Jerry Seinfeld is a Long Islander raised in Massapequa. I can assure you that there is nothing particularly funny or interesting about Massapequa. I was raised there myself and my experience of this little town on the South Shore of Long Island was a lot like his, I’m sure.
It was a bland, safe, boring, middle-class place with lots of kids playing touch football on the streets. The biggest thing you might say about Massapequa was that it was home to the All American Hamburger Drive-in. That’s it. Yet Massapequa gave birth to one of the great comic geniuses, Jerry Seinfeld.
He created “Seinfeld,” the television sitcom that is widely considered to be the greatest and most influential show of all time. Famously known as “the show about nothing,” “Seinfeld” is a series about four friends who live in Manhattan on the Upper West Side. One character is played by Seinfeld, who plays himself as he interacts with his three friends in his apartment. It is referred to as the first post-modern sitcom and is filled with irony, incongruity and is actually based upon experiences Seinfeld or Larry David have had. The mantra of the show’s creator was that there should be no character development. It gave birth to many lines including “yada, yada,yada” and “No soup for you !”
After nine seasons and while still ranked No. 1 in ratings, Seinfeld walked away from the show, paused for a while and then created the wildly popular show “Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee.” When asked how he came up with the idea, he said: “I like comedians, I like cars and I like coffee.” If you haven’t seen this series, I recommend you do so. He chooses very funny comedians to talk to (Jim Carey, Eddie Murphy, David Letterman) and he chooses wonderful looking cars each week like the one you see in the photo.
But all of his television shows fail to reveal the true genius of Seinfeld. You only get that when you see his stand-up routines. In one of his shows, he goes on for five minutes about the wording of in versus on. He starts by introducing the story of how his family moved from Brooklyn to Long Island.
“We used to live in Brooklyn, but now we live on Long Island. Why is that? We never would say we live on Brooklyn and we would never say we live in Long island.” He goes on to discuss the use of in versus on regarding trains. “We rode on the train, not in the train.” This word play goes on for some time and it shows how incredibly gifted Seinfeld is verbally, but it shows something else.
Seinfeld is perhaps the only truly popular comedian I know who exclusively uses what Freud called non-tendentious humor. Non-tendentious humor is the use of word play or harmless, non-offensive humor. Almost every other comedian I can think of uses tendentious humor which employs sexual, aggressive, vulgar, and largely offensive humor. Lenny Bruce, Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor or the ever-offensive Ali Wong are good examples of this. But to be funny by using quirky, non-offensive observations about the minutia of life takes a comic genius.
So how does he do it? Maybe it had something to do with being raised in Massapequa. The fact that the place was so boring and bland may have forced Jerry to learn how to entertain himself by developing a keen sense of humor. In fact, in his standup routines he does tell one story about how bored to death he was when he was forced to accompany his mother to wallpaper stores or to banks. The North Shore of Long Island gave birth to the wildly funny Andy Kaufman, so perhaps Great Neck was as boring as Massapequa was and forced Andy Kaufman to get funny or go mad with boredom.
The suburbs are that faraway dreamland every parent living in Brooklyn or Queens yearns for. But the fun streets of Queens and Brooklyn are just fine for most kids. When my parents moved us from Bayside to Massapequa, I was about 8 years old. The mean streets of Bayside had action and a pulse, which was perfect for me and my brother.
When we moved to Massapequa, it was like being sent to some dull, foreign, lifeless wasteland. I wish I had grown up next to Jerry Seinfeld instead of Richie Dezino, Gail Oppenheimer and Drew Agnone. If I lived next to Seinfeld, I could have been his very first audience, laughing uproariously at his little skits about Coco Puff Cereal and Fruit Loops.
Oh well, such is life. I’ll have to settle for seeing him in person at his next show at the Beacon Theater. Do you think this column will get me a backstage pass to to meet him?
