It’s all in the timing
Back in 1957, comedian Don Adams, later famous for his role as the bumbling Agent 86 on TV’S Get Smart, took to the stage on The Steve Allen Show. Introduced as “one of America’s brightest new monologists,” Adams started his set with a bit about the development of “a new car that’s powered by electricity.” He said it would cost about $5,000: “$1,000 for the car and $4,000 for the extension cord.”
Some jokes are timeless. Some get stale over the years. And as we’re about to see, some age faster than a ripe banana.
This week Netflix unveiled Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill, his first major televised comedy special since 1998’s I’m Telling You for the Last Time. It was recorded at New York’s Beacon Theatre in 2019, a time can all agree was the Distant Past, and that showed in some of the out-of-date jokes.
It starts with the 66-year-old comedian in a helicopter flying over the Hudson River. “Too much traffic to land right now,” the pilot tells him, whereupon Seinfeld makes a 12-metre plunge into the water.
No stuntman! Yet all I could think was: Traffic?! What traffic?
Then the first 10 minutes of the show, which had the unfortunate feeling of being broadcast from another planet. First there was a bit about going out, how we’re always moving.
“If you’re at work you want to get home,” he says. “Home, I’ve been working all week, I gotta get out. You’re out, it’s late, I gotta get back. Gotta get to the airport. When are we getting on the plane? Plane takes off, when’s the plane going to land? Plane lands, why don’t they open the doors so we can get out? Nobody wants to be anywhere.” That last sentence feels right, but for all the wrong reasons.
Now, obviously Seinfeld can’t be expected to predict a once-ina-century pandemic.
And arguably any jokes about traffic, eating out, baseball games, hot dogs and movies would play about as well in 1957 as in 2019. Just not now. It’s just rotten timing.
And to be fair, the rest of the show is pretty fun, especially if you’re a fan of Seinfeld’s signature crankiness. He takes on texting, the U.S. Postal Service, portable toilets, aging and marriage. He describes the latter as being on a game show, but forever in the lightning round. He says he starts his day with “movies I think we saw together for $200,” while his wife chooses “details of a 10-minute conversation we had at three o’clock in the morning eight years ago — and I would like to bet everything I have on that.”
And while one person’s “timeless” is another’s “tired” — after all, Adams’s jokes about “women’s intuition” in 1957 eerily mirror Seinfeld’s talk of wives — he sometimes manages some real philosophically inflected funniness, as when he questions our constant attachment to our phones.
“I think the only reason people exist is phones need pockets to ride around in,” he says. “I used to think Uber was on my phone so I could get around. Then I started thinking maybe they put Uber on my phone because that makes me take the phone because the phone is using me to get around!”
And I have to admit I was partial to his bit on the invention of Pop-tarts and his crafting of the tagline: “They can’t go stale ’cause they weren’t ever fresh.” Adams would appreciate that one, though maybe not right away. After all, Pop-tarts wouldn’t be invented until 1964.