What’s The Deal With Jerry Seinfeld Claiming The ‘Extreme Left,’ 'P.C. Crap’ Killed Sitcoms?

This old trope again.

Life is going well for Jerry Seinfeld. He has a new movie coming out on Netflix, Unfrosted, which is receiving a lot of attention. He just turned 70 on Monday, and his Unfrosted co-star Sarah Cooper still thinks he “could get it.” Nonetheless, he’s not in the best mood.

No, sorry, that’s the wrong clip. He was less upbeat when discussing the state of television sitcoms today in an interview with The New Yorker (watch below).

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“Nothing really affects comedy. People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it,” Seinfeld said. “It used to be, you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M*A*S*H is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All In The Family is on.’ You just expected, ‘There’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight.’ Well, guess what — where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

There’s a lot here that’s just not true. Network sitcoms don’t bring in the ratings they did during the 1970s and 1980s because there are multiple streaming services, the Internet, and video games. Happy Days never had to compete with porn on a laptop.

Television has always been a business and there’s never been a period when networks weren’t concerned about offending audiences. When All In The Family first aired, CBS executives manned the switchboards with extra operators standing by to address viewer reactions and complaints. There weren’t many at first, but as the ratings increased, so did the backlash. Teachers tried to figure out how to teach their students about bigotry, which would get them fired in a Republican-run state today.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show was originally intended to feature a divorced Mary Richards, but network censors balked and some at the network even feared audiences would think Laura Petrie had bailed on Rob.

Offending people isn’t the same as entertaining them, and if your job is to entertain, then yes, you would worry about offending other people. Sure, there was a time when audiences could collectively point and laugh at people who were powerless to speak up, but now those marginalized groups are an active part of the audience. Sorry, but you have to entertain more than just white heterosexual men, who once exclusively determined what was funny. The Internet has democratized critical commentary, and that infuriates certain performers who benefitted from the more exclusive system.

The ‘extreme left’ is code for women and other marginalized groups

It wasn’t the “extreme left” or “P.C. crap” that controlled what was broadcast during Seinfeld’s youth and the peak of his career. That was right-wing censors, who demanded that mainstream entertainment adhered to their own personal sensibilities.

A 1989 Los Angeles Times article noted that the “conservative tide that washed [Ronald] Reagan into the presidency precipitated a still-growing trend toward government and societal pressure on freedom of speech and expression.”

What seems to have set off comedians of a certain age and cultural demographic is that women (specifically feminists) and other minorities are daring to criticize content they don’t enjoy. That’s why we often hear that a beloved TV show from the past couldn’t air today because of “woke” backlash: Fox’s In Living Color wouldn’t last because people would complain about the “Men on … Film” sketches, but the issue was more that two heterosexual men were mocking queer culture. Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang could do a hilarious variation of that concept with no issue. I personally don’t get the arguments that Fox’s Married … with Children couldn’t endure today’s “woke” scrutiny. The show is pretty tame in context (and TBS used to air reruns in the 7 a.m. hour before school started). Maybe certain jokes wouldn’t land well now, but in 2024, Kelly Bundy could probably date a Black guy (or girl) without the episode being yanked.

Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy and American Dad! have both run for decades and have pushed every conceivable boundary. Neither could’ve existed in the 1970s or 1980s. NBC’s The Good Place featured interracial relationships and lampooned the entire concept of an afterlife, which once would’ve been extremely controversial. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Seinfeld co-creator Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm are sitcoms that thrived in the supposed “woke” age. Abbott Elementary has achieved mainstream success on a major network and unlike Seinfeld, it hit the ground running.

Seinfeld’s classic sitcom examples are all 40 to 50 years old. It’s like someone watching Seinfeld in 1992 and comparing it to The Bob Cummings Show and I Married Joan. Bob Hope was in his 70s when Saturday Night Live premiered, and it’s unlikely that Lorne Michaels ever considered him as a potential host. His comedy wasn’t sufficiently hip for the “not ready for primetime players.” (Milton Berle did host a 1979 episode of SNL when he was 70, and it was a disaster.) Arguably, the supposed “woke” audiences today are far more receptive of performers from previous generations. Steve Martin and Martin Short are brilliant alongside Selena Gomez in Hulu’s Only Murders In The Building.

“But when you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups— ‘Here’s our thought about this joke.’ Well, that’s the end of your comedy,” Seinfeld said. The great Ken Levine, who wrote for Cheers, has raised the same issue about the prevalence of network notes on modern sitcoms. However, those executives don’t represent the “extreme left,” nor do they have any ideological commitment to “P.C. crap.” They want to please advertisers and maintain an audience that is steadily dwindling.

“We did an episode of the [Seinfeld] in the nineties where Kramer decides to start a business of having homeless people pull rickshaws because, as he says, ‘They’re outside anyway,’” Seinfeld said. “Do you think I could get that episode on the air today?”

This is almost always the wrong question. Comedy is ideally fresh, not packed with chemical preservatives to keep it shelf stable for decades. Maybe a joke was funny 25 years ago, and maybe it’s no longer funny right now. That’s not actually a failure of the original writers. You can’t (and perhaps shouldn’t) aim for posterity. It’s definitely not a failure of today’s audience, as far too many comedians insist.

However, Seinfeld almost seems to understand this.

“We would write a different joke with Kramer and the rickshaw today,” he said. “We wouldn’t do that joke. We’d come up with another joke. They move the gates like in skiing.  Culture — the gates are moving. Your job is to be agile and clever enough that, wherever they put the gates, I’m going to make the gate.”

Yes, that’s true test of one’s talent. It’s not a burden. It’s actually a gift.

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