seinfeld, but for P.T. Barnum!)
Don’t get us wrong. We’ve got no problem with Shapiro. It’s Rosenbaum, and his cringeworthy, over-the-top (and totally misplaced) hatred for Seinfeld that’s got our attention.
But even Rosenbaum can’t say something nice about Shapiro without going and ruining the mood– he winds up the essay with this sentiment:
That’s the great thing about Rick Shapiro. He’ll never be a billionaire, he’ll always be Sydney Carton, whose fame is only posthumous…
We can’t help but feel that Rosenbaum is not so subtly rooting for Shapiro’s demise. The untimely death would make for a better story, no doubt, and he could blame the passing on Seinfeld. Why not? He blames everything else on Seinfeld.
(Thanks to sharp-eyed reader Vince Martin for sending along the link. And Ron Rosenbaum’s other far more reasoned writing can be found here.)