If you were fortunate enough to be alive in the 90s, you no doubt remember the sitcom, Seinfeld. It was one of the most popular shows of the decade and it starred Jerry Seinfeld, Elaine Benes, Cosmo Kramer, and George Costanza. You can even watch the show almost 2 decades later and the reruns just continue to be as popular as the original. If you enjoyed the show, you might be surprised to learn that millennials are now saying that it is offensive because of a number of episodes being ‘insensitive’ and ‘stigmatizing towards some societal group’.
In order to validate their feelings, they have looked into a number of the lines, scenes and jokes that were told on those shows. They use it to say that the show was even more insensitive because of them. Jerry Seinfeld has not kept silent on the subject when he learned what the millennials are saying. You might be surprised by what he thinks.
First of all, let’s learn a little something about what is considered to be offensive. They are claiming that the ‘Soup Nazi’ was out of line because it called for Army level discipline. It seems as if that was a little insensitive because it borders on what Jews were made to endure in concentration camps during World War II.
They also say that the ‘Puerto Rican flag joke’ was out of line. Kramer accidentally set the flag on fire in that episode and to try to stop the flames, he stepped on it.
They also targeted the ‘pig man joke’. Kramer comes across a mentally ill patient who is in the hospital and is overweight. He thinks he has a pig’s face and starts running around yelling ‘Pig Man’.
One of the jokes that they consider to be offensive is the ‘cleavage’ joke. In that episode, the father of a teenage girl catches Castanza staring at her cleavage. He then gets his female friend to wear a low cut top so her father would do the same. He’s trying to show that it’s normal for a man to do it but millennials find it is insensitive.
What does Seinfeld have to say? In the past, he has “frequently spoken publicly about believing that society has become overly politically correct.”
“Hopefully most people can agree that comedy, even “edgy” comedy, doesn’t need to alienate marginalized groups in order to make people laugh, though,” he explains, “Thanks to more modern understandings of what political correctness entails — and why being PC is important — it’s less common these days to find jokes like the offensive ones that often played out on Seinfeld.”
Many other publications are also chiming in on the subject and the majority of them do not agree. One popular resource said that “so much of our culture today seems to be about finding reasons to hate pop culture from even a decade or two ago.”
There is been a lot of controversy lately, especially this Christmas season when people talking about the issues with Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer and ‘Baby It’s Cold outside’. I guess we can add Seinfeld to the mix.