Seinfeld and the 9.9 Percent

I’ve always harbored a nagging suspicion that “Seinfeld” was never really about nothing — that beneath its deadpan humor and insistence on moral vacancy, it was, in fact, a deeply moral act of parody – but a special kind of parody: one perpetrated by one of its co-creators upon the other co-creator.

It is easy to imagine Larry David, the show’s true architect, shaping it as a kind of private joke at the expense of his friend and co-creator, Jerry Seinfeld — a man of smooth charm, bourgeois instincts and untroubled confidence. Larry David’s sensibility has always been allergic to comfort, to the hypocrisy of social niceties, to the well-adjusted calm of the successful man who believes that life’s meaning lies in the pleasure of good taste and clever observation. In “Seinfeld,” he built an exquisite comic world defined by shallowness, self-involvement and moral inertia — and then handed the lead role to someone who could inhabit that world perfectly, sincerely and most crucially, without self-aware irony.

For me, Jerry Seinfeld, both as a character and as a man, perfectly embodies the new American upper-middle class — the 9.9 percent who live well, think of themselves as sensible rather than rich and treat the world not as a moral terrain but as a place to be efficiently managed. 

Seinfeld’s life is a small masterpiece of comfort. The 12-acre Hamptons estate, the $17,000 espresso machine, the vintage car collection: and none of it is hidden or disavowed. He is proud of it, proud in that particularly American way that turns prosperity into virtue. His Netflix series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” is an ongoing ceremony of this faith. Every episode begins with the caress of a camera over chrome and leather, a fetishistic introduction to another gleaming car, followed by the ritual of coffee, the easy laughter of a fellow celebrity, and the gentle chatter of people for whom the world has become both background and playground. It is not conversation but an aesthetic — the elevation of comfort itself into an art form.

In that world, morality has been redefined. Indeed, Seinfeld is proud to declare that the universe operates on a simple binary: funny or not funny. “If you’re funny, I’m interested,” he once said. “If you’re not, I’m not.” It is a cosmology perfectly suited to the 9.9 percent, who have replaced unironic moral struggle with the aesthetics of intelligence and the yield of the bottom line. 

But more revealing is Seinfeld’s next step of elevating humor to the epistemic realm, from which the next step into the ethical is but a comparatively small one: what is funny is what is true, insists; and what is not funny is false. And since what is true must be good: ergo morality attained in two simple hops through the punchline. The comedian then somehow becomes both priest and philosopher, absolved of the need to take overt stands since laughter itself is elevated to the level of the ethical. Right and wrong dissolve into taste. And all of this while comfortably sipping a cappuccino.

This is why Seinfeld’s public voice in times of crisis has been so telling. Confronted with suffering — with war, injustice, the brutality of Gaza — he withdraws or deflects. “I don’t care about Palestine,” he once snapped to a protester, not out of cruelty, not out of ideological commitment, not even out of anger, but with the bland honesty of someone annoyed and for whom caring beyond his own sphere feels alien, inauthentic, even false and self-indulgent. In other words, when it surfaces, his anxiety is never about moral failure, but about maintaining a steady, even-steven relevance. His fear is not that he might be wrong, but that he might cease to be funny.

And then there is his famous advice to young people: pick one thing, work hard at it, and make a living from it — which reveals the core of his creed. It is the bourgeois ethic distilled to its simplest form: Find a craft, perfect it and prosper. Yes, there is dignity and even wisdom in the advice, but there sure is no transcendence. It is the counsel of someone who has never been truly disoriented, never undone by what cannot be managed. 

This same ethic is visible in his proud display of the yellow notepads on which he has written jokes for decades — thousands of pages lined up like relics of industry. He showed them once, smiling, as if to say: This is my life’s work. The image is touching, even noble in its own disarming way, but also stultifying. The notebooks, filled with observations about the small absurdities of life, are the perfect metaphor for Seinfeld’s existence: careful, diligent, controlled, never daring to leave the realm of the comfortable absurd.  That he would be proud to display those yellow notepads with no self-awareness over how they may be received reminds me of Sartre’s waiter who performs the role that he has settled on with perfect polish, projecting a kind of effortless competence, but in a way that makes the performance itself the only reality that matters. That’s probably why I felt a little embarrassed for him – Jerry – his castle and fleet of cars notwithstanding.

And yet, I do sense that he knows, dimly, how he is seen. When Duke students heckled him over his stance on Gaza, he smiled and said, “too late.” It was an attempt to turn discomfort into punchline, but there was something brittle in it. His laughter has acquired, over time, the quality of defense — a way of keeping the world’s disorder at arm’s length. He corrects himself when public opinion shifts, not because he rethinks his positions, but because he feels the tremor of disapproval. His conscience is social, not moral.

It is precisely this serenity, this untroubled detachment, that Larry David might perhaps have found so fascinating, even contemptible. If “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is the comedy of friction — a man unable to adapt to the soft surfaces of bourgeois life — then “Seinfeld” is the comedy of smoothness: a man perfectly adapted, perfectly comfortable, untouched by the world’s crises. The former is tragicomic; the latter, antiseptic. Larry David is what happens when conscience destroys composure. Jerry Seinfeld is what happens when composure replaces conscience. 

Seinfeld’s great artistic feat, surely unintentional, is to have lived out, unaware, the parody that Larry David began. Jerry has become the saint of the 9.9 percent — disciplined, apolitical, a lover of comfort, a man for whom the world’s chaos is just material to be gently mocked and filed away in another notebook. He has built a fortress out of laughter and mistaken it for light. It will be interesting to see how this man – and the 9.9 percent – evolve their stand when the bells of the Gaza reckoning start tolling.