NICK ERBER Seinfeld My younger brother likes to watch Seinfeld. Last summer, when I would come home from work, he'd be laying on one of our green couches or sitting in the giant brown velvet armchair that my Dad bought himself A plaid-dad George Costanza would be on our rigorously indulgent 42-inch Phillips plasma screen television yelling at Jerry, his glasses brightly flashing directly into the camera, catching my attention and certainly blinding the cameraman. My brother would sit there, transfixed and tired from his day of running up and down the football field, face unsmiling and eyes dimmed. Often he'd have a box ofTriscuits at his side and a Gatorade in hand, alternately gulping and crunching, leaving large chunks of fibrous cracker in the bottle. When the laugh track would blare out, loudly commending the comedians on the screen, he would stare blankly at the giant faces. Occasionally, I would agree with the audience's evaluation of a certain joke or situation. I would laugh. He rarely did, and when he would, they would be brief, thoughtless laughs, like the ones we would some– times give out of obligation at a bad joke told by someone in authority over us. Immediately he would go back to staring at the screen, basking in the simultaneous cold-warm hysterics of recorded laughter. Dim eyes, cold laughter, commercial. Then. Dim eyes, cold laughter, commercial. Rinse. Repeat. This was art apart from art, narra– tive apart from thought. For me, Seinfeld is hit or miss with its humor. This holds true for most sitcoms that I watch. Most of the time I'll be at least 0 Kwith what the show is about. There's consistent writing and a little charac– ter development. But at other moments, I just think that it's boring, a complete waste of time. There's a draw about the show. It's exciting in a difficult-to-pin-down way. The show is about nothing, but it's so obviously popular. (1) I think that this fascination with nothing comes from a subtle but integral self-involvement that the show exudes. 34
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