I Fuckin Hate Jerry Seinfeld

He sucks

If life deals you too many blows, sometimes you gotta fuck off to Amsterdam and spend your days tooling around the canals on a boat with your amazing dog, looking at the clouds. It’s super sad when your dog dies, that’s another blow life will deal you. I really miss my dog. This is our first summer here without him, and I feel him everywhere. We’re finally going to bury him this summer, down on the canal bank next to the blackberry bush where we keep our boat. We were going to bury him under the tree he used to lie under, but the Gemeente cut it down, which was another blow. We loved that tree. 

Brian was the best and we miss him terribly

I was sent an advanced reader copy of The Resilience Myth, by Soraya Chemaly and I read it while lying in the Vondelpark, in between staring at the clouds. It’s a good book, well written and smartly researched, I recommend it. After my essay about being pushed out of my career by shitty men went super viral, a few literary agents came knocking on my door asking if I wanted to elaborate, perhaps in book-length format. I don’t. I said what I said. But I did pitch a book about how resilience is a lie – that sometimes you are derailed, and life doesn’t get back on track for you. Contrary to popular narrative, sometimes you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps and emerge from the muck, ready to slay your dragons. Not everyone gets to fuck off to Amsterdam with their awesome dog to stare at clouds, either. The book I pitched was already being written by someone else, and I’m glad because it’s much better than I ever could have written. This book wasn’t mine to write — the universe had someone else in mind for it. I’m relieved it’s in the world and I didn’t have to write it. I couldn’t have done it the same justice. 

The book I do want to write is called They Suck and it lists everyone who sucks with a detailed story about why, from the petty to the profound. I’ve been writing it in my head, in notebooks, on my Stroopwaffled blog, and in Medium and Substack posts for years, and some day perhaps it will be published in a tidy book format, handy for reading at the beach. I’d like that. My latest addition to the list of people who suck is Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve known Jerry Seinfeld sucks for some time, but it seems like he’s revealed his suckitude sufficiently lately that the rest of the world is starting to catch on. 

I fuckin hate Jerry Seinfeld. He’s gross, and if saying so out loud ruins my chances at EGOT, so be it. Jerry made news last month after he declared sitcoms were ruined by woke liberals and now he’s out there feeling nostalgic for ‘dominant masculinity’. As a reminder, Jerry dated a 17-year old when he was 38 so it’s no wonder he holds this point of view, he doesn’t want anyone ruining his fun. It’s something he doesn’t really have to worry about because he’s a billionaire with the power to make or break someone’s career with an invitation to get coffee, during which time he will drive his companion in a dangerous car that is not modern-day road worthy, on a busy LA highway, in a vehicle woefully equipped with rubberbands for seatbelts, and completely disregard his guest’s obvious discomfort. It was so uncomfortable to watch these scenes it raised my blood pressure. 

It’s on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee that I truly learned to hate Jerry Seinfeld. I watched it with my kid over the period of about five months, one episode per evening between dinner and homework, and sitting through it was an exercise in torture for not only me, but also for my kid who loves stand up comedy. I don’t know why we saw the whole series through, but it has something to do with our neuro-spicy need to finish things. We did, however, eventually figure out we could fast forward through the guests we simply could not abide, and that made things marginally better.

Jerry has revealed who he is many times over. He was a notorious bachelor until he married his wife, and she sucks, too. So badly so that she had to use her influence to secure a glossy feature in Vogue (or Vanity Fair, intriguingly the piece seems to have been scrubbed from the internet, but it was definitely a Condé Nast feature, which I read while I worked at TeenVogue in the presence of none other than Anna Wintour, as we often shared photos across publications and we were going to be featuring these two asshats in our magazine, for some reason), to tell the world what a not-horrible person she was from her Hamptons farmhouse kitchen, but she is, in fact, a horrible person. She traded up after her honeymoon, leaving her fresh husband behind for a richer fish, and even though she was set for life, she appropriated someone else’s recipes to write a cookbook (she ultimately won the plagiarism case, how nice for her!) that she promoted on Oprah, then humble bragged about gifting Oprah 21 pairs of Christian Louboutins as a little thank you gesture after the show catapulted her book to a best seller. There are also petty things like the time she was quoted as saying how she hates how people thank their spouses and refer to them as their best friends in Oscar speeches. Her snarky take was something like, hahaha we hate each other, it’s so funny, let’s buy a 15 million dollar house in the Hamptons and be horrible people together. 

Back to Jerry. He sucks. He’s selfish and dismissive and steeped in money, power, and influence in ways that are emblematic of much of what’s wrong with America right now. He’s telling the world all about it with his own thin mouth, but you can also find it in blind items, which I always home in on because it’s where you learn who sucks the most. The blind items about Jerry Seinfeld are especially gross. I mean, do whatever you want in your own marriage but hitting on your teenage daughter’s friends is gross and having a wife who doesn’t care cuz she loves money is also gross. I also dislike the way he engages with his female guests. He fawns over the ones who are pretty and girly and giggle and flirt or can hang with the guys and in the words of Anne Ramsey in Throw Momma From the Train — “the unsalted nuts make me choke,” which is how I like to describe anything that grosses me out, in this case, how Jerry Seinfeld treats his female guests.

Jerry sucks the most when he talks with other comedians about his sucky wife and kids, which isn’t very often, but it’s revealing. He’s delighted to be married. It suits all his needs in the most clichéd of patriarchal ways. He’s fed, looked after, glowed-up, has company —  when he wants it. All his needs are taken care of, and still, when he speaks about his wife, it’s with the take-my-wife-please comedy stylings. Has that ever been funny? But the way he talks about his kids is what really gets under my skin, and this is where the insidious side of his callousness shines through the most. In these segments, he says how much he loves having kids, how great and entertaining it is for him, but any time someone mentions a kid having actual, human needs, or facing any kind of struggle that might warrant parental support, Jerry shrugs it off. Meh, whatever, he says. Who cares what kids need? It’s stupid and unnecessary to concern oneself with such things, he intimates. I could go on, but let’s cap it here for now.

I’ll wrap it up by saying I fuckin hate Jerry Seinfeld. He sucks. But I’ll get over it. I’m resilient, after all.