What is Wrong with Jerry Seinfeld?

WHAT’S WRONG WITH JERRY SEINFELD?*

Jerry Seinfeld has a problem. He is a respectably good-looking man living in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. He has an interesting job, a compelling circle of close friends, and he is funny. Let us not underestimate the seductive power of a well-placed and witty observation about the varied incongruities of modern social life. And yet despite a steady stream of attractive and eligible bachelorettes parading through his apartment under the watchful gaze of cornflakes and Cocopuffs, he remains, after a full nine seasons of relentless questing after love, unremittingly single.

What is Jerry’s problem? Why is it that a man who fills his days with the search for romantic companionship, a man who is, under any circumstances a perfectly eligible bachelor, even, shall we say, quite the catch, why is he unable to find true love? Or failing that, a committed relationship. Even George Costanza, the perennial dunce and incurable, for lack of a better word, screw-up, was able to keep up an (intermittently) steady relationship with a woman for the better part of three seasons. Even to the point of engagement and, if it hadn’t been for her untimely postage related death, marriage.

But Jerry has no Susan. Despite his romantic entanglements with unquestionably more women than George (I would hazard to guess that Jerry dates two to Georges one) he cannot seem to find anything more than these mere entanglements. His brief encounters with women, sexual and romantic, never seem to become more than that. Why? What makes Jerry so different, even from George, of whom he said ‘I think I’m pretty much like you, only successful.’ Why does Jerry, so successful, have so little success in exactly that area of life to which he devotes more time, energy and dialogue than any other?

Jerry is a paradox: the serial dater who cant seem to keep a partner around beyond the third date, an eminently datable man who finds plenty of sex and no love. Why can’t Jerry make it work? Why is this question so important? Why should we care about the romantic hang-ups of a fictional character from the mid-nineties? Well, let me tell you.

Jerry’s problem is our problem as well. His is the problem is the problem of every serial dater, man or woman, teen or centenarian, who can find plenty of tail but no love in the modern world. Jerry’s problem is the problem of everyone, lonely and depressed, who comes home from another failed first date and asks themselves ‘Why can’t I find someone? What is wrong with me?’ Well, let me tell you.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH JERRY SEINFELD?

Wrong. Convincing as it sounds, Jerry is unable to find a committed relationship not because he can’t commit but because he can’t relate. Jerry’s problem is that he is so desperate to find anyone at all that he isn’t satisfied with anyone in particular. The women in his life are not individual people they are candidates auditioning for the role of girlfriend. He reduces each of them to pithy ciphers (Mulva, the Virgin, the Two-Face, and the ever-popular ‘Oh, You…’) and compresses them from living, three-dimensional people into two-dimensional labels.

But this is just a symptom of the more basic problem, and the more basic problem is attitude. Jerry automatically and unconsciously collapses his romantic prospects into nothing more than game-pieces in his romantic puzzle. The who of these women, the other person centred in another life, is entirely eclipsed by Jerry’s need for them to fill a role, and the only requirement for the role is female genitalia. Jerry cannot find love because he is not looking for a girl in all her unique particularity, he is looking for Girl, any girl, as an appendix to his own life. Jerry’s Problem, ultimately, is that he is not looking for a human being, he’s looking for a girlfriend.

BUT IS THAT REALLY MY PROBLEM TOO?

Yes.

WELL, HOW SO?!

One of the greatest problems with love in the modern world is that the heart-sick seekers after companionship are not looking for people, they are looking for roles. The lonely man wants a Girlfriend, he doesn’t want Anne, who works at the office supply store and smiles into her cash register when he refreshes his stock of printer cartridges and pencil lead. The twenty-something who always dreamed of raising a family to the tune of Subarus and Labradors isn’t interested in Tiffany, who sat in front of him in History of Political Theory and dropped her pencils with alarming regularity, he wants Woman, Wife and Mother.

If this all sounds a bit chauvinistic, even a bit ‘every man wants to marry June Cleaver because she presses his shirts, cooks his meals and is his mother,’ well there’s a touch of that but it misses the point. Jerry’s Problem is not just Jerry’s, it is also Elaine’s, and neither of them are looking for a Cleaver. Or not exactly. Jerry may not be looking for a sous-chef cum launderer, we may as well give him that much credit, he may be looking for the woman he will dote on, the woman who will laugh at his jokes, even the woman that he will give everything to, but at no point is he looking for Susan, who was a lesbian for a short time, collects dolls and for better or worse loves you.

The point, which again we return to, is that Jerry and you, yes you, you who cycle through romantic partners, who likes but does not love, who goes on plenty of first dates and precious few second dates or gets caught up in a dolorous succession of luke-warm relationships, you, your problem, and of course Jerry’s Problem, is that you are looking for person ‘of your type,’ and people don’t come in types, they come in singles and in lucky moments doubles. The search for ‘a girlfriend,’ a woman who will enter your life and become caught in your orbit like a fledgling moon, cold, dead and smiling, is not only unrealistic, it is doomed to failure. Love is a merging of two lives, not the addition to one of a secret ingredient that makes everything taste better and nothing essentially different. Jerry cannot find love because it is impossible to love a type; people must be loved as themselves and only that. In the end it is not surprising that there can be no love and no relationship between Jerry and ‘The Two-Face’ or between Jerry and ‘Mulva,’ but there could perhaps have been love between Jerry and Anne.

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* The author would like to make it expressly clear that he is writing about Jerry, the character in the television show ‘Seinfeld.’ He knows nothing about the actual Mr. Seinfeld and therefore could not be writing about him.

The Last Man to Know Everything

On May 10^th 1829, the English renaissance man, Thomas Young, died at his home in London. In his 56 years, he revolutionised no less than five branches of physics (including pioneering the wave theory of light), three medical specialties (including inventing a rule of thumb for converting adult drug dosages for use in children), developed a new method for tuning musical instruments, wrote extensively on philosophy, and partially deciphered the Rosetta Stone, leading directly to its full translation by Jean-Francois Champollion. Despite this impressive array of accomplishments, Thomas Young isn’t very widely known to-day. He is undeniably one of the giants on whose shoulders modern science stands, but his ideas fell mostly into that grey area between gravity and relativity, too technical to be of use to the average person and not shocking enough to interest him, and perhaps that’s all for the better. The coefficient of elasticity is rightfully not all that compelling these days. But Dr. Young was marked out by history in at least one way that deserves a little more recognition: he is widely believed to be the Last Man to Know Everything.

So, what does that mean? For most of human history, it was possible for an educated person to know literally everything that was known. Now of course, ‘the known’ was a fairly limited field at the time. Thomas Young, or Da Vinci, or Francis Bacon (all contenders for the title) surely would have been stupefyingly ignorant about Confucianism or Antarctic geography, but within their limitations, these men were familiar with everything it was possible for a man of their time to know. And this doesn’t just mean that they had read all the latest in physics and economics and astronomy, but also that for any given piece of furniture in their houses they could tell you how it was put together and came to be in the dining room, they knew how the wax for their candles was produced, their ink mixed, their books printed, their wine farmed, fermented and bottled, their horses husbanded, ad infinitum.

Of course, whether any of these men actually knew ‘everything’ about all of these things, it is certainly the case that they were recognised experts on every facet of their worlds. It was possible for Thomas Jefferson to know how walls are raised and beer brewed, how pulleys and cotton futures work, how universities and countries are founded, and still be able to cogito and ergo sum with the best of them, while to-day it is possible for a Nobel Prize winning physicist to come home from a day at Los Alamos and not have any idea how to work his TIVO.

Now, none of this is meant to unfairly elevate the genius of Thomas Youngs over the genius of Nuclear physicists. Give Thomas Young a copy of The General Theory of Relativity and he would certainly be so far out to sea that he just might reach India; and surely Nuclear Physicists know quite enough without the TIVO. The reason that no one knows everything these days isn’t that geniuses are any less brilliant (far from it) but that there is just too much to know. The point is really much simpler, and has much more to do with the intelligent layman than with the Renaissance Savant.

Once, and not so long ago, it was reasonable for an educated person to be intellectually familiar with everything in his environment. Now, it’s become paradigmatic that no one person in the world understands all of the processes involved in the creation of a simple pencil. The comparison isn’t a value judgement, very few of us have any great need to produce pencils, and a lot more people can programme computers now than could in the 1800s, but all of this does illustrate a rather interesting philosophical shift.

The shift: we know longer know about things generally, we know about things specifically, or rather, specific things. Educated people in the past knew most of what there was to know about everything. Educated people to-day know a great deal about a handful of things, but not much about the rest.

Whatever there is to be said about the virtues of a well-rounded education, the shift was an absolutely necessary one. The body of human knowledge had simply grown to large to fit in any one human head. If people were perfectly rational, things might have gone on like that, the human world developing into an agglomeration of mutually indifferent specialists operating only within their own ideal division of labour, but things went in a slightly more difficult direction.

Rather than a world of experts in their spheres who leave other spheres to other experts and let that be the end of it, the split has evolved into a world of laymen with an almost religious awe of the magic of expertise, and experts who think nothing of practicing their magic by day, but who are just as ready as anyone else to gawk in the shackles of technological superstition by night.

Take a simple example: an older person has a computer problem. A young person is called. The young person may, and likely does, have no better an idea how to solve the problem than the older person, but they are more than willing to tinker around a bit and figure out a solution. But the older person cannot do this; he has completely abdicated the realm of computers to the ‘people who know about computers,’ even in cases where there is no reason at all why his personal initiative shouldn’t be enough to solve his problem. But he can’t bring himself to it. Prying into someone else’s specialty is no less than spitting at the ghost in the machine.

Perhaps this expert-layman polarity is more a feature of the last generation than the present one. In the last fifty years any number of social revolutions have risen to power, or authority from the experts and authorities and return it to the disenfranchised individual. But if this was our grandparents’ thesis and our parents’ antithesis, our synthesis ought to have some fairly organic relationship to it. It's something to consider.