Word: seinfeldisms
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Moments like this are the point of Montreal's 11-year-old Just for Laughs comedy festival, which this year featured 200 comedians, appearances by comedy legends George Burns, John Candy and Michael Richards (Kramer on Seinfeld) and not one but two acts involving naked guys dancing with balloons. The festival attracts around 600,000 people, but the performers are not nearly as interested in the crowds as they are in the 400 scouts from Hollywood and New - York City who roam the venues in search of the next Roseanne Barr or Jerry Seinfeld. The industry types perform a very...
...winks range from the casual and occasional (network newswomen appearing as themselves on Murphy Brown) to the deadpan crypto-real (on Seinfeld, comedian Jerry Seinfeld plays a comedian named Jerry, and in one episode he makes a Seinfeldish TV pilot) to the relentlessly ironic (David Letterman satirizing his program, his genre, the entire medium). Letterman will appear as himself next month on The Larry Sanders Show, which is Garry Shandling's spot-on comedy about a fictitious late-night network talk program called The Larry Sanders Show. In the episode, Sanders is beaten out by Letterman for an award, then...
...characters in Seinfeld talk about intimate things too, but they at least come across as friends who might really confide in one another. Maybe because they are, in a sense, all variations on the same person. The series (created by Seinfeld with writer Larry David) is, like several other new-generation sitcoms, an outgrowth of stand-up comedy material. Episodes spin off the sort of trivial incidents and observations that Seinfeld dwells on in his monologues. (Jerry feels guilty over a gift pen; Jerry's girlfriend thinks he picks his nose...
Unlike the well-made, two-act structure of Cheers, Seinfeld episodes are freewheeling, anecdotal and -- paradoxically, for a show based on stand-up material -- almost devoid of typical sitcom one-liners. Here is George, for example, complaining that his new job as a comedy writer is going to waste: "Can you believe my luck? The first time in my life I have a good answer to the question 'What do you do?' and I have a girlfriend. I mean, you don't need a girlfriend when you can answer that question. That's what you say in order...
...characters on Seinfeld are more rounded and less stereotyped than practically any on TV. Kramer, for example, the next-door neighbor with the electric hair and thrift-shop wardrobe, could have been a typical sitcom shtick figure. Instead he's an impassioned eccentric with endless reserves of nuttiness. (After the group orders Chinese food, he shouts a final request into the phone: "And extra...