Mel Brooks once said, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." Humor's never sounded so pure. Mel Brooks seems to be saying that what's funny is what's most extreme while truthful in the resultant unexpected pain of a circumstance. While it makes sense that many modern television sitcoms often follow through on their comedic impulses until the end of each episode (Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock), TV Land has certainly had its fair share of pansies. Until the 1990s, sitcoms were often based on one-problem premises for predefined characters, many one-liners, and a lesson learned at the end of each episode. "Aaaawwww." Any tragedy or pain that came from these shows was as a result of hard events we related to in our own lives (going out on a first date, getting fired from our job, the awkward family vacation, etc.). These were life-situation comedies, and the humor came from the little cuts in our finger that might interrupt how we wanted to pursue our larger life purposes as humans, plus three-minute commercial breaks and canned laughter. The ending of each show was like a band aid, and soon enough our leading characters' boo-boos were all cleared up by next week's episode. It makes me want to puke. As displayed in his standup, his television show, his animated movie, and his writing, I think Jerry Seinfeld did also.
[...] On the show, Jerry Seinfeld plays as him standup comic, in jeans with button-down shirts, living in a New York City apartment), revealing the self that went into his standup work, a self that sees irony in the way people speak about things and the way people deal with awkward yet mundane situations. His natural sarcasm and wit work on this show because, given how involved he is in the writing process, we feel he'd say his jokes off-the-cuff if he was in those actual situations. [...]
[...] Caryn James in the New York Times describes this standup show as featuring the same old Jerry with material we've heard him tell for years, and despite the title of his performance, he still brings success to the Broadway stage with his original style of observational humor. His jokes get the same laughs, and by allowing Jerry to bring all his material together (besides the shorter bits he did at the beginning and end of his sitcom, as well as in his best-selling book, Sein language), he is able to create a solid one-hour routine in the polished way he had been most comfortable with his entire career. [...]
[...] The animation in the film captures a comic roundness to the movie's tone, and Seinfeld, as a co writer, relishes in his power to visually capture the gags he had thought out in his head: of these visual scenes, I thought of all of them. And as a standup comic or on a TV show, you can't put a camera on a bee on a tennis ball or through a car engine” (IGN.com). If Seinfeld was how Jerry Seinfeld sees things on a regular basis, then Bee Movie is the closest thing to his fantasy of being Superman. [...]
[...] On Seinfeld, Jerry lets us see what would happen if he had to date these women, and his subsequent analyses and attempts at reforming them after conversing about these issues with other extreme yet real characters (an innovative, eccentric unemployed next-door neighbor, a working-class smart, brassy ex-girlfriend-current- best-friend, and a neurotic, unsatisfied puts who lives with his parents). Seinfeld focused on character traits rather than character development, and those little things that could drive a person crazy in another person, while insignificant in the long while, are often what Jerry Seinfeld has a sensibility for in his work. [...]
[...] The movie works because it's as if Jerry Seinfeld is living within his own comic routine. do bees live? Is it like is his hypothetical, and the jokes follow suit. Of course he would graduate among hundred thousands of bees, and then four-seconds later another class of the same number would graduate. I could just hear him at the beginning of the Seinfeld episode, “It's the bee life cycle! These ceremonies must mean nothing!” Seinfeld says in his IGN.com interview, had to kind of take the edge off because it's the way he looks. [...]
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