The Tao of Jerry Seinfeld: Comedic Philosophies on Revenge, Emotion, and Death
Jerry Seinfeld has pervaded homes around the world, chiefly with the sitcom Seinfeld, co-created with Larry David. The staying-power of the show is so strong that one strolling the streets of Chicago, two decades after the end of the show’s production, is likely to be stalked by his face plastered on the sides of city-buses.
Seinfeld co-star Michael Richards, the actor behind the infamous
character Cosmo Kramer, tells a story about a trip he took to Bali to “step away from the world.” Although deep in the jungle, across the globe from where the show was set, he told how being recognized as Kramer was inescapable. During this jungle sabbatical, Richards encountered naked tribes-people using a primitive TV set to watch the show. Standing in the brush, as they pointed at him, shouting in their native tongue, Richards could distinguish only one word being uttered: “Kramer!”
One could argue that Seinfeld’s influence on comedy and culture emanates from the comedic purity of the show. An unbeatable challenge would be to find a single sad moment that isn’t immediately followed by a joke throughout the show’s illustrious nine-year run.
Delving into Seinfeld’s groundbreaking career as an actor, writer, producer of Seinfeld, stand-up comedian, and host of his series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee reveals more than comedic engineering, but a philosophical view of life peculiarly stoic. Although comedians and aspiring funny-people can glean a humor treasure-trove from Seinfeld, anybody can learn a thing or three from him about the art of living.
In the information-saturated era that has emerged since the end of Seinfeld, any person who has experienced a personal betrayal or harm has, owing to social media, the convenience of petty cyber-revenge unavailable to the masses in the 90's.
In an early Seinfeld episode titled “The Revenge”, co-star Jason Alexander’s character, George Costanza, plans to exact revenge in response to a petty incident. The episode begins with Costanza’s boss extracting a laugh out of a business meeting with a snide comment at Costanza’s expense. The small, neurotic, melodramatic Costanza spends the better part of the episode concocting his vengeance.
He lands on the idea of slipping his boss a “Mickey,” a drink laced with a psychotic drug such as chloral hydrate. While not sharing the common intention associated with the act — to incapacitate and rob the victim — Costanza’s goal was to simply cause him to pass out.
Upon hearing of his friend’s plan in the dingy city laundromat, Seinfeld asks, “What is the point of all this?” Costanza responds with a firm, pointed index-finger and a simple one-word answer, “Revenge.” Is it just coincidence that this comes from someone who is self-admittedly self-loathing? Probably not.
Seinfeld’s profound reply doubles as a succinct philosophy about the art of living: “The best revenge is living well.” If Seinfeld was, instead of a sitcom in the 90’s, a play during the time of Christ, the Stoic Philosophers hearing this, may have said (scratching their beards turning to-and-fro from another), “Jerry doth maketh great sense! He must be of the Stoic school!”
The Stoics coveted the ability to distinguish the internal and in one’s control from the external and out of one’s control. Epictetus — born a first century slave and became a Stoic schoolmaster — imprinted this concept into the minds of his students at Nicopolis in Ancient Greece. Found now in his Discourses and Selected Writings, his wellspring of practical ethics was originally of the oral tradition. Owing to his pupil Arrian, his philosophies — which have helped centuries of generations achieve serenity — were recorded into posterity.
The first lesson Discourses offers, titled “Concerning what is in our power and what is not,” introduces “the best and most efficacious gift” we humans possess and which predicates every move of stoic mental jujitsu: “the ability to make good use of impressions.” Simply put, he is talking about perception.
Through deliberate practice to strengthen the muscle of perception, one can master what the schoolmaster believed is the chief task in life: “To identify and separate matters so that I can clearly say to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.” If you can internalize this thought process it can be a useful practice to help navigate the trials of daily life.
Epictetus relates a telling anecdote about fellow Stoic Philosopher, Agrippinus, I think Seinfeld would appreciate:
“Agrippinus used to say, ‘I don’t add to my troubles.’ To illustrate, someone once said to him, ‘You are being tried in the Senate — good luck.’ But it was eleven in the morning, and at that hour he was in the habit of taking the bath and exercise. ‘Let us be off to exercise.’ When he was done, word came that he had been condemned. ‘To exile,’ he asked, ‘or death?’ ‘Exile.’ ‘And my estate, what about that?’ ‘it has not been confiscated.’ Well then, let us go to my villa in Aricia and have lunch there.’… ‘I have to die. If it is now, well then I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived — and dying I will tend to later.’”
While certainly an extreme example used more for humor than illustration, as trials with the possible verdicts of exile or death are sparse nowadays, this anecdote sheds a great deal of light on his thought process. He evaluates impressions, judges what is or isn’t in his control, and proceeds accordingly.
Across the Adriatic Sea in Rome more than three decades later, Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire, clothed in immense power and wealth. Influenced by Epictetus’s Discourses, Aurelius recorded his philosophies in a personal wartime journal at the battlefront. Posthumously published, Meditations includes his own ideas on perception and revenge which share the current with those of Epictetus and Seinfeld.
Whereas Seinfeld equates proper vengeance to proper living, Aurelius’s method for handling “injuries” also begins internally: “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” I parenthesized injuries earlier, for the Emperor adds the corollary, “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.” What thoughts you have and how you entertain them are choices you control. Though difficult, being able to flip the switch from experiencing to rejecting your sense of injury is a superpower worth pursuing.
It’s a double-pronged effect. Begin by identifying things that are out of your power. If someone insults you, ask: “Is this within the power of my control?” Naturally, one cannot control the thoughts or actions of others: the answer is no, it is not. Why spend more energy than that on something you cannot affect? That’s the first effect — freeing negativity from your soul.
The second is the subsequent sense of freedom that will flood your psyche. You’ve been insulted — so what? The insulter has inflicted upon themselves a wrong, which they will have to live with. It’s like setting down a heavyweight suitcase of petty grievances. Once you set it down, you escape its hold and are then lighter.
It’s the inward focus that is found in Seinfeld’s approach toward life. He understands that he cannot control the thoughts and actions of others, only his own. Why spend the energy and waste the time on such silly tasks as vengeance?
Over a decade and a half after “The Revenge” episode, Seinfeld hosts his friend and Seinfeld co-star Michael Richards in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episode “It’s Bubbly Time, Jerry”. Though Richards will join show business posterity for his role as Kramer, to some he may be remembered more recently for a moment of weakness and anger on stage as a stand-up. Sitting in a California deli, the clear-door beverage refrigerator back-lighting him, Richards laments, “[I] lost my temper because somebody interrupted my act and said some things that hurt me, and I lashed out in anger. I should have been working selflessly that evening.” With deep regret for his actions, Richards tells his friend how that night still lives with him.
“I busted up after that event seven years ago. It broke me down. It was a selfish response. I took it too personally, and I should have just said, ‘Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I’m not funny. I think I’ll go home and work on my material. I’ll see you tomorrow night,’” punctuating the statement with a bout of gibberish as Kramer would have done. “But inside, it still kicks me around a bit.”
Jerry’s advice to Richards encompasses another stoic approach to life and emotion. It’s a word of advice Epictetus could easily have said to one of his students at Nicopolis over two millennia ago. “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.’” The wisdom strikes Richards. Absorbing it, he responds only, “Yeah… Yeah…”
Leaving the deli, as the sea-breeze sweeps through the nearby trees, they walk the streets, their presence causing double-takes and smiles from recognizing passersby. They shake hands and take pictures with fans, which seemed to be every person with whom they cross paths. The episode closes as they cruise down the ocean-side highway, and a calm comes over Richard’s face.
Stoics had varying approaches to handling emotion, but they all center around an internal locus of control, foundational to Jerry’s advice. Epictetus told his students, “In general, remember that is we who torment, we who make difficulties for ourselves.”
A fellow Stoic Philosopher, Seneca the Younger was at his death when Epictetus was just a ten-year-old slave. His philosophical ideologies were originally encapsulated in a series of letters to a friend and protégé. They are now available in an anthology called Letters from a Stoic. In one of his letters he wrote, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” Their methods have the same starting point: within oneself.
One year later, in the “I Like Kettlecorn” episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with David Letterman, Seinfeld hints at his comfort with a most uncomfortable topic. Sitting in the quaint yet busy New England diner, Letterman tells how his son injured himself playing with a home-built push-car before the first baseball practice of the season. “I can’t go to baseball practice,” he says to his dad, “because I’ve hurt my hand.”
How would Seinfeld react? Stern and authoritative, or caring and accepting? Seinfeld, with self-amusement, gives his favorite canned answer, “I support whatever position my wife takes. That’s what I do.”
The former talk-show host uses his still-sharp interviewing skills and probes further. Laughing, Letterman asks, “Because she knows more about parenting than you?”
“Here’s the answer,” Seinfeld says, “Doesn’t matter what you do, but why have a fight with your wife?”
The two laugh throughout, just as two old friends engaged in lighthearted shit-talking do.
“Yeah. But the worst part of that is — maybe you don’t experience this since you mentioned that you don’t care,” quips Letterman, stirring both to laughs, “Is that you feel guilty about your own behavior.”
Most of us, as Letterman seemed, are likely at once bewildered by Seinfeld’s response. Though the order of thought was derailed by Letterman’s reaction, Seinfeld began, “You know, I kind of look at my family now and I think, ‘Well, in 60 years everyone’s dead here.’” Astonished, Letterman calls for the check, to which Seinfeld couldn’t help but burst into laughter. Naturally, as would happen in Seinfeld, the moment of seriousness vanished. Seinfeld elaborates, “I just don’t like this over-consideration of every decision.”
True to Stoic fashion, Seinfeld uses the contemplation of death as a boon to bring the daily decisions of life into sobering clarity. Seated across a small red-and-white-checkered diner table, the two carried on discussing the — to them — serious business of comedy.
Though murky in the episode with late-night legend David Letterman, Seinfeld’s interpretation of death surfaces with more clarity in his episode with fellow stand-up John Mulaney called “A Hooker In The Rain”. In an urban-industrial carpeting store in New York City, the two joke around while Seinfeld accompanies Mulaney in searching for a carpet, an errand assigned to him by his wife. The conversation turns toward one’s end-of-life perspective.
“I’d like to die looking at the ocean,” Mulaney says. “I think, though I don’t know what it feels like to die.”
“I think it’s gonna feel great,” Seinfeld replies, as Mulaney twists to the side sniggering, as one would to divert a sneeze. “All the things you’re done with. I just think it’s gonna be fantastic.”
One well versed in Stoic Philosophy finds no issue seeing the resemblance between this and the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius:
“Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature … This is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us … Consider two things that should reconcile you to death: the nature of the things you’ll behind you, and the kind of people you’ll no longer be mixed up with.”
The idea that we are all finally reduced to dust, offers several uses. A decision-making framework can be formed around this concept. It can eliminate, or minimize, the entertainment of meaningless thoughts in one’s mind. A backhanded remark from a friend or coworker could, instead of rule one’s thoughts for a time, be deflected with the confidence that we all die just the same. Spending time in one’s life in petty anger is unworthy of the care.
Another tool is the reduction of a high-status person’s allure, be it social, political, or occupational. Anxious, hushed ideas and contributions can be voiced in front of the company leaders at one’s workplace, in social environments, or political arenas. Death makes equals of us all, and the filter suddenly — rightfully — becomes the strength of one’s argument rather than in whose company the discussion takes place.
Lastly, it implores one to capitalize on every opportunity and advantage life and serendipity have to offer. Death is the end of the story for us all. As Seneca would say, “Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
Waiting for the building’s elevator, Mulaney warns Seinfeld, “If she doesn’t like the rug, I’m gonna throw you under the bus… immediately.” As two stand-up comics tasked with selecting a carpet to tie a room together — and with autonomy to do so — Seinfeld and Mulaney were set up for failure. The carpet they chose was unfit for the room. Defending the rug, Seinfeld says it was a joint decision. Mulaney’s wife asks, “You both liked this one?” Taking a bit from Seinfeld’s act, the husband underhandedly deflects the fault with his sheepish response, “I kinda did.” Seinfeld found a home for the rejected rug, giving it to a member of the production staff, who put it to good use.
Owing to Jerry’s internal locus of control, understanding of the mechanics of human emotion, and comfort with death, “Stoic” has justifiably earned a place alongside that of “writer” and “stand-up”. Interior decoration is a different story.
This article was originally published at thoughtmedley.com.
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