Word: seinfeldisms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Once upon a time, kids, there was a TV show called Seinfeld. It was a "sitcom." This was a term for a popular genre - watched by tens of millions of viewers - in which amusing things were said and done not by politicians trying to dance or amateurs trying to sing but by professional actors pretending to be real people, for 22 minutes at a time. When Seinfeld aired its finale in 1998, about 76 million people tuned...
Starting Oct. 4, the cast of Seinfeld reunites for five episodes on Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO sitcom from Seinfeld co-creator Larry David that a couple million people watch on Sunday night on a good week. Which sums up what's happened in the sitcom world since Seinfeld left. There have been sitcoms in the decade since - even great ones, like Curb and Arrested Development - but no monster hits. As the great comedy explosion of the '90s faded, networks made fewer and fewer new sitcoms, and those that got on the air were eclipsed by dramas and reality shows...
...funny thing - literally - is happening in prime time. Sitcoms don't have the ratings or reach Seinfeld did, and probably no single one will again. But collectively, TV sitcoms are better and more diverse than they have been in years. Any roundup of the best new TV shows of 2009 would be mostly, if not entirely, comedies. And they're expanding the definition of what sitcoms can be: musical, complex, more than a half-hour long and sometimes even dead serious...
...city, controversy erupted. "Tel Aviv is the military center of Israel," said Canadian author Naomi Klein, "a place from which fighter jets departed on their missions to Gaza last December-January." Soon it was mandatory for politically active stars to take sides. Sacha Baron Cohen, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Voight and Oprah Winfrey voiced their support for the program; Harry Belafonte, Julie Christie, Jane Fonda and Viggo Mortensen were all for a boycott. Politics aside (which it never is at a film festival), the protesters ignored Israel's recent emergence as a vital national cinema - and that many of the country...
...Lenny Bruce, and the counterculture years of the late '60s and '70s gave rise to stand-up social commentators like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Robert Klein. By the '80s, however, stand-up had mostly retreated to the home front (Roseanne Barr), the trivia of everyday life (Jerry Seinfeld) and the carefully nonpartisan "topical" jokes of Johnny Carson. In the George W. Bush years, political comedy came back in style, not just for late-night hosts like David Letterman and Jon Stewart - who are far more willing than Carson was to let their (usually left-of-center) political views show...