Kill and Die
I read three books and watch three pictures.
Books of Stand-Up, Late Night and Sitcoms
SeinLanguage from 1993, written by Jerry Seinfeld. I haven’t read this since I was a kid, but the experience was fun in the same way: denuded of Seinfeld’s exuberant style of boyishly self-amused comic delivery, much of his old stand-up material rests quietly on the page with Zen-like poise. Seinfeld was a pretty good performing comic in the Nineties and I think he’s matured into a much better one nowadays, but for whatever reasons his old material is funnier to me when I read it with my subdued internal intonations — when I read his thoughts without his voice.
Even while bits of it are indeed very funny, reading SeinLanguage straight through in its entirety at any age is kind of a weird thing to do and I don’t necessarily recommend it. It’s more of a flip-to-a-random-page-on-the-toilet type of book.
In the Year 2000... from 1999, written by Conan O’Brien and the writers of Late Night. I haven’t read this since I was a teenager, but the experience was fun in the same way: guffawing at collected reprints of the declarative prophecies from the “In the Year 2000…” segments from the old Late Night with Conan O’Brien program. The illustrations for this slim paperback volume were done by none other than Pierre Bernard Jr., focus of the equally hilarious regular Late Night bit “Pierre Bernard’s Recliner of Rage.” My favorite joke-prediction from In the Year 2000..., and one that symbolizes much of what I loved in the comedic tone of Late Night with Conan O’Brien, is:
A badly drawn cartoon hamster will be elected to the Senate. He will be indicted on federal racketeering charges, cleared, but still leave office under a cloud of suspicion.
Entrances and Exits from 2024, written by Michael Richards with a foreword by Jerry Seinfeld. I usually avoid audiobooks, but it was wonderful listening to this great showbiz memoir read aloud by its quirky, expressive and impassioned author (and a foreword written and read by Seinfeld, in which he proffers a succinct meditation on comedy as a “sacred mission” undertaken in the comedians’ high-wire world of “kill and die”).
Richards evinces too many intriguing and fascinating qualities not to be an interesting person: weird, wounded, motivated, mercurial, outrageous, offensive, penitent and simply one of the funniest people to ever work on television. He’s got a pretty wild and unique life story to recount and he does it with the storytelling sensibilities of an elite raconteur, relating episodes and emotions in convivial and ebullient present tense description.
His fatherless childhood as a Los Angeles native with a family history of mental illness recalls Norma Jeane, as do his mental travails when his on-camera persona eventually becomes too entangled with his real personality (or lack thereof, as Richards repeatedly frets). He struggles in school, gets drafted into the Army, becomes a father at a young age, finds work in theater, television and film, scores Seinfeld and Kramer, nearly gets himself killed several times at the height of his success, stumbles into opulence and social glamour and incurs chronic exhaustion and multiple prestigious awards. He struggles with self-loathing, his first wife leaves him for another man, he learns he was conceived in a rape; he studies widely in philosophy, religion, literature and acting technique; he lets the bright lights lure him into a pathetic miscarriage of a Seinfeld followup show. An autumnal return to his passion for improvised stand-up comedy threatens to undo him when he publicly loses control of himself and impulsively deploys vicious racist insults in an ugly attempt to overpower a heckler.
After traversing these ups and downs, Richards retreats into the cloistered work of trying to figure out how he fucked up his success so spectacularly and who he really wants to be when the cameras aren’t rolling. He has some soulful closing meditations on life and spirituality; for this reader they rather recall Levin’s heart-lightening concluding monologue in the final pages of Anna Karenina. One might speculate that in this analysis Richards had to lay the Anna of his comedic talent beneath the train of success before the Levin of his spiritual side could be at peace and find a workable vision for the future. But the totality of Entrances and Exits is ultimately more interesting and invigorating than its coda; as Seinfeld wrote in SeinLanguage, “As you make each passage from youth to adulthood to maturity, sometimes you put up your arms and scream, sometimes you just hang on to that bar in front of you. But the ride is the thing.”
Richards’s audiobook memoir is enthralling and compulsively listenable, interesting and entertaining in equal measure. Even with Richards being such an exceptional and exceptionally flawed individual, his accounts of confronting and addressing his problems and failures is reassuringly relatable. Naturally the most interesting part is hearing him explain how he and the Seinfeld team developed Kramer into arguably television’s most popular character, but overall the guy just has a ton of crazy true anecdotes to tell, and as a trained actor and preternaturally brilliant comedian he is well-poised to deliver a riveting performance of his own story.
Film Selections: Pastries, Toys and Television
Unfrosted, directed by Jerry Seinfeld, 2024. Seinfeld co-wrote, directed and performed the lead role in this aggressively silly vanity project that purports to be a cartoonish reimagining of the invention of the Pop-Tart. It reads more like an excuse for Seinfeld to fetishize the Sixties popular design aesthetic of his youth, riff on his well-established love of cereal and arrange much of the current top tier of mainstream comic talent in one movie.
His clout can corral some heavies: a surprisingly unfunny Andy Daly, an unsurprisingly unfunny Amy Schumer, a stalwartly serviceable outing from Melissa McCarthy as Seinfeld’s character’s key creative partner. The list of big comedy names goes on and the production values are slick, but the laughs are inconsistent and the credits eventually roll overtop a ghastly all-hands-on-deck dance number. The project is cobbled together with parts stolen from Barbie, The Hudsucker Proxy and…very probably that movie about McDonald’s, which I haven’t seen. Even though he’s still basically always playing a version of himself, Seinfeld’s acting skill has found room for improvement over the decades, especially compared with the classic years of his sitcom when he was happy to let himself be outshined onscreen by the likes of Richards.
The Lego Batman Movie, directed by Chris McKay, 2017. My closest friend back east called me the other morning and I told him I was about to watch this. I told him I had read books by Seinfeld, Conan and Richards and that Conan did the voice of The Riddler in The Lego Batman Movie. He told me Will Arnett’s Batman voice is meant to poke fun at serious Batman voices but it’s actually just better, which turned out to be correct and to be a Bat-Signal for this movie overall: a parody that is mostly better than most of the material it’s parodying.
This was my first time seeing an animated Lego movie. A gestalt clicks: they’re bottling the type of fun you have playing with Legos and making a knowingly goofy, beautifully-animated family movie out of it. On the rec room floor you get to follow the instructions and build what’s on the box, and/or go wild and make whatever kind of crazy shit you can piece together, and/or also exercise your prerogative to make the branded Lego constructions battle one another (Batman against Star Wars and so on). This movie is a dazzlingly-executed and deliriously fun animated realization of that playtime ethos.
I liked The Lego Batman Movie. Arnett is great. Ralph Fiennes fields a marvelous Alfred. The computer design and animation are impressive. The Lego conceit deals the oversaturated Batman franchise a corrective ribbing.
The only thing I didn’t like was the frenetic pace. I UNDERSTAND that’s how child-oriented movies have to be nowadays to have a shot at the market share, but everything happens so packed in and rapid-fire that I had to back up several times to make sure I was following. And that’s in a movie meant mostly for little kids. (I know, I know…maybe that says more about me than the movie. It was still a little too frantic for me.) Nevertheless, this one is recommended, especially if you’re not obsessive about catching every detail and just want to luxuriate in the visual and audial artistry.
UHF, directed by Jay Levey, 1989. Michael Richards stirring up comical business out of his scantily-written character is the best thing UHF has going for it. He plays Stanley Spadowksi, a dim-witted janitor with a simian bearing who becomes the star performer on an antic, dadaist UHF television station owned and operated by the film’s protagonist George, played by “Weird Al” Yankovic.
I have nothing for or against “Weird Al” as a stage performer or human being, but he’s a washout as an actor and co-writer on this boorish and non-funny picture. Like Unfrosted it is set up as a fanciful live action cartoon where the laws of physics and reason don’t fully apply, and Yankovic and company use this elastic reality in concert with their loose n sketchy story construction to push their absurd and hallucinatory ideas as far as possible on a budget much more constrained than the one Seinfeld commanded in his star-studded 2024 production. Regrettably the results yield almost nothing that’s amusing or interesting aside from Stanley, whose presence alone saves this movie from being one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Richards quite literally throws himself into his part with the otherworldly charisma, commitment, chaos and nuance that he would refine and deepen in the next nine years of playing Kramer, a role he inaugurated on television the same year that UHF was released.