Reminder: no one wants to be the main character of the internet for a week, not even the literal main character from a beloved sitcom.
Jerry Seinfeld has turned into a major trending topic this week for a rather inane statement about why there aren’t as many sitcoms anymore. Despite being a part of the industry and seeing firsthand the real reasons, he decided like a lot of older white guys it must be bEcAuSe wOkE. He complained on the New Yorker podcast on Sunday:
“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.’ … 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 PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
OK, first we just have to do a speedrun through how silly this statement is. The era he’s talking about where everyone was watching the same sitcoms no longer even existed by the time he was on TV. It’s constantly changing. There were, back then, only three channels. Of course sitcoms represent a much smaller percentage of real estate when there are a gazillion options to choose from on hundreds of channels and streaming platforms. We doubt there actually are even less — there’s just so much other stuff available! Add to that people getting worn out on the format during the golden age of TV. Compared to brilliant dramas like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Game Of Thrones, etc, sitcoms tend to look a little hokey. Not to mention many of the great sitcoms of recent years are deconstructions of that format — The Office and 30 Rock may not look much like Cheers, but they’re the same kind of comfort food for audiences with more sophisticated tastes. Also, you can still watch all those old sitcoms on streaming! Just sayin’!
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As far as things which push the envelope not being able to survive? There are several prominent counterexamples of huge hits that completely pull the rug out from such vapid logic. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Rick & Morty and Veep are frankly edgier than anything he ever did on his own show. Hell, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David — his longtime pal — only just ended Curb Your Enthusiasm, a show that never stopped crossing the line! Literally every part of what Jerry said here is nonsense, and the only people nodding their heads are idiots who just love getting their daily pellet of anti-woke.
But we’re not here to talk about Seinfeld yelling at clouds. We want to talk about the unintended consequence of it. That is to say, the internet responding the way it so often does when they’re annoyed with someone: digging. And it didn’t take long at all to remind everyone of the scandal Jerry escaped relatively unscathed back in the day — and attempt to sort of cancel him in retrospect.
Whether it was annoyed folks on the left hitting back or not, we saw a LOT of responses digging up the time Jerry was maybe the biggest star on TV… and used that cache to date a high school girl.
Yes, it’s a true story.
Jerry met Shoshanna Lonstein in Central Park in 1993. The story goes he spotted her and kind of followed her around before striking up a conversation and getting her number. He was 38 years old at the time. She was 17. Soon after, they made their red carpet debut as Seinfeld started showing off his teen GF. The new couple quickly made headlines, but at the time most mainstream coverage — like People magazine for instance — quickly accepted it, just talking about it like a hot new couple and not something totally inappropriate. Yes, really! The cover profile’s subheading was, no joke, “When Jerry Seinfeld fell for 17-year-old Shoshanna Lonstein, cynics snickered. No more.” And they gave Jerry the platform to tell it from his side. Naturally, he gave them the old “age is just a number” defense, saying:
“Shoshanna is a person, not an age. She is extremely bright. She’s funny, sharp, very alert. We just get along. You can hear the click.”
He also said this was more comfortable than dating multiple girls at once as he’d been doing — he told the mag:
“You go out with one girl and the other sees you with her in the paper. That was uncomfortable. Now I’m not doing anything I’m uncomfortable with. My interest in her is very proper.”
But the outlet also noted that she was still living with her parents despite having turned 18 and being legal. The whole article is a wild relic of a different time. For some reason the fact the multimillionaire kept dating her PAST being 17 somehow justified the age she was when he got her number. Like imagine if James Franco had started dating that one girl he flirted with, and People was like, well, people say she’s mature for her age… You can read their entire 1994 cover story celebrating the couple HERE.
BTW, we say 17 because it’s a matter of record that’s how old she was when they met, and — we will remind you — he got her number. He swears they didn’t start dating until she was 18 (and he was 39)… but his explanation of what they were doing before her 18th birthday never sounded like it wasn’t dating! Even Howard Stern thought this was sketchy as hell and said so to his face, teasing him during an interview on his radio show has having waited in the park with “a candy bar on a string.” Jerry defended the relationship, saying:
“I didn’t realize she was so young. This is the only girl I ever went out with who was that young. I wasn’t dating her. We just went to a restaurant, and that was it.”
They weren’t dating, they were just going out! They went to a restaurant, how is that not a date? OW! Sorry, our eyes just rolled so hard, we strained something.
By all accounts, the two dated for four years. We also know they broke up in 1997. When she was 21. You can do your own math. She went on to be a successful designer… after finishing college, of course.
Anyway, we hadn’t thought about that icky story in years! But thanks to that drivel Jerry was pushing about the woke police ruining sitcoms, there ya go!
[Image via Vallenilla/Tina Paul/WENN.]
