Reception
Elizabeth Magnotta and Alexandra Strohl analyze the success of Seinfeld with recourse to the incongruity theory of humor: "The Incongruity Theory claims that humor is created out of a violation of an expectation. For humor to result from this unexpected result, the event must have an appropriate emotional climate, comprised of the setting, characters, prior discourse, relationships of the characters, and the topic." Specifically, Magnotta and Strohl focus on The Marine Biologist, in which George becomes embroiled in yet another lie, and on The Red Dot in which George tries to save a few dollars at Elaine's expense by giving her a marked-down cashmere sweater.
David P. Pierson treats Seinfeld as a comedy of manners: "he popular TV sitcom can best be associated with the modern comedy of manners dramatic genre. ... These dramas are distinguished by their emphasis on a strong sense of style, deportment, and a witty repartee that is used to conceal the raw emotions which lie just beneath the surfaces of the dramatic lives of its characters."
Nod Miller, of the University of East London, has discussed the self-referential qualities of the show:
Seinfeld is suffused with postmodern themes. To begin with, the boundary between reality and fiction is frequently blurred: this is illustrated in the central device of having Jerry Seinfeld play the character Jerry Seinfeld. In the show's fourth season, several episodes revolved around the narrative of Jerry and George (whose character is co-creator Larry David's alter ego) pitching 'a show about nothing' based on the everyday life of a stand-up comedian to NBC. The reaction of the fictional NBC executives, by all accounts, mirrored the initial responses of those who eventually commissioned Seinfeld. The fourth season ends with 'The Pilot', an episode focusing on the casting, taping and screening of the show-within-the-show, Jerry. This episode also illustrates neatly the self-referential quality which is one of Seinfeld's hallmarks. The series finale was so replete with references to earlier shows as to render it largely incomprehensible to those not already well-versed in the personae and preoccupations of the Seinfeld universe.William Irwin has edited an anthology of scholarly essays on philosophy in Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing. Some entries include "The Jerry Problem and the Socratic Problem," "George's Failed Zest for Happiness: An Aristotelian Analysis," "Elaine's Moral Character," "Kramer the 'Seducer'," "Making Something Out of Nothing: Seinfeld, Sophistry and the Tao," "Seinfeld, Subjectivity, and Sartre," "Mr. Peterman, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Me," and "Minimally Decent Samaritans and Uncommon Law."
Read more about this topic: Seinfeld
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)