Categorical Aperitif

Dangit, stuff keeps getting in the way of catching up with my Eventually There'll Be At Least One for Every Day Random Flickr Blogging. In happier news, though, we finally got some honest-to-gosh fall weather in east central Florida. I mean, my bare feet actually got cold yesterday. Cold, I tell you!

I'll catch up with the ETBALOFEDRFBing as soon as I can; meanwhile, while I don't usually find much worth reading in Slate aside from Today's Papers, I highly highly highly recommend this piece by Ron Rosenbaum. I've never seen Rick Shapiro, the "anti-Seinfeld" to whom Rosenbaum refers; however, I don't think anyone could put their finger any more perfectly on what it is that I've always hated about both Jerry Seinfeld and his insipid show:

When the hype began for Bee Movie, I wondered if Seinfeld's trivializing inanity could do any more damage to the American psyche than it'd already done. And it occurred to me that rather than merely denounce Seinfeld, I should suggest an alternative, his evil twin, the Sydney Carton to his Charles Darnay, Rick Shapiro. That's me, always thinking positive.

When I say damage to the American psyche, am I exaggerating? Well, I don't know if you read Steve Martin's lovely recent memoir in The New Yorker. It was about how he became a comic before the comedy club revolution and how he participated in the birth of a new, original kind of American comedy that he and few others were exploring in the '60s and '70s. It was at once incredibly funny and incredibly silly, but also genuinely and provocatively philosophical.

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.

You could argue that a nation's character is defined at least in part by its sense of humor, and Jerry gave us the sense of humor of self-satisfaction. Anything that didn't fit the suburban Massapequa mindset was something to be held up for piddling laughs. He was so deeply in love, so deeply satisfied by his own trivial quirks that those who didn't share them were alien subjects of ridicule.

The promotional booklet really says it all. I'm not going to waste my time or yours reviewing this saccharine little animated fable which is NSFD (not safe for diabetics). Instead I invite you to stare at a drawing of Jerry's bee "Barry B. Benson," and tell me that you don't eventually see Satan.

My friend, I don't need to look at an animated bee to see Satan; I see him every time the local station runs an ad for Seinfeld. Jerry's bland, besweatered visage looms over the show title and station logo, and if you look into his big, dead eyes, you can catch a glimpse of the Dark Lord howling with triumphant laughter just before the Enzyte commercial comes on.

The Austin Lounge Lizards have a song that often comes to my mind at moments like this. It's called "Put the Oak Ridge Boys in the Slammer," and it's about—well, exactly what you'd think, given the title. But the Oak Ridge Boys are only a convenient synecdoche, stand-ins for any number of lucrative banalities. Here are my favorite lines:

Lunchtime in the USA
Baloney and American cheese
Same forty songs on the radio
Call the music police!

Send the Oak Ridge Boys up the river
And stick 'em where the sun don't show
Moor 'em in the Monongahela
Or out in the Ohio
Put the Oak Ridge Boys in the pokey
Silence 'em forevermore
Chase 'em down out of the Smokies
With brickbats and two-by-fours

I gotcher little show about nothing right here, pal. *bonk*