How Seinfeld Made Something Out Of Nothing
template, but injecting a little more saccharine romance, Friends similarly concerned itself with the lives of young adults surviving New York in a state of arrested development; and it likewise revolved around a group that meets to yammer about their day at the local coffee shop, frequently getting distracted by the particulars of dating and relationships. Shows like How I Met Your Mother have drawn inspiration from Seinfeld'splayful vocabulary, trying to engineer terminology like 'suit up' and the dating 'Lemon Law' and the many governing strictures of 'The Bro Code'. Always Sunny in Philadelphia has proudly declared itself 'Seinfeld on crack', steering characters already skewed toward selfishness straight into the abyss of a destructive, deluded chaos. But to me, Seinfeldat its best has always worked under a wholly different dynamic than the rote summaries people sometimes use to encapsulate it would suggest. It rather operates at a level of discourse and play articulated best in the discussions of the language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was ...okay, to be honest, not such a funny guy. The cliché is to describe Seinfeldas a show about nothing. Indeed, it is a description that the show itself mischievously encouraged in its fourth season, when George and Jerry conceive of the sitcom pilot Jerry(a show-within-a-show that, ironically, came to be geared around by a zany sitcom plot about a court-ordered butler). They refer to their invented program, itself inspired by their 'real' life in the fiction of the sitcom, literally, as, 'A show about nothing'; as George explains to the baffled NBC executives:
'But nothing happens on the show. You see, it's just like life. You know, you eat, you go shopping, you read, you eat, you read, you go shopping...'Often considered 'anti-television', Seinfeld seemed to subvert all the sitcom conventions of character and narrative. Revolving around four rather narcissistic people, figures locked together in a strange interdependence that would, according to show creator Larry David, contain 'no hugging' and 'no learning', it observed the moments in-between the usual sitcom 'moments'. In Seinfeld, no one's boss was coming over to dinner; no one delivered a baby in an elevator; no one had a zany wedding, and needed to be talked out of their cold feet with a syrupy 'awwwww...' from the audience. (Indeed, one gets the sense that had the audience said 'awwwww...' to anything that was depicted on that soundstage David would have had them forcibly removed from the studio and hurled into a ditch.*) Instead, its episodes frequently revolved around scenarios in which (at least superficially), the plot appeared to be happening elsewhere, and this quartet are left distracted by the little stuff: waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant; trying to find a lost car in a garage; taking a subway ride; bickering over the size of a salad; trying to get the hell out of Florida while arguing about a gift pen; trying to make it to a dinner party with a marble rye. It was the show that concentrated on the 'nothing' going on behind the conventional television 'somethings' that had grown tediously stale. But while 'nothing' is a snappy summation one that hints at the inimitable tone of its plots it belies the genius of the real subject matter into which the show delved: the connective tissue at the heart of every episode. Because in actuality, the whole of Seinfeld, and the wellspring from which it draws its masterful comic sensibility, is about grammar about testing the application of language amongst a circle of like-minded language users. George, Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer each play out the normative social influence of behavioural and ideological concepts. They test words and play out their meanings. They perform, in a very real sense, comical versions of the language-games proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
'Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.'**Whenever new terminologies are introduced (scientific and medical terms, new forms of technology, slang and definitions) our language like a city grows and adapts to make room for these words, and their new applications. But we have to know these terms and their meaning; see them applied, to learn the grammar of their usage. Otherwise, as Wittgenstein notes, we are so alienated from this grammar that we will fail to understand what is being said. As he observes later in the book in one of his most famous statements:
If I lion could talk, we could not understand him.***What Wittgenstein is essentially saying here using the example of a beast given the power of speech is that language requires more than just knowing the definitions of a list of words. It's about being attuned to their context, to the subtleties of their use. In the case of the lion magically granted the power of human speech or not his grammar, his frames of reference (or in Wittgenstein's terms, his 'forms of life'), would nonetheless remain so alien, so divorced from our own experience, that we would still be unable to comprehend one another anyway. It would, on a much smaller scale, be like getting dropped into the middle of a Seinfeldepisode, suddenly witness, with no establishing perspective, to a bunch of people jabbering about 'Mimbos', 'shrinkage' and being 'anti-dentite.' Without the necessary back story, we would, like the lion, suddenly have no idea what these words meant recognising their sounds, but oblivious to their unnatural applications, seemingly locked behind an abstracted code. Wittgenstein therefore came to argue that the only means to explore the way in which language makes meaning was to examine its grammar to look at how language is being applied at the very moment of its use, in localised examinations of speech that he called 'language-games'. One such example of these games was an examination of various uses of the word 'blue'. After all, the word 'blue' could be an adjective, a noun; it could be one of (or all of) a series of colours; even a state of mind:
Is this blue the same as the blue over there? Do you see any difference? You are mixing paint and you say Its hard to get the blue out of this sky. Its turning fine, you can already see blue sky again. Look at what different effects these two blues have. Do you see the blue book over there? Bring it here. This blue signal-light means . . . . Whats this blue called? Is it indigo?****'Blue', Wittgenstein reveals, is not simply a label applied to a physical or conceptual object. It can have a myriad of meanings in a multitude of circumstances, all defined by its grammar and discerned by language-users familiar with these uses effortlessly in the moment of its utterance. And it is precisely these kinds of explorations of language that are undertaken in every episode of Seinfeld, as each week we watch these characters explore through the myriad potential for meaning that they can engender in their discussions their own linguistic suburb in the city of language.
'You have no idea of the magnitude of this thing. If she is allowed to infiltrate this world, then George Costanza as you know him ceases to exist. You see, right now I have "Relationship George". But there is also "Independent George". That's the George you know. The George you grew up with. Movie George. Coffee shop George. Liar George. Bawdy George. .... And he's dying Jerry! If "Relationship George" walks through this door he will kill "Independent George". A George divided against itself cannot stand!'Indeed, it is when Susan starts using the language of 'Independent George' declaring that she will put something in 'The Vault' that George specifically begins to see the walls between his behavioural selves crumbling.***** Perhaps the best example of this kind of language-game play, however, comes in the episode 'The Alternate Side', in which Kramer gets a bit role in the project of another loquacious New Yorker, Woody Allen. Having impressed the filmmaker with an act of unintentional slapstick, Kramer is offered a tiny speaking part (literally elevated from extraneous onlooker to language-user), and is asked to deliver the line,
'These pretzels are making me thirsty.'When Kramer returns to Jerry's apartment to relay this news, he shares with the others the line he is tasked with delivering. George, Jerry and Elaine each offer suggestions on how best to convey the phrase's meaning. Elaine screws up her face, smacking her lips as though trying to banish the salt from her palate, seemingly surprised to discover, 'These pretzels are making me thirsty...' Jerry meanwhile, dismissing her effort, declares, 'These pretzels are making me thirsty,' over-earnestly slicing the air with his hand. George, offering an overwrought interpretation, bores a hole in the table with his stare as he burbles, 'These pretzels... are making me thirsty!' in a tone of barely contained rising-crisis. Kramer is unsatisfied with them all, and although vowing to work on the line further, to continue trying to find its most suitable inflection, seems resolved to embrace his own vaudevillian delivery, all but winking into the camera as he grins, 'These pretzels are making me thirsty!' No consensus is reached, and each character goes their own way, each chasing down their individual plotlines. However, at the end of every one of these excursions, George, Jerry, Elaine and Kramer return to the line, this time investing it with genuine and contextual meaning. Kramer continues to roll the line around in his mind, mystified that he cannot seem to invest the statement with feeling: 'These pretzels are making me thirsty?' George, unhinged by the stress of failing to repark an increasingly complex Tetris game of cars, screams the line as a displaced non sequitur out of the apartment window, 'THESE PRETZELS ARE MAKING ME THIRSTY!' Elaine, choked with discomfort at trying to break up with her boyfriend who has just suffered an incapacitating medical scare squirms, 'These pretzels are making me thirsty...' through awkward laughter. And Jerry, seething with contempt at a rental car employee who has just informed him he will be responsible for paying the damages, despite his having bought the insurance, spits, 'These pretzels are making me thirsty!' Just as Wittgenstein displayed in his examples of the word 'blue', in each of these instances, the phrase takes on dramatically new and singular meaning dependent upon the context of its use. When George and Jerry conceive of the premise for their show-within-a-show the mise en abyme that reflects upon the fiction's larger structure their description of 'Nothing', and a 'show about nothing', is not meant to indicate that it will be boring, about depicting emptiness, or the negation of purpose; instead it is about minutiae, about the ineffable strings of usage that govern behaviour, that dictate meaning, and that consequentially allow us to function as a community. As George would elsewhere poignantly shout:
'We're living in a community here!'And so, for a show that purports to be about 'nothing', the show reveals itself to concern the most profound and central 'something' of all. Seinfeld, in celebrating the seeming 'nothingness' that binds all verbal communication, exposes the centrality of linguistic communion of the ineffable ties that define all human speech, and the shared experience that invests these applications with meaning. As Wittgenstein would say, it's about language-games: who knows them; how they are being employed. The genius of the Seinfeld program is that each week we get to watch these concepts, these definitions, play out, watch them effortlessly, organically stirred into usage. Each episode is a language-game, teasing out the implications of these descriptors, validating or disproving their acceptance into the communal parlance. In Seinfeldwe are drawn into that circle. Made an unseen occupant of that diner booth. We know the context. We've seen the usage. We get it. * According to his own account on the Seinfeld DVDs, he even despised, and actively discouraged the audience from applauding when Kramer slid into scene. ** Philosophical Investigations #18. *** Philosophical Investigations, II xi, p.223. **** Philosophical Investigations #33. ***** And this play with grammar is even true in its last two, far broader (and arguably less satisfying) seasons after Larry David had left as show-runner. Although the series had turned into something of a weekly comic cryptic crossword with three or four seemingly disparate narratives that would somehow interweave by the endpoint the comedy nonetheless came from knowing just how disconnected those through lines were before they were given new agency in the context of the show's resolution. Kramer meaninglessly wandering around with a meat slicer suddenly became crucial to Elaine when she had to feed a dog through the crack under a locked door.