Seinfeld

The stereotype of the Jewish male as a hypersexual deviant has a long genealogy, one that straddles the fi ne line separating anti-Semitic discourse from seemingly self-deprecating Jewish satire. On November 4, 2017, Larry David co-opted this trope in a Saturday Night Live opening monologue about seducing women in a Nazi concentration camp. Critics were infuriated that David would “spoon-feed Neo-Nazis” during an era of heightened Jewish fear, engendered by the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and the fallout of the #MeToo movement. Despite the outrage, this was not new terrain for David, as he had used the motif of Jewish sexual deviance numerous times on his HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm. On Curb, David’s character is repeatedly branded a sexual deviant by sheer happenstance—a product of his own ineptitude and an uncanny ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. David thereby appropriates and negates the myth of Jewish deviance through satire, and he uses the comedic discursive space it creates to broach controversial topics such as the Holocaust and Jewish–Christian relations. By playing the hapless schlimazel, David simultaneously challenges tenacious stereotypes and confronts the ghosts of collective memory that continue to haunt the Jewish people.

The '90s sitcom Seinfeld recirculates American mythology and popular tropes in a way using the distinctly American forms of stand-up and the televised sitcom. It asserts definitions of what these genres mean and can accomplish in explicitly commercial spaces, and whether anything, as opposed to nothing, can be asserted. A (somewhat facetious) comparison to James Joyce's Ulysses use and modernization of European myth for a new context.

Far from being merely "a show about nothing," this article argues that the American television sitcom Seinfeld (1989-1998) managed to develop a sophisticated theory of situations and events in modern life. The show explored a rich and humorous multiplicity of everyday situations and events that took its main characters and audience members alike to the very limits of their conventional lives. Yet Seinfeld consistently stopped short of raising larger political stakes in these explorations. In other words, Seinfeld never took its critique of everyday modern life to a structural level, that is, to the historical forces and social relations that shape contemporary situations and events. By bringing Seinfeld into an intellectual encounter with communist philosopher Alain Badiou's work on situations and events, I argue that we can gain a deeper appreciation of both sides and rethink the political and aesthetic potential of situation comedy.

Tens of thousands of television programs have been broadcast over the past 60 years. This book uncovers how TV shows get on the air, what makes a hit, TV censorship, the popularity of cable, the distortion of TV ratings, how to measure a program's success, the impact of TV on children, and what makes the greatest TV shows of all time. This is a shorter 2013 revision of the author's original textbook "TV Programming Perspectives."

The advent of a post-racial understanding of racism has changed the way in which Europe sees itself and its ethnic minorities. The concept of the post-racial emerged in the United States to describe a belief that America was no longer a racist society and the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land was a public and highly visible confirmation of that state of affairs. A global post-racial culture has taken hold of western plutocracies in which racism is universally denounced but increasingly difficult to pin down. Sayyid’s study, by using a decolonial analytics, examines the different ways in which racism is imagined and how this imagination shapes the way in which the post-racial appears. The paper goes on to sketch out an alternative account of the post-racial as an aspect of the various trends that have been described as being post-political.

This article examines how the Seinfeld and Sopranos series finales problematize a contemporary televisual ethos that Raymond Williams has famously characterized as “flow.” These finales at once question their status as product and, in the case of The Sopranos, offer a direct critique to the nature of televisual flow itself. The emergence of such avant-garde intentionality in network and cable television underscores, moreover, a fundamental tension between art and commerce. These finales draw much of their energy by evoking an aesthetic of disruption and subversion not from the outside of the production process but from within the corporate sphere.

Aristotle had used the word "Eudaimonia" for happiness, and had stated that it was the only thing valuable in isolation. He, together with Plato, had also introduced the "Superiority Theory" in which the reasons behind the fact that people usually laugh at the misfortune of others was analyzed. Sigmund Freud, on the other hand, approached happiness from another angle and argued on his "Relief Theory" that humor can be considered as a way for people to release psychological tensions, overcome their inhibitions, and reveal their suppressed fears and desires. In Adorno and Horkheimer"s famous book "Towards a New Manifesto" (1949-2011:14-15), Adorno had declared that animals could teach us what happiness was, and Horkheimer had added that achieving the condition of an animal at the level of reflection could be considered as freedom. Keeping these definitions in mind, would it be possible to state that the ultimate goal of comedy in media is to help people reach Aristotle"s "Eudaimonia" by mirroring our "animal side" back to us within the social limits of the "superiority theory"? Or is there more to these comedy shows then what meets the eye? Can there be an underlying agenda in disguise for marketing and advertising within the friendly face of "comedy"? How product placement is used on TV series, and why is comedy regarded as an appropriate ground for such initiations? This study will try to find answers to the above mentioned questions by using a qualitative content analysis method, discourse analysis, and will also take the famous Tv series "Seinfeld" as a case study.

Este artigo propõe-se a analisar o último episódio da sitcom Seinfeld problematizando as estratégias de engajamento com o público e de construção de uma história da série de um programa televisivo que se proclamou como o “melhor sobre o nada”. Buscaremos aqui discutir as estratégias que permitiram a serialização deste suposto nada temático a partir de uma reflexão sobre as peculiaridades da serialização de sitcoms, em particular a construção de seus personagens e os mecanismos diegéticos de ativação da memória utilizados para engajar o público e construir uma possível história da série para além de uma trajetória linear de seus protagonistas.

In a departure from my earlier work on Seinfeld, I argue the stereotypes, "Jewface," in that text, as well as in Curb and The Larry Sanders Show, are designed,  in part, to makes East European Jewishness visible. It's a way to maintain and subvert the Jewish closet that was so prevalent in the televisual 1990s and 2000s.

Creo que la posición negativa de la Escuela de Frankfurt, que toma a los medios de comunicación y sus contenidos como instrumentos de masificación y homogeneización del hombre moderno, si bien es importante reconocer su valor crítico, puede negar cualquier posibilidad, si se adopta como una única mirada válida, de apreciar algunos rasgos que servirían para comprender nuestra realidad.