This is probably the first time I've encountered something where "It's so bad that it's good" makes sense to me. I could not stop laughing. The exterior shot with the Seinfeld-inspired music. The laugh track at inappropriate times. They talk about going to a sushi restaurant, and when they've finally agreed to go, they sit down and don't go anywhere. This is like the alien scientists who want to bring back humans after they've gone extinct, and end up cloning chimps. Bravo!
The crappiness is unexplainably funny. Jerry speaking the cues in the comedy bits and saying "pause for applause", Elaine clipping through Jerry, George talking to the fridge. I lost it when it cut to an indoor shot with nobody in it for 2 minutes and then cut away.
Wow, I thought also the super spammy lol chat is AI generated as well, but it seems people find this really funny? I mean most of the ""jokes"" do not even have a bad punch line. That's the only thing I can lol at now, why wtf?
I think it’s funny in the same way it’d be funny to watch your kids try to act out their own scene from Seinfeld. It’s not the punchlines that we enjoy, it’s the uncanny proximity to the real thing. Sometimes humor comes from expecting something you’re used to and being served something just ridiculous instead.
Yep, it's the TV equivalent of Blaseball, or Dwarf Fortress(DF). Given a sufficiently complex generator of event strips, framing[1] becomes a social activity. Blaseball saw the production of wikis[2], songs[3], and announcer recap[4] framings.
Likewise, DF wouldn't be the same without Boatmurdered[5] or any of the other story tellings that followed suit.
Conspiracy theorists follow the same pattern but applied to news and current events - a participatory group activity that discards the majority frame and synthesizes new frames under a different genre. Participants reuse people[6] and locations[7] but rewrite the script to become both playwrights and audience members to a substantially transformed alternate experience of reality.
Watchmeforever, is exactly this group mythmaking experience that pairs a random event strip with improvisational community framing that takes the meaningless output of AI-generated content and transforms it into a meaningful group experience.
EDIT: Also The Sims franchise to a large extent. Longtime players have a certain tendency to embellish in-game events beyond the game's pre-packaged framing in a way that produces deeper meaning than the novice/out-of-the-box-frame engages in. Certainly CK1/2/3 and countless others as well.
Blaseball is so great. Baseball already serializes well to text based (like listening to a play by play on the radio) and then they started mixing things in like 4th base, unruns, crow attacks, etc that I loved. I almost want to make my own blaseball style sim (maybe based on WWE wrestling?) but don't really have the time.
It IS the experience. Without the chat I would have checked out of the nonsense in a minute but the audience reacting to the endless non sequiturs truly made this an art.
There was a skit just now where they talked about going to a comedy show. Of course the scene cut and they didn't actually go. Except three skits later they talked about "the comedy show we just went to".
After that Elaine, Kramer, George all talking about a comedy club experience. When they delivered their lines, they each sat on the couch in the exact same spot, models clipping into one another. Then the camera switched to front view of this new comedy chimera and just lingered without a line said.
Now losing all sarcasm-detection, but perhaps not everyone realizes that that ("a show about nothing") is one of the most common/core descriptions about the original Seinfeld. "That was the joke", *swoooosh* and so on, I guess.
See [1] for instance, but it's also mentioned much earlier in the introduction section.
This is a reference to Seinfeld. When Jerry and George pitch their show to NBC, they pitch it is a "show about nothing". Which is almost like an recursion, because the show they pitch in Seinfeld is Seinfeld. So, Seinfeld is a show about nothing.
Seinfeld was about how comedians get their material, not nothing. Hence the opening, ending, and interspersed shots of Jerry doing standup related to the events in the show. Though, they somewhat dropped that in later seasons.
must be that I am not native English speaker and I've never watched Seinfeld, except for some popular clip over the decades, but this is honestly so bad that is really bad. It's Sierra adventures bad jokes bad.
The unflinching deadpan delivery of the AI just kills me. Reminds me of say Steven Wright, Mitch Hedburg, Norm Macdonald, Harold Ramis. Absolutely slays me.
I'm curious as to why the dialogue is so bad. What AI is this using? When I ask ChatGPT to write a scene, the results are usually somewhat funny:
INT. JERRY'S CAR - DAY
Jerry and George are driving down the road, with Jerry behind the wheel.
Jerry: (gazing at the cup holder) This car is such a piece of junk, it doesn't even have a proper cup holder.
George: What are you talking about? It has a cup holder right there!
Jerry: (skeptical) That's not a cup holder, that's just a little indentation in the dash.
George: It's a cup holder, Jerry! I've used it a million times.
Jerry: (sarcastically) Oh, well if you've used it, then it must be a proper cup holder.
George: (defensive) Hey, I've never had a problem with it.
Jerry: (exasperated) That's because you don't have any standards. A real cup holder should be able to hold a variety of cup sizes, not just the tiny little cups you drink out of.
George: (scoffing) That's ridiculous, Jerry. Who needs a cup holder that big?
Jerry: (serious) I do, George. I like to drink my coffee in a real cup.
George: (rolling his eyes) You and your fancy coffee cups.
Jerry: (smiling) Hey, I have standards, George. What can I say?
George: (laughing) I guess that's what makes you, you.
Jerry: (laughing) And that's what makes you, you.
They both burst into laughter as the car pulls up to a stop light.
That's actually extremely impressive, even for chat GPT. Not only is it a coherent scene, the humour emerges from a disagreement about an incidental detail in the lived environment. While situated in a realistic situation that's typical of the series. With the detail in question being a real environmental detail of that situation. George is irate and Jerry sarcastically winds him up. It literally could be segment from a real episode (bar the ending). So we have (an impersonation of) theory of mind, coherent understanding of setting, a narrative structure etc.
Compared to the infinite Seinfeld, which appears composed of disconnected setup -> response type gags, it's night and day.
> While situated in a realistic situation that's typical of the series.
That's a bit of a low bar.
> With the detail in question being a real environmental detail of that situation. George is irate and Jerry sarcastically winds him up.
And that's what you typically get from trying to replicate statistical data from the series.
It's a very good impersonation of a theory of mind, but it's an impersonation. The most surprising part is that when asked for a Seinfield episode, it actually tries to construct a Seinfield episode. But somehow, that's that part that least impress most people.
I can't find the post I saw from the creator, but apparently this is something they have been working on for years, well before ChatGPT. They created their own script generator.
I thought the dialog was amazing? It's generating conversations and a script for a TV show, are you expecting it to be as good as the original? It's crazy that they can carry out a conversation from start to end about a specific topic.
I wonder how much of a copyright violation this must be. I mean, they obviously fed it a lot of Seinfeld scripts for it to understand the characters and humor. I know HN likes to say "fair use" but I wonder how Hollywood's lawyers feel about that
This is the question I have about feeding scripts to AI. If I watched a ton of Seinfeld and came up with my own idea about a script, is that a copyright violation? Whats the difference between that and an AI bot learning it? I don't think Hollywood or anyone can reasonably expect people to consume some sort of media (whether its a book, tv show, music) and not come up with their own interpretations and ideas around it.
Fanfilms are actually a fair use case I learned recently (went down a rabbit hole after discovering the wide world of Friday the 13th fan made sequels)
The rest of the episode continues with Kramer getting a wild streaming setup, Elaine setting up Teams for Peterman and George quite quitting by mounting a picture in front of his webcam
I did the same. But had it specifically set in 2021
Also set in the restaurant.
George gets a job as an "Uber Delivery"* driver and Kramer is excited about VR.
*Is that a thing? I don't think I've seen that where I am
Maybe because mainstream comedy shows all follow canned patterns with lame and unoriginal jokes. To the point that even a machine can write a script that sounds very similar. Stuff like Friends or Big Bang Theory would probably work very well too.
Great. Now I’m going to be haunted by a recurring dystopian vision of the future in which all content (even broadcast TV) is pumped out this way to maximise profits. Humans won’t use their brains for creativity anymore. Instead, new ideas will be seeded deep inside a neural network somewhere, and our reactions will be monitored and used as one constant feedback loop. Until we are ultimately just sat drooling and giggling 24/7 at some optimised computer generated content buffered by lucrative advertising.
The movie "Her"[1] is already here with AI Chatbots. I was recently fooling around with open source 6B parameter AI chatbots. The model is 20GB. That's just for text and that's more text than I could read in my entire life. I could talk to the chatbot for my entire life and never get to the end of it. The amount of raw information that humans can I/O into their brains is very small compared to these chatbots.
Her (2013) is one of the best sci-fi movies ever made. Not only is it heartfelt and the characters are relatable, but the sci-fi future it is set in is a very accurate representation of our near future. This movie predicted AI companions just as Siri was taking off, and it perfectly predicted the alienation between humans that is slowly getting worse. Simply amazing.
I know that I am going to sound pathetic but I may actually like it. It makes me sad when the characters in long running shows get old or die in real life. I also get sad when shows end and the characters that I love just go away. Right now we have cartoons but I don't really connect with these characters. What I would love is an actual good series where the characters never grow old and the series never ends. Now this may not be something that an AI can produce in my lifetime but I am sure that AI generated content will cross the uncanny divide within the next 40 years or so.
That was my immediate reaction to seeing chatGPT. Any digital content, fully customized, can be created with minimal human input.
The quality of the content is still crap, but that will improve with time. And the audience getting dumber to think it’s fine will speed up the process.
This is part a larger “fear” of mine. We never get to actual singularity because along the way AI is either good enough or we mislabel it to thinking we’ve reached the singularity when we haven’t. Or some other allure/consequence that isn’t immanently itself destructive (accidentally creating hostile Skynet is possible but outside this fear, this fear is more insidious). We think may we have the desire to reach AI singularity but I’m not convinced. We’re too selfish.
here's what i think: imagine if this was good, like it generated stuff that felt like a real episode, like you couldn't tell the difference. how uninteresting. the little bit of entertainment value this has is in being so stupid. the entertainment value of an episode of _seinfeld_ is inseparable from the fact it was written by a human.
Just heard something to the effect of "I just heard about this new kind of restaurant where all the food is Chinese. You can order anything you want and it will be Chinese."
This may relate to one of the 170 Seinfeld episodes being entitled "The Chinese Restaurant". They spend almost the whole episode in line waiting for a table which which they're repeatedly told will be ready in "5, 10 minutes". Probably the training data included the scripts and titles.
That early episode is essentially the origin of "a show about nothing." When describing their idea for "Jerry" to the NBC execs, George uses that incident as an example. Summarizing: One of the episodes will just be four of them waiting for a table at a restaurant. Why would people watch that? Because it's on TV! Not yet...
It's very meta because of course when you say it out loud it does sound horribly boring just like the NBC guy says. But the Seinfeld audience is aware that the Seinfeld characters (now the ones writing a sitcom about their personal experiences) actually experienced this situation, and to the Seinfeld audience, it was actually a very funny episode, therefore realizing that the Jerry audience would also find it funny.
People who find this interesting might also find the work being done recently by The Companion--a service that specializes in providing fan service (writers panels, behind the scenes stuff, etc.) for popular science fiction content--with some researchers from Google and the showrunner of Stargate on extended episodes for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis.
So like, the "obvious problem" with this content for Seinfeld is the "acting" (care of the TTS engine) sucks. Honestly, are the scripts bad? Maybe, sure! But actors actually do a job that can sometimes be ignored by filling in all of the subtle details that make the character the character and even then make awkward interactions suddenly "work".
In the extended work from the Google AI on Stargate, what they did was get some people from the actual cast of the show to be willing to do a table read of the AI-generated scripts (and the AI was then told to limit what it generated to using the actors they had).
And OMG sometimes it was hilarious nonsense and yet it was FUN, because the actors were kind of trying to make it all work, and they were able to lean on their backgrounds doing those characters for a decade and all of the hard-ish stuff of comedic timing but also the easy-ish stuff of how a basic human interaction works.
When we get to the point of being able to have AI actors easily pull off some of those things--having text to speech that infers enough context to know the correct emotions to apply in addition to the appropriate timing and stress as opposed to merely the correct pronunciation (which is always where we seem to be working, practically)--this stuff is going to rock, and it will be scary how well even shitty scripts do (as it isn't like many sitcoms--not saying Seinfeld, but you can easily scrape the bottom of the barrel on formulaic shows people have pumped out--have very good writing to begin with).
One to generate the 3d scene. One for the lighting. Three for cameras. One for each actor acting out the given script along with a set amount of "improvising" and "randomness", one to generate background royalty free music based on the emotional context of the scene, one to serve as a Foley artist for environment sounds.
The equivalent computer power of a medium sized bitcoin farm running everything with the only humans being the writers, the IT people running the systems, a director watching each take as it is rendered live to pick the best ones, and an editor to slap all of the takes together.
That's probably technically possible now, if not actually implemented.
Another 15 years or so and kids will be rendering full movies in the basement and watching them with their friends.
> One to generate the 3d scene. One for the lighting. Three for cameras. One for each actor acting out the given script along with a set amount of "improvising" and "randomness", one to generate background royalty free music based on the emotional context of the scene, one to serve as a Foley artist for environment sounds.
One for each hand to maintain the appropriate number of fingers.
Some TTS, like Tortoise-TTS or 15.ai are decent at timing and stress, though I think they're generally more at "read an audiobook if supervised" level, and not "be a voice actor, unsupervised" level.
It's weirdly compelling - partly because the chat participants are so enthusiastic, but mainly because once I started watching it I didn't want to risk missing the tiny chance that it might actually deliver a good joke!
On streams with high view counts I firmly believe they've never been majority human. They're not even AI, just dumb bots that spam whatever the other bots are spamming
If you have even the slightest actionable proof I am confident advertisers would pay large sums to know the actual reach of their ads. Until then your firm beliefs come across as conspiratorial.
If anyone likes the weirdness of artificial intelligence-generated content on Twitch, they will probably also enjoy Vedal's Neuro-sama: https://twitch.tv/vedal987
The channel does not run 24/7 because Vedal is always monitoring Neuro-sama's output (things can go very wrong when you let an AI interact with a Twitch chat).
Also, Neuro-sama plays different games such as Osu, Minecraft, Pokemon. I don't know about the others, but Osu's AI was built by him (probably RL), so he put a lot of engineering effort into it.
I... I don't know what to say... this is so... man... wtf?
I really have no words to express how uncanny it feels to watch that stuff, it seems alien television from the future and the comments seem a hive mind of bots. The experience is like seeing the apocalypse coming towards you from afar at a steady pace and there is nothing you can do to stop it. We need a big solar flare before it is too late.
Creative endeavors are going the way of artisan crafts 100 years ago, mass produced by AI assembly lines, the rich will pay a premium for genuine artistry but the masses will digest this copy of a copy of a copy media.
I'd argue that the stylistic suck is the best part of this. It being so obviously fake makes you subconsciously lower your expectations and then when an actually good joke hits it throws you off guard and makes you laugh. Combined with the random laugh track, awkward pauses, and crappy animation it really stands out for itself and offers a unique viewing experience that you can't really have anywhere else. The voices need the be wrong because otherwise it's uncanny valley territory and therefore not funny.
Valid point, but I don’t expect AI to be able to really pull off a believable stream of scenes in the foreseeable future. I think for at least the next few years it will still be off enough to be hilarious. The uncanny valley can actually add to that, in my opinion.
I jumped onto a point that sounded like a sad black mirror episode where the actors are trapped in a time loop forever, forced to come up with dumb jokes.
Elaine: "Why are we here"
Jerry: "to tell jokes"
Elaine: "But why are we here together"
Jerry: "Maybe fate put us here for a reason. To make the world a funnier place."
Probably it's just a little unity world with a visual filter, some models and movements that those models make, and then you train GPT-3 by giving it the API of what scenes, actions, and camera angles are available, and have it generate those in combination with a script and laugh tracks.
i dunno how they do the animations. Haven't watched enough to see if it repeats, or it is generated dynamically.
The script is probably written by just asking chatGPT (for a script). Might even have some prompts that seed the script.
Then the output of the chatGPT is fed into a TTS (text to speech) and played.
I think the laugh track is randomly played (or played in between different scripts that GPT generates). And i can't tell if the music is generated, or just repeats and is only for some scenes.
For the animations, they could probably write it with traditional artificial intelligence. It's as simple as having events that trigger based on whos talking, such as sit on couch, walk over to kitchen, wave hands while talking, etc.
Scenes and animations seem to be picked at random. Just watched George microwave something in the kitchen while having a conversation about something totally different. They really nailed it. Seinfeld is truly a show about nothing. Thinking back to countless scenes of Kramer wandering into the kitchen to pour a bowl of cereal and spout some nonsense that would loop back on itself in the last scene of the episode in some tangential way
Right, it might be possible to have chatGPT produce a set of movement scripts that run as part of the text of the show.
Tho i would imagine trying to get that working is a lot more work than just randomly choosing a set of pre-animated videos. I suppose if the video doesn't need to sync with the text, then you can create a large bank of them, and choose based on keywords from the text.
I am guessing it wouldn’t be hard for an AI voice generator to impersonate the actor’s voices given the possible sample data available. I’m sure it’s not long before we have completely new AI generated deep faked episodes of beloved TV shows.
faking a real voice could be construed as fraud unless they have prior permission from the actor. Their likeness cannot just be copied and used. At the very least, trademark infringement?
How long until "Twitch Plays Sitcom Writer" (Twitch Plays Larry David?) where the chat audience votes on potential prompts for the AI to generate episodes about?
Twitch was kinda already interdimensional cable. A former roomate and I would occasionally dive into the depths of twitch looking for unusual and interesting streams and we called it "watching interdimensional cable". There was some really wildly strange stuff out there. I toyed with building a tool to help find streams with the right je ne sais qua, but I never could quite beat our heuristic of just sorting by fewest viewers and scanning for things that looked like they might be good.
Wonder how far you could get with ML plus a simple filter for games that are unlikely to be interesting. Something like "how strange is this stream title for Twitch" and "does this stream preview look like other stream previews that were interesting". Can neural networks detect je ne sais quoi and whimsy?
So, recently, I accidentally stumbled into an almost bottomless pit of romantic comedies on an amazon prime "channel" called PixL. It has a ridiculously large quantity of low-value sort-of-OK content that all kind of bleeds together if you squint.
I watch a lot of TV/movies, and it is mostly something to deal with me feeling lonely (which is probably a bad thing to fix, actually: better I get so sad that I quit computers and go into the real world to find another person... but that's a more fundamental problem).
I have long said that what I really want are 3-star movies, as I am really just using the people in the movie to tie up the tiny bit of my brain that tries to process the existence of people to be less lonely: I don't want it to be so bad as to be frustrating or so good that I actually want to watch it, as that would be distracting.
The problem, though, is it feels more like being at an airport or on a street than around your classmates or friends: people come and go and you never get to know them that deeply, as a movie is only an hour and a half.
Watching multi-season TV shows thereby works a lot better against being lonely, and I think a lot of people essentially use sitcoms like this: they have seen the show a million times and continue to watch it on repeat as part of their brain has established a parasocial relationship with the characters.
But, the problem I have doing that, is that watching the same content on repeat also causes this sense of deja vu and gives the world an air of implausibility. It is fun to be there for the new stuff, but hearing the old stories again doesn't convey the same feeling of "this is happening" (as false as we all know even that is ;P).
But so now like... generating an infinite amount of content for a pseudo-sitcom that is maybe even just sort of OK--as that's what the AI can manage to muster up until the end of time--might frankly be fine, as I'm not trying to really watch it anyway?
It then just needs to be close enough to what my subconscious expects out of a person so that I get the feeling of "I'm watching these people I pretend to know" (though it would be interesting if one's subconscious is better at deciding it is all fake than one's consciousness is ;P "thankfully", TV is already a bit fake).
And, so, maybe it works better if instead of being a new lame sitcom it is a lame extended universe of a great sitcom (such as Seinfeld), so you will have already watched it actively enough to train your own brain that these are people in your life who matter to you and then it is easier to use the seasons of that sitcom to fine tune an AI into generating more content in that same genre / story for you to begin spending the rest of your life not really exactly watching an infinite stream of generated extended seasons.
I remember a study, a couple of decades back, that found that people who watch soap operas estimate they have more friends than people who don't. I figure the lizard brain knows they're people, but doesn't know they're actors in a box. Just thought that might be interesting to you.
I sort of know what you mean. Not necessarily to combat loneliness but I listen to pretty much every Sherlock Holmes pastiche available via audiobook. Many of them aren't particularly great in and of themselves but there are a sufficiently large number of them and it's nice to check in with the same characters/setting. "Comfy" is the popular term for it. I certainly imagine AI will be capable of producing stories of that sort of quality within the next decade or so. And AI voice actors will be equal to at least some of the narrators on Audible.
Meeting real people involves risk. Risk of social awkwardness, boredom, getting hurt, drama, messiness. It's a lot of effort. There are already a thousand ways for people to meet others on the internet, but people choose to passively consume media instead.
The problem is the medium itself. The internet, as much as it was believed to be a tool for bringing people together, also largely serves to keep our interactions shallow. Anonymity provides malevolent sociopathic sadists to cause significant amounts of harm pseudo anonymously, making the kind of vulnerability required to form meaningful connections much more risky than it is in real life encounters. Stories of people meeting great friends and spouses online are outliers and selection bias.
If you want to meet people, the internet is a terrible way to do it.
The internet is also a terrible way to exchange information securely. With encryption, it's possible. There was a time, when security vulnerabilities weren't blamed on the hacker but on the system developer. Why feel limited by malevolent sociopathic sadists when this creates the opportunity to add to the medium and create something better?
It's kind of what people can do already using their own imagination. You can imagine a set of characters and stories that goes on forever and stays the same. AI would just flesh it out with actual writing and visuals, but I'm not sure if it's that is a huge improvement.
It's probably that your video stream is more delayed than the chatters. On mobile Twitch has a huge delay especially on iOS which can be improved by clicking the Settings icon and choosing Low Latency player. Will still be more delayed than people on desktop.
If you enable low-latency mode in Twitch, then you get the video about 5-15 seconds earlier (at the cost of that any minor connection interruptions may interrupt the video more).
Woman: "Looks like you've finished that entire tub of ice cream all by yourself"
Man: "Yeah it only took me a day and a half to finish it. I must have been hungry"
It makes me think of the early days of cinema. It took a while for things to fall into place. Even things that are considered masterpieces like "Metropolis" are a bit weird in contemporary terms; set pieces go on way too long, serious moments sometimes come off as comical, actors stare into the camera, etc. It's not hard to imagine that the non-masterpiece run of the mill stuff was nigh unwatchable in today's terms.
So "Nothing Forever" isn't funny now but I'd be surprised if something like it is more than 5 years away from watchable.
I think this should be used more often. In modern film it's mostly used for forth wall breaking as a cheap joke, but the acclaimed Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu often used the technique for a kind of "VR" effect, to make the viewer feel like they're present in the scene. The characters address the camera directly but they don't show any awareness of the camera. If you haven't already, I recommend watching "Tokyo Story" to see how it's done. It places highly on many "best movies of all time" lists, and despite the slow pacing and lack of action I found it surprisingly compelling.
If you haven't seen it, you might enjoy this "AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek": https://infiniteconversation.com/
I think the shared experience of watching this bizarre thing together is what really makes it great. Seeing people comment on the absurd actions in the chat makes it so much more enjoyable to witness.
I have to confess I don’t really understand the appeal here. It’s not funny nor particularly entertaining (to me of course). Obviously reading the comments I’m in the minority here.
If you don't find the original Seinfeld funny, then you won't find this funny too, and that's ok. It is definitely a type of humor that you gotta be attuned to and/or like it already, with many people never getting around to liking it.
So this is pretty similar to the Continuity AI from William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, except it doesn't really maintain continuity. Crazy that this is where we are already.
You know what Al Bundy is, but you don't know "Seinfeld" except from "on the web"? And then you search for it and post a YouTube vid here? I don't believe it.
It's true (although it was broadcasted uncrypted) but with YouTube, Netflix or ... the internet in general it's hard to think someone really has no idea what/who Seinfeld is.
I didn't remember it was broadcasted uncrypted. Maybe it was airing too late for 10yo me ? By the way, while everyone here in France know Friends or How I met Your Mother, despite being available on Netflix i'm not sure way more people know Seinfeld nowadays than in the 90s. One must admit it's pretty hard to get into it 30 years after as it aged a little and it never got it primes here.
They’re both sitcoms but with very different styles. Seinfeld is a “smart” comedy and makes social commentary through the life of the Manhattanite characters. Married with Children is more of a base comedy, lampooning the old cliche of the perfect 50s household. At least that’s my take. I haven’t watched either in probably 20 years.
Seinfeld is satire. The self-centred and extremely shallow characters are a long-running commentary on typical American sitcoms and their depiction of Christian family values. They treat romantic partners as entirely disposable, they never learn from their mistakes or demonstrate any form of personal growth whatsoever. They treat sex and taboo topics such as masturbation like a game. Heck, they even demonstrate utter disregard for human life, with several characters dying throughout the series and the main cast not giving a damn.
This is in stark contrast to so many American sitcoms which had a lot of stories around conflict, personal growth, forgiveness, and charity. Many of those shows tried to depict idealized Christian family values intermingled with the jokes. Many episodes would feature a prominent personal life lesson in the denouement.
I believe the creators of Seinfeld (Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld) established a strict rule for the writing staff: "no hugging, no learning." This no-compromises dedication to comedy to the exclusion of all else is what set Seinfeld apart from other shows.
The whole 'being about nothing', the vapidness of their personal relationships, how self centered the main characters are. I think it's a good representation of how quickly modern consumer society careened from it's purpose of proving western liberal capitalism was superior to communist polities and descended into nihilism and pleasure seeking behavior once the Soviet Union fall. They even touch on how fragmented urban society had become and how hopelessly isolated we were becoming in the crowd, even before social media.
Besides being adopted by the marketing for the show, "show about nothing" was never really accurate. It was lifted from when George pitched the show-in-a-show (season 4's running plot).
Especially in the earlier seasons, what Seinfeld is about should be apparent: There's a little standup skit performed by Jerry Seinfeld, with the usual ridiculous circumstances you'd hear in a standup skit. The episode that follows shows exactly how Jerry "came up with" the idea for the standup the episode opened with.
Instead of "about nothing," Seinfeld was really about answering the question people often ask: "How did you come up with that?"
Of course, as the show developed and real-life inspirations started to be exhausted, the show adopted more and more outlandish sitcom ideas that weren't rooted in the real-life experiences of the writers. The standup openings were abandoned as well.
I think some misinterpret “about nothing” too literally. The entire show is about the minutiae of life, or to connect the dots more clearly, about “nothing important.” Indeed, the show gets a bit “meta” when it makes a copy of itself inside itself and is also about nothing.
It's a classic comedy of manners, a style as old as the hills.
The "show about nothing" spiel with the implied "which is completely original and has never been done before" was true in it's demarcation from traditional sitcoms based around forced scenarios but always complete rubbish
with the latter intention and a brilliant marketing line.
The act of people who weren't around to watch Seinfeld when it originally aired complaining that it's just so overdone, unfunny, unoriginal, tired, cliched, or just like other shows, is called the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" trope.
>"I don't know what the big deal with Hamlet is. It's just one famous saying after another, strung together by a moldy old plot." — Old Joke
>There are certain shows that you can safely assume most people have seen. These shows were considered fantastic when they first aired. Now, however, these shows have a Hype Backlash curse on them. Whenever we watch them, we'll cry, "That is so old" or "That is so overdone".
>The sad irony? It wasn't old or overdone when they did it, because they were the first ones to do it. But the things it created were so brilliant and popular, they became woven into the fabric of that show's genre. They ended up being taken for granted, copied and endlessly repeated. Although they often began by saying something new, they in turn became the new status quo. It's basically the inverse of a Grandfather Clause taken to a trope level: rather than being able to get away with something that is seen as overdone or out of style simply because it was the one that started it, people will unfairly disregard it because it got lost amidst its sea of imitations even though it paved the way for all those imitators. That is, a work retroactively becomes a Cliché Storm.
>There may be good reason for this. Whoever is first to do something isn't likely to be the best at it, simply because everyone that comes after is building on their predecessors' work.
>Named after Seinfeld, which many people won't watch any more because everything about it has been copied. note Most likely will result in Fan Haters and accusations of Rule Abiding Rebels. This can also occur in countries that get the shows years after they originally come out.
>When someone attempts to make "Seinfeld" funny again in this time and age, see Reconstruction.
Not to be confused with the act of thinking an old in-joke referencing a sub-culture was originally from that show (yada, yada, yada), which is called the "Seinfeld Effect" or the modern internet-meme related "Family Guy Effect".
Thanks for sharing. I had no idea there was a term for it.
As I reflect, I can see that with a lot of shows I thought were amazing. Humour evolves in such a fascinating way that a killer joke, even if it’s not context specific to an era, can stop being funny.
I showed my wife a bunch of flash videos from my teenage years. She just stared and I slowly came to realize: they’re just not funny anymore. I remember thinking they were such a novel concept and the humour was trying something very new. But I guess what was new and exciting then is so socially normal now that it doesn’t trigger the funny response.
>Abstract: Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs -- ineffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable.
>Introduction
>A gentleman entered a pastry-cook's shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him. "You've not paid for the liqueur." "But I gave you the cake in exchange for it." "You didn't pay for that either." "But I hadn't eaten it". --- from Freud (1905).
[...]
>In the 1912 edition Freud, still perplexed about the purpose of nonsense, recounts a joke of this form: {11}
>"A man at the dinner table dipped his hands in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his neighbor looked astonished, the man apologized: "I'm so sorry. I thought it was spinach."
Seinfeld was a leading TV comedy in the US, and is respected by people in the industry as one of the best shows (or sitcoms) of all time.
It was 'show about nothing', as they described it, about mundane minutiae. It starred three characters, including Jerry Seinfeld, who cared about nothing but themselves. Another description I read was that it was innovative in starring unsympathetic characters.
That's such a silly thing to say I'll assume it's intentionally provocative and not intended to be truthful rather than representing genuine ignorance.
But for anybody young enough/daft enough to take it seriously, check out
Fawlty Towers
Young Ones
Blackadder
Yes Minister
Dad's Army
Etc
Etc
That's just a quick UK list off the top of my head, I'll leave others to correct the parent comment with US (Bilko?, Cheers?, etc) and other national
(Let The Blood Run Free?) suggestions...
Your suggestions are all british, Seinfeld is obviously american. Maybe what the other person was trying to say was "Seinfeld was the first good american sitcom".
I think my brain just completely skipped the last line where you mentioned the US shows, my bad. Probably thought the comment was over after reading 'etc' twice :D
IT Crowd is maybe the most similar to Seinfeld I’ve seen. Main characters independently find themselves in increasingly awkward situations (due to social ineptitude, laziness, entitlement, narcissism, etc) that eventually all unexpectedly intersect in some climactic way
Not a soap opera; it's a sitcom. The Youtube video you found is not particularly good. It gets better in the later seasons. A lot of it is pretty clever; some of it is brilliant.
