THE DIVERSITY OF MANKIND
10/10/98
‘Way back on memorial day my 11 year old granddaughter Christa was spending the weekend with us. Among other things we had been doing to amuse ourselves, we had spent the whole weekend with the TV tuned to “Animal Planet”. Monday evening at 8:00 PM my wife said “OK, now we’re going to watch our show. You’ve had control of the TV for the whole weekend, Christa.” She changed the channel, to the mutual disappointment of Christa and me.
When she saw what we were going to watch, Christa said “Allie McBeal? I never thought you’d watch that!”
I responded “What do you mean? It’s the best show on television.” “Except maybe for “King of the Hill.”
“Well, you don’t watch Seinfeld or the Simpsons.”
I almost smacked my little granddaughter before I took the time to reflect. Why don’t I watch those shows? The most revolting person I’ve ever encountered, a talk show host from Temple, thinks that the Simpsons is the best TV show ever to grace the planet. That could be the reason, except that I wasn’t watching The Simpsons before I ever heard of that talk show host.
Seinfeld, we have always thought, is just a dumb show about nothing. Not long ago I surfed right into a piece on Court TV about a man, a watcher of Seinfeld, who had been fired from IBM because of an incident related to his being accused of sexual harassment. Part of the testimony included his having shown the woman a copy of a dictionary page which described the notorious body part from one of Seinfeld’s shows. She said that he made her look at the dictionary, and went on about making sure she understood the definition.
I’m glad he won his judgement, about 1.3 million dollars from IBM, but I hope that he never sees a penny of it. The man is too dumb to be let out of the house, much less given a large sum of money.
My wife, who was in the kitchen during the Court TV thing, asked what body part they were talking about. I told her.
“That’s not the way to pronounce it, anyway” she announced.
“Are you sure?” I replied as I grabbed for the dictionary.
The first dictionary did not even have the word, the second had a definition but no pronunciation; when I finally found it a third dictionary, I saw that of two ways to pronounce the word, neither of them rhymes with “Dolores”.
THAT’S THE KIND OF SHOW SEINFELD IS..
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2 comments:
I totally agree about Seinfeld, Papa. I never saw the attraction. Simpsons is okay in small doses. Ally McBeal had wit. I wonder if it's on NetFlix...
Although I could never be as committed to Ally McBeal as I once was, I do think it was a very good show, and I would watch if it suddenly appeared on the screen through no effort of mine.
Although this "remembrance" was written well over a decade ago, I'm impressed to notice that Larry David has recently referred to Seinfeld as a "show about nothing".
I seem to be more observant than ever I realized......;*D
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