Seinfeld and Philosophy

Yes, this is a blog post about Jerry Seinfeld. I know, he’s a super-famous old rich white dude, and in the comedy world he’s as mainstream as they come. I don’t care. I think he’s an amazing person and I want to write about him. And also: he’s anything but mainstream in terms of his approach to life.

I’ve mentioned Seinfeld at least a couple times before on this blog and have known for awhile that I’d eventually write this post. But first I wanted to rewatch his Netflix series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and then much to my delight the Seinfeld series was added to Netflix, so I decided to rewatch that whole thing, too, for the first time in about fifteen years. I also watched his two recent stand-up specials, Jerry Before Seinfeld and Twenty-three Hours to Kill, as well as the documentary from 2002 called Jerry Seinfeld: Comedian. And I relistened to Marc Maron interviewing him in 2020 for his WTF podcast. The book I’ll be drawing from for parts of today’s episode is called Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book About Everything and Nothing, which I owned a copy of in college and actually found, at the time, to be too heavy on the philosophy and too light on the Seinfeld, so I eventually sold it. But I purchased another copy a few months ago and this time around found the text to be a great philosophy primer.

I grew up on Seinfeld the sitcom. Watched it every Thursday night with my sister and stepdad. The final episode aired near the end of my sophomore year in high school. In college I collected all the seasons of it on DVD, even geeking out on the episodes for which Larry David and Seinfeld himself provided commentary. I believe I owned a copy of his 1998 stand-up special, I’m Telling You For the Last Time, on DVD, although it might’ve just been on CD or I might have just rented it from Blockbuster a whole bunch. I just know that I consumed it enough to have most of the jokes memorized. In 2005 or thereabouts I had the immense pleasure of seeing Seinfeld live for the first and only time (so far, anyway), when I actually quite literally wanted him to stop talking for just a minute so that I could get a break from laughing because my stomach muscles and face muscles hurt so much, but of course he did not stop. He was relentless.

I love Jerry Seinfeld. And not just his comedy. I love the man himself—or at least the man he presents himself to be in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and in other interview scenarios. Until that show came around in 2012, I’d never seen Jerry interact as himself with other comics. Actually, I had watched the aforementioned Comedian documentary, which has all kinds of awesome comics in it, talking shop with Jerry over French fries in what I assume is the restaurant part of a comedy club. But in Comedians In Cars, you really get to see those other comics make him laugh. There are countless shots of Jerry doubling over in the middle of the sidewalk, or throwing his head back while driving and grabbing his companion by the arm, or draping himself over the edge of a restaurant booth, or smacking the table and trying not to spray coffee out of his mouth because whatever his companion just said was so amusing.

Comedians In Cars also showed me how deeply devoted Jerry is to comedy—and stand-up in particular. He is someone with a true calling, and these types of people always fascinate me. For his entire adult life—and some of his childhood—Seinfeld has given his full self to his craft, knowing there was no end goal and that he could always get better at what he does. The laughs can always get bigger. For this and other reasons, I’ve come to see him as a wise man. I love how unapologetic he is, how self-assured without being arrogant, how healthy-minded and well-adjusted. He seems unsullied by wealth and fame. In Jerry Before Seinfeld, a Netflix special from 2017, he says that when he was a young comic just starting out in New York City, he said to himself something like, “If I can just make enough money off my act to buy a loaf of bread a week, I will have made it. I’ll be golden.” He wasn’t bothered by being poor or by any of the other unglamorous aspects of his career, because he was doing comedy, and that “felt like Heaven.” And I’d bet he still feels that way. If somebody told him from on high that he must choose between being rich and being a comedian who still performed, he’d go with comedian. (Of course this is just conjecture, perhaps a bit of wishful thinking, and I wouldn’t be shocked to hear him say, “No, I like the money.” And of course to be totally unapologetic about it.)

Another reason that Seinfeld is a fitting subject for this blog is that he enjoys reflecting and conversing on the nature of existence. Like any good comedian, he is in essence a philosopher. He thinks critically about life and tries to make some kind of sense out of it. His comedy consistently upholds the Socratic maxim that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” It is this philosophical side of Seinfeld that I plan to focus on the most here.

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In his essay, “The Examined Life: Jerry and Socrates,” William Irwin, who also edited the book said essay is in—the aforementioned Seinfeld and Philosophy—points out multiple similarities between the two men, focusing on the character Jerry in Seinfeld the show, and not on the actual man per se—but I think the comparison applies to the actual man, too. In fact I know it does, because I just watched a PBS interview in which Seinfeld says outright that there is zero difference between his real life self and the character he played on TV. One comparison Irwin makes in his essay has to do with what came Socrates said right before saying that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. He said, “The greatest good in a man’s life is this, to be each day discussing human excellence and other subjects you hear me talking about, examining myself and other people.” I think Jerry Seinfeld could say this of himself, especially when it comes to the emphasis placed on human excellence—at least when those humans are comics or automobile designers—in Comedians in Cars.

Of course, Seinfeld also examines everything that isn’t excellent about humanity. As he said in 2020 on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, rage is an essential element of comedy, plus “aggression, confrontation, resentment, irritation.” And indeed Socrates said: “I think god has caused me to settle on the city as a horsefly, the sort that never stops, all day long, coming to rest on every part of you, stinging each one of you into action, and persuading and criticizing each one of you.” Comics are critics. Whether it’s their friends and family, society at large, or themselves that they’re criticizing (a la Louis CK), they’re pretty much always being critical of something. In Jerry Before Seinfeld, Jerry says it was a revelation to him as a kid when he realized that comedians had no respect for anything. Here was a group of people with whom he could essentially say of and at the world, “This is all stupid.” One of his primary methods of conveying such criticism involves pointing out what often goes unnoticed because of its familiarity. That’s what Kelly Dean Jolley explores in an essay that compares Seinfeld the sitcom to the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. She says that, like Wittgenstein, Seinfeld the show—and again, I’d argue Seinfeld the man—strives to teach “a new way of hearkening, some kind of receptivity.” We can’t just walk around ignoring this stuff!

I also want to spend some time here discussing Seinfeld’s spiritual side. There can be a fine line between philosophy and spirituality, but in Seinfeld’s case, the former seems to be characterized by thinking and talking about stuff, while the latter is characterized by doing stuff. In his Marc Maron interview, Seinfeld said in no uncertain terms that he is a spiritual person, and that his work as a comedian is spiritual work. “Comedy is deeply spiritually satisfying,” he said. “You’re risking your own personal comfort to make total strangers happy for just a moment. That’s a spiritual act.” (In the Jamie Foxx episode of Comedians In Cars he says, “When they’re laughing at your stuff you’re being infused with golden light.”) When Maron asked him what else his spiritual practice involved, Seinfeld simply and humbly said, “I try to be good to people… I’m always trying to be generous to people.” When Maron asked if it was true that Seinfeld went through a Scientology phase, he affirmed that he did take a course on Scientology in the ’70s and found it interesting but didn’t go any further with it. “Did anything about it change your brain?” “Yes,” Jerry said, “I liked the emphasis on ethical behavior.”

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Jerry Seinfeld’s real-life interest in ethical behavior is certainly reflected in Seinfeld the sitcom. In his essay “Seinfeld and the Moral Life,” Robert A. Epperson says “it should be obvious even to the most casual viewer of [the show] that one of [its] primary themes is proper conduct.” He asserts that Seinfeld is, above all else, not about “nothing,” but about living the moral life in contemporary American society. He defends the program from “the common charge that it merely depicts, albeit comically, the aimless lives of self-absorbed, superficial, immature, upper west side New Yorkers.” As the characters in Seinfeld so regularly demonstrate, living the moral life doesn’t always come naturally. Aristotle famously insisted that only a person of fully virtuous character finds such a way of life easy. For everyone else, though, leading a moral life takes time and practice. For “perfect” people, morality is no concern. But for our fictional friends Elaine Benes, George Constanza, Cosmo Kramer, and Jerry Seinfeld, moral decision-making becomes problematic. George is the one for whom it seems more problematic than anyone else, and it’s one of the traits that endears me most to him. I love, for instance, how irritated he gets with social customs like bringing wine to dinner parties (he insists on bringing Pepsi instead), and with other types of gift-giving that he sees as having gotten out of hand. At the same time, he is happy to uphold the custom of saying “bless you” when someone sneezes, and other types of common courtesy that, when denied him, cause him to exclaim in exasperation, “We’re living in a society!” Which is a line I quote regularly because I regularly witness people behaving as if we’re not living in a society.

Epperson points out that virtue ethics is especially represented in Seinfeld the sitcom. As opposed to utilitarian and Kantian theories, virtue ethics “focuses the inquiry on the character from which the actions proceed… The question ‘What is the right thing to do in this situation?’ is often examined via a consideration of ‘what sort of person acts in such-and-such ways?’” Epperson contends that this type of question is often what guides the behavior of Jerry and George in particular. In the episode where Jerry is trying to break up with his girlfriend-du-jour so that he can date her roommate instead, he is unexpectedly presented with a menage-a-trois opportunity. Much to George’s extreme dismay, Jerry turns the opportunity down, not because it would be monolithically “wrong” to accept, but because he “doesn’t want to be an orgy guy.”

In another parallel between Jerry and Socrates, Epperson notes that the latter persisted in philosophizing right up to the last hours of his life, which were spent in prison. (He was sentenced to death after being convicted of impiety and corrupting the youth.) The last episode of Seinfeld ends with Jerry and the gang in a jail cell, having just been sentenced to a year in prison for violating the good Samaritan law (more on that in a sec), and like Socrates, Jerry is still doing his observational comedy routine—his own form of philosophizing. Just before his execution, Socrates made profound proclamations about death, saying one must not be apprehensive about it, assuring his admirers “that no harm can come to a good man either in his life or after his death.” The Jerry character in Seinfeld is likewise a paragon of equanimity, seeming unharmed by his prison sentence, perhaps because of his essential goodness. In this way he also exemplifies the philosophy of another favorite thinker of mine, Marcus Aurelius, who basically said that nothing—not the specter of a year in prison or even of one’s own death—can prevent one from being his best or truest self. For Jerry, that means making a funny observation about the placement of George’s second shirt button, which is “too high” and in “no man’s land.” “Haven’t we had this conversation before?” George asks. And indeed, it was the very first conversation we as viewers ever saw them have, in the first scene of the pilot episode.

The series finale, though, deserves more attention in a discussion about Seinfeld and the moral life. In his essay, “The Final Episode: Is Doing Nothing Something?”, Theodore Schick, Jr., explores the ethical implications of the good Samaritan law, which Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine are convicted of breaking when they do nothing to help someone who’s being robbed on the street in the fictional town of Latham, Massachusetts. In fact they actually make fun of the victim, who happens to be obese, and Kramer even films the crime. Supposedly the Latham city good Samaritan law was modeled on the one in France, which reads: “Anyone who, by their own actions, if there is no risk to themselves or another, can prevent a crime or physical harm and refuses to help shall be punished by five years imprisonment and a 500,000 franc fine.” Same goes for anyone who refuses to come to the aid of a person in danger, if there is no risk to themselves or another. (I recently heard a story on the news about a young girl whose life was saved by a stranger in a subway station. She tripped while getting on the train and had started to fall through the gap to her sure demise, but a stranger caught her just in time. The mother never even saw them, just their arm, pushing the girl through the train doors to safety, and then the train pulled away and the person who’d just saved this girl’s life was lost in the crowd.) 

Anyway, the Seinfeld gang should feel lucky they weren’t in France when they broke the good Samaritan law. They got off easy with one year. And while Schick argues that they were unfairly tried, he concurs that they should have at least called the cops as a way of assisting the robbery victim. Their failure to act in any beneficent way therefore places them “below the standard of a minimally decent Samaritan” in this instance. Schick emphasizes that none of them are bad people; they just failed to do their civic duty in this particular scenario and do deserve to be in a jail cell. (It’s interesting to note, as Jennifer McMahon does in her essay, “Seinfeld, Subjectivity, and Sartre,” that Sartre’s play No Exit, which contains the famous line, “Hell is other people,” takes place in a small prison cell.) But will their prison sentence teach the Seinfeld gang anything about how to better live a moral life? In his essay, Schick says that two rules guided the show’s writing. Those rules were: no hugging and no learning. I take this to mean that the main characters never hug one another—at least not for any genuinely sentimental reason—and they never learn from their mistakes. And I’d say Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and other writers of the show did a bang-up job in upholding both rules across all nine seasons.

Another essayist in the Seinfeld and Philosophy book, though, would argue that we as viewers are learning something. In a piece titled “The Secret of Seinfeld’s Humor: The Significance of the Insignificant,” Jorge J.E. Gracia makes the case that when we laugh at something, it’s because we’re seeing in it “the significance of the insignificant.” We cry at something, however, “because through it we grasp the insignificance of the significant.” Gracia elaborates by saying, “Comedy reveals to us the relevance of much in our lives to which we pay no attention, [while] tragedy shows us that what we regard as important is not really so. The first teaches us a lesson without pain; the second makes us learn a shattering truth.” The notion of being taught a lesson painlessly reminds me of something Jerry says in the Trevor Noah episode of Comedians in Cars. He says, “Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a gap. When you stub your toe on the foot of the bed, that was a gap in knowledge. And the pain is a lot of information really quick.” He also touches on this idea in the Chris Rock episode, when somehow they get on the topic of skateboarding. Jerry points out that, in order to learn a skateboard trick, you have to get it wrong multiple times. In the process you get hurt, and as a result of that pain, you learn how to do that trick. He says, “Whenever I see those skateboard kids I think ‘those kids are gonna be alright.’” If Jerry is onto something here, then maybe we can conclude that comedy’s lack of pain implies that we’re not learning anything terribly new as the audience, but rather being made aware of what we already know. We just needed this funny guy to remind us.

And I’d add that we just need funny people, period. We need them to disarm us in the way that only funny people can, to help us contact our capacity for joy, which is immense. I believe we’re essentially made of joy, but the things we experience and the messages we receive often have an obscuring effect, and we not only struggle to contact our joy but even actively (though unconsciously) resist it. Comedians make such resistance impossible. They say, “It is okay to lose control of yourself and surrender to joy in this paroxysm we call laughter. That is why I’m here.” Comedy is therefore a noble profession, and true comedians—the ones like Seinfeld who say, as he did in the Marc Maron interview, “My job is to serve the audience… Their laughter is the only relevant currency in the end”—these people are gifts to their fellow man. And what they do is anything but frivolous. As Maron says in the preamble to his Jerry interview, “[comedy] is a necessity.” Because: this world can be an incredibly difficult place to inhabit, and being human can sometimes feel like torture. With so much fear and grief and madness everywhere, it’s no wonder we can be a tough crowd. As Seinfeld says, getting people to laugh (at least at the time and place of someone else’s choosing) is the hardest thing in the world. Lucky for us, the man likes a challenge. It’s a big reason why his act is so clean and family friendly. Sure, he could get a laugh with a well-timed F-bomb—people just love that word—but he says that every laugh he’s gotten for that reason has felt too easy. He wants it to be difficult. As he says in the beginning of Twenty-three Hours to Kill, “I could be anywhere in the world right now” (and of course he means that literally because he is super-wealthy). “If you were me, would you be up here, hackin’ out another one of these?” I think about that and chuckle every time I start the process of making a new episode of this show. “Hackin’ out another one of these…”        

In the 2002 documentary Jerry Seinfeld: Comedian, we get to see him actively engage with the more difficult aspects of his job in a behind-the-scene way. It’s the first time he’s done stand-up with new material since Seinfeld the sitcom ended, and not every performance is a success. In one scene he actually tells an audience member to shut up—albeit in a very funny, non-threatening way—because the guy is just talking through Jerry’s entire act. Afterwards we see him venting backstage, exasperated, basically saying, “I’m a really famous person. What’s it gonna take for people to pay attention to me?” You can tell he’s kind of amused by the whole thing—by humans in general—and probably knows that it’s good for him to be humbled like that, but at the same time he’s genuinely flummoxed. There’s another moment where he’s onstage in some comedy club or other, and he totally forgets his next bit. All he can do is curse and shake his head. He keeps waiting for it to come to him and it never does. But my favorite instance of watching him work hard comes right before an especially big performance he’s about to do. He’s alone in a hotel room, slowly pacing back and forth, occasionally looking at a piece of paper, but mostly just going through his whole act in his head. You can practically see the metaphorical gears turning. It feels very intimate and I love it.

The difficulty of his job is also what’s allowed Seinfeld to maintain some perspective and stay relatively down-to-earth. Or that’s what he says when Barack Obama asks him over coffee at the White House (because all down-to-earth guys have coffee with the President at the White House) how his wealth and fame hasn't gone to his head. “I’ll give you the real answer,” Seinfeld says, “I fell in love with the work. And the work was joyful, and difficult and interesting, and that was my focus.” I get a lot of Zen vibes when I hear Seinfeld talk about work in this way. The concept of Joyful Mind seems applicable, which, as you might remember from the How To Cook Your Life episode I did, is what we have when we pour our full passion for life into whatever it is we’re doing, even—or especially—when that thing is difficult. And the more Seinfeld and other comics challenge themselves in this way and dig down ever deeper to see what they’re really made of, the more the audience benefits. The comics benefit, too, of course, from fruits of the creative process like self-revelation—the discovery of new insights and opinions—but Seinfeld says, “I’d never give [any of] those things the same weight as the laugh.” In the Steve Harvey episode of Comedians In Cars, he said that people need to laugh even more than we need the truth. In fact he even says that we don’t need the truth. But then, in the episode he did with Seth Meyers, he asserted that “the truth ends every conversation.” And lord know that can be a good thing sometimes.

You might be surprised to learn that, although he’s devoted his life to making others feel happy, Seinfeld himself does not want to be happy all the time. He says as much to Jimmy Fallon on Comedians In Cars: “I don’t want to be happy all the time. Just now and then.” This is an example both of how well-adjusted Jerry is, and also of one of life’s great paradoxes: if we crave or expect happiness all the time, we’re probably going to be less happy overall than if we only expect it “now and then.” Seinfeld also talks about happiness in the Stephen Colbert episode. When Colbert asks him where he ranks happiness in terms of what’s important in life, Seinfeld says, “I think it’s a foolish thing to pursue.” Sounds like something a philosopher would say, doesn’t it? Or some sort of spiritual teacher? Colbert seems to get it, and he responds with, “Suffering is actually a pretty good way to get to happiness.” Jerry agrees. But of course then he has to make a joke about it, saying, “Like I’m suffering right now trying to make you happy.” And so I have to wonder if he does agree that suffering is a good way to get to happiness. I doubt it. He just doesn’t seem like a guy who suffers much. No doubt he experiences pain, but suffering is different. Suffering is what happens when we resist pain, or when we judge our pain as a reflection of our own weakness or something. Jealousy is a kind of suffering, and in the John Mulaney episode of Comedians in Cars, when Mulaney says that Jerry doesn’t seem like the kind of person who experiences envy or jealousy, Jerry agrees. He says, “I mean, there are things I want that I don’t have, but I don’t care that I don’t have them.” 

Also in line with this same happiness themed, in a conversation with John Oliver, Jerry says that he likes to explore the different things that life has to offer, but he doesn’t expect to enjoy them. He’s just curious about what’s working for other people. In his most recent stand-up special on Netflix, called Twenty-three Hours to Kill, he says he does not have a Bucket List, but rather a list that rhymes with “bucket” and starts with F. He doesn’t feel the need to do anything in order to feel like he can die at peace. Now in his late sixties, what else is there worth seeing that he hasn’t already seen? This attitude reminds me of Marcus Aurelius, who said in Meditations, “If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.” Marcus also says that “to live [life] out in these circumstances, among these people, in this body? Nothing to get excited about,” which is another sentiment I think Seinfeld would echo. In Twenty-three Hours to Kill, perhaps speaking more for himself than the majority of humans, he asserts, “Nobody wants to be anywhere. Nobody likes anything. We’re cranky. We’re irritable. And we’re dealing with it by constantly changing locations.”

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As Seinfeld says in the Zach Galifianakis episode of Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, “[Comics are] interested in what’s off about everything. And we seek it, and when we find it, we love it.” One could argue that philosophers and spiritual types alike are driven by the same interest and the same love. What’s wrong with this picture? But instead of getting indignant or freaked out about how everything is wrong with the picture, they simply observe. In many cases, they just ask questions. Socrates did it. Seinfeld does it. In one of his more recent jokes, he asks why public bathroom stalls have “the under-display viewing window, so we can all see the lifeless, collapsed pant legs and tragic little shoe fronts that are just barely poking out… How much more money is it bring this wall down another foot? They don’t even make the panels meet up tight in the corners. Why can’t they cinch it up? Why are we doing this to people?” Plato said that “the feeling of wonder is the touchstone of the philosopher, and all philosophy has its origins in wonder.” As does comedy.

But Seinfeld grapples with deeper societal issues than shoddy bathroom stall construction, and another part of that same Zach Galifianakis episode exemplifies how a question can contain its answer. Essentially talking about cancel culture, Seinfeld says, “The problem with not allowing intolerant talk is that now you’re intolerant.” When Zach asks, “Well how do you judge what’s intolerant?”, Jerry says, “Exactly.” Judge not lest ye be judged, people in glass houses, etc. And, jokes aside, Seinfeld himself is pretty tolerant of most people. If you were to say “It is what it is” to him, he might respond with “Why are you alive?”, but for the most part he doesn’t talk badly about anybody or to anybody in a mean-spirited way—except for in the Bridget Everett episode of Comedians In Cars when he expresses his extreme dislike of another comic who’s name is bleeped out, which makes Everett amusingly uncomfortable. “I’ve never seen you like this,” she says. “I’ve never been like this,” he says. And I believe him. And I’d bet he has good reason for disliking whomever he’s talking about.

But in a much earlier episode of the show, when Howard Stern asks Jerry to talk about who he doesn’t like, saying, “Let’s see you get a little negative,” Jerry won’t do it. “I don’t want to hear myself talk like that,” he says. And this kind of response seems more representative of his general character. Note the emphasis on ethical behavior, which I talked about before. And note, too, that he’s not so much concerned with how others might feel if he says negative things about them—although I’m sure he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. His main concern is how he would feel upon hearing himself talk like that. Just as the character he played in the Seinfeld sitcom didn’t want to be “an orgy guy,” the real-life Seinfeld doesn’t want to be a negative talker. The Buddhist notion of Right Speech comes to mind, which Howard Stern could learn a thing or two about. And in fact, that episode of Comedians In Cars is painful to watch, because Stern so obviously hates himself, and his self-loathing is made all the more apparent by Seinfeld’s obvious ease with himself. He clearly likes himself, but in a way that isn’t arrogant. He likes himself in the way that all of us should like ourselves, because we are one-of-a-kind expressions of the universal life force and that’s a really neat thing! Because there’s so much good work to do and here’s another day in which to do it! He doesn’t like himself in a self-important way, because he knows, as he says in the Michael Richards (a.k.a. Kramer) episode of Comedians In Cars, “We’re just raindrops on a windshield.”

And when things do feel overly important, he knows that’s just a mindset issue. In that same episode, Michael Richards talks about the regret he feels for shouting racist slurs to someone who was heckling him during a stand-up act (as you might recall from years ago), and he says, “It still kicks me around a bit,” with an air that suggests it still kicks him around a lot. “Okay,” Jerry says, “well that’s up to you… That’s up to you to say, ‘You know, I’ve been carrying this bag long enough. I’m gonna put it down.’” He’s not condoning what Richards did, not saying “there, there, you’re a good person.” He’s telling him, in a most loving tone, that he must take responsibility for himself in a different way now. The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre again comes to mind, who said that “existentialism’s first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him." I’m also reminded of Francois Fenelon, the French archbishop and theologian whose book The Seeking Heart I talked about back in December. Fenelon says that beating ourselves up about something is always worse than whatever we did that we’re beating ourselves up about. Not only is it not helpful, but it just mires us ever deeper in our own ego-driven thought patterns, our own tortured self-absorption.

And I’ll add that we beat each other up too much, too, on a societal level. I’m thinking about prisons, which are society’s way of saying, “You sit there and think about what you’ve done.” We’re way too punitive. For once I’d like to see us collectively respond to someone who’s gravely misbehaved—a mass shooter, for instance—with concern instead of disdain, disgust, outrage, etc. Just once, just to see what happens, could we respond with the attitude of, “You have gone astray, my friend. What has caused you to betray your own good heart? When you hurt others you hurt yourself, and we don’t want you to hurt yourself. We want you to be kind to yourself. Has someone hurt you? How have you come to be so lost? The world needs you here. You have a unique purpose to serve and no one else can take your place. How can we help you serve your purpose?” Something like that. Just once. Responding with concern instead of hatred might actually be more effective at changing the behavior. But we don’t really want to change behaviors, do we? We want people to feel bad, to be punished for what they’ve done. Not because the punishment will prevent them from doing it again, but because they “deserve” to be punished. And then we get to feel like we are right and they are wrong, and we love that feeling.

Seinfeld actually touches on the notion of being right in the Ali Wentworth episode of Comedians in Cars. In a conversation about marriage and arguing, he says in all seriousness, “I have absolutely no interest in being right. I used to have feelings. Those feelings got in my way. I got rid of those feelings.” Okay, maybe it wasn’t in all seriousness, but again he’s evoking some interesting spiritual notions, and again Buddhism especially comes to mind. In a recent dharma talk, one of the teachers in my sangha reminded me of an inquiry I’d heard before, a question we can ask ourselves when tempted to engage in an argument: “Do I want to be right, or do I want to be free?” The need to be right is a purely egoic need, driven by the feeling that if we are wrong about something, we are ourselves are wrong, or stupid, or weak, or what have you. These are probably the feelings that Seinfeld “got rid of.” You might say he’s just suppressing them, and that’s not good. But in this case he specifies that the feeling were “getting in his way,” which is not the reason people typically suppress feelings. I’d say usually it’s because the feelings are too painful to deal with consciously that they get suppressed. There’s a difference between suppressing something because it’s painful or shameful or whatever, and consciously getting rid of something because it’s preventing you from being where you want to be—in this case, free to do something other than argue with your spouse. If you don’t want to argue with your spouse, then drop your attachment to being right.

Another thing I appreciate and admire about Jerry Seinfeld is his perspective on death. In the Jon Stewart episode of Comedians in Cars, he asks Stewart how he would like to be buried. Stewart says he hasn’t really thought about it and asks, “Have you started to think about that?” When Seinfeld says it doesn’t bother him to think about it, Stewart says, “But I always think, like, why would you think about it?” Seinfeld’s answer: “Just for fun.” To me this implies that most thinking is fun for him, and how he’d like to be buried is just something else to think about. But he later reveals in the John Mulaney episode that he’s actually pretty excited about death, that it does sound fun to him. When Mulaney says he’d like to die looking at the ocean, then follows it up with, “I think, though I don’t know what it feels like to die,” Jerry says without missing a beat, “I think it’s gonna feel great. All the things you’re done with. I just think it’s gonna be fantastic.”

How refreshing! What if we all thought that way about death? And what if it really is gonna be fantastic? That would be the greatest of all cosmic jokes! This thing that all of us walk around fearing more than anything else could be the most amazing, wonderful, beautiful thing that life has to offer. Maybe that’s another attitude we should all just try for a bit, along with being less punitive. I for one recall Seinfeld’s excitement for death on a regular basis, when I find myself fearing it. And in fact, fearing death is one big thing that I look forward to being done with! I won’t have to worry anymore about my dogs dying either, or the hell realm that this world could soon become as a result of climate change, or nuclear war, or both.

Seinfeld’s perspective on dying is also apparent in the bit he does in Twenty-three Hours to Kill, about how we like to say, “Well, he died doing what he loved.” Jerry points out that the dead guy in question might feel a bit differently about the activity in question if he knew it would be the cause—or at least the situation—of his ultimate demise. And also, wouldn’t it be better to die doing something you hated? Then you could say, “Fantastic, at least I’m done with that!”

I mentioned earlier that Seinfeld’s initial, childhood attraction to comedy was based in the realization that comedians had no respect for anything. And it would seem that, for him at least, this irreverence even applies to life itself. In the intro part of the Sebastian Maniscalco episode of Comedians In Cars—over some faded footage from the sixties of people riding around on scooters with infants in their arms—he says, “Remember when life was kind of a cheap throw-away thing? Was it more fun? Of course it was!” He echoes this sentiment in a conversation with Lewis Black, about art, saying, “Importance is the worst thing to put on art, comedy, creativity of any kind… If you think this is important, you’re screwed before you write the first word.” One could argue that there is an art to living, that life is a form of creativity, and could therefore apply this idea thusly: “If you think life is important, you’re screwed before you take the first breath.”

And also, while we’re at it, if you think that life is short, you’re just plain wrong. Your memory is faulty. As Jerry says in his conversation with Bill Maher, “[Life] is very long… If I pulled out a chart of every day of Bill Maher’s life, you would go, ‘Oh yeah, there was quite a bit to this.’” I remember being told as a twenty-one-year-old that life was long. I was in France for a study abroad summer, homesick and regretting my decision, and one of the chaperones of my cohort—a woman in her sixties, probably—said so gently, “Life is long. A month is nothing.” I’d never heard anyone say that life was long before. It was a comfort to hear. But in that Comedians in Cars episode, Bill Maher persisted, saying that life does go faster, the older you get. “Everybody says that.” “Yeah, they say that,” Jerry agrees. “[But] none of these things are true. It’s faulty perception.” I’m inclined to agree with Maher here and “everybody” who says that time passes faster the older you get, because I have experienced it myself and it really does feel true. But it’s interesting to consider how Jerry might be right, and maybe it is just faulty perception.

I like Martín Prechtel’s theory on how time passes for babies in utero. In his book The Smell of Rain on Dust, about grief and praise, he says that nine months in utero feels like ninety years to that baby, because if you think about how slowly time passes for little children compared to adults, it must pass that much more slowly for developing fetuses. And a newborn’s first cry is actually a cry of grief, because they’ve lost the only home they’ve ever known for what felt like an entire lifetime. And indeed it was an entire lifetime, albeit a precursor to another lifetime, and though we can never know how time actually does pass in utero, we can maybe start to see that time itself is not an accurate gauge for determining what counts as a lifetime. As Marcus Aurelius says, “Three days of life or three generations: what’s the difference?” And all you ever lose when you die anyway is the present moment. “A brief instant,” Marcus says, “is all that is lost.”

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I should have mentioned earlier how William Irwin points out in his intro to the book Seinfeld and Philosophy, that “the very name ‘Seinfeld’ rings with philosophical significance…meaning (roughly) ‘field of being’ in German. Seinfeld [the sitcom] has indeed been fertile ground, a ‘field of being’ from which spring fruitful discussions and observations of the philosophical importance of the mundane.” And throughout this episode I’ve also been proposing that Seinfeld the man—both in his stand-up act and in conversation with friends, as presented in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee—has also provided us with this fertile ground for new ways of talking about the nature of existence. The parts of life that might seem trivial, or like “nothing,” are, through his perspective, turned into something meaningful, and we recognize its meaning so thoroughly and instantly that we must laugh out loud, sometimes uncontrollably. We see, as William Irwin writes, that “everything and nothing are sometimes not so terribly far apart.” Which reminds me of a bit in Seinfeld’s recent Netflix special, Twenty-three Hours to Kill, wherein he asserts that, in the grand scheme of life, “sucks” and “great” aren’t that far apart, either.

And speaking of things being close together, in a PBS interview that’s part of a series called “Pioneers of Television,” Seinfeld says that no other art than live stand-up comedy so closely connects the recipient of the art and the artist himself. What he calls the “wire” between the comedian and the audience member is very short, the reaction to the art instantaneous, and seen, heard, and felt in a way that other reactions to art are not. With comedy, the laugh tells you if the art is any good. As opposed to say, live music, wherein you can’t always know for sure if the audience is resonating with your stuff. A concert goer could look bored, for instance, and actually be really moved by the music. Not so with stand-up comedy. I just thought that was an interesting point on Seinfeld’s part and wanted to share it.

There’s actually a lot more I could say about Seinfeld’s various insights and what they have to offer to us as humans trying to make it through another day in this world, but instead I’ll just leave you with a few gems that I wasn’t able to work in. Just a few more things he’s said that endear me to him.

First, there’s his response to Sarah Jessica Parker commenting on how much coffee he drinks and how, if she drank that much, she’d have horrible anxiety. He says, “I like the anxiety.” And there’s what he says to Trevor Noah: “You don’t need to know anything. Everything that you need to know, you’ll figure it out when you need to know it. Even if you miscalculate, and make the wrong decision, you needed to know that.” And to Howard Stern, when Stern asks, “Did you have a good relationship with your father?” Jerry says, “Yeah. I mean, I didn’t expect much.” And to Dave Chappelle, in regards to being creative/artistic, even if it’s hard work: “If you’re able to contribute that, maybe you should do it.” And to Ellen Degeneres: “Love is not rational. You can say, ‘Well, I love this person because,’ but that’s not really the reason. There is no reason. You just feel it.” And finally, to Marc Maron—and this sounds obvious but I think it’s something we all need to hear on a regular basis: “You can’t be other than what you are. You can only be what you are.”