Jerry Seinfeld is finally admitting he was wrong to blame the “extreme left” for ruining comedy.
Seinfeld says he “regrets” the comments and is ready to take them back in this exclusive clip from the latest episode of his friend and fellow comedian Tom Papa’s Breaking Bread podcast. “I said that the ‘extreme left’ has suppressed the art of comedy. I did say that. That’s not true,” Seinfeld says before laughing at himself and adding, “It’s not true.”
It was in an extended talk with the New Yorker’s David Remnick to mark his 70th birthday this past April that Seinfeld first made the claim that genuinely funny television has disappeared as “the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
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Those comments drew inevitable praise from commentators on Fox News and other conservative platforms, like Greg Gutfeld who wholeheartedly agreed with Seinfeld’s assessment. “You know, he is right,” Fox’s “late-night” host remarked. “When you look at sitcoms today, you don’t feel like you’re going to relax and laugh. You feel like you’re going to be lectured or educated.”
But they also received significant pushback from even close collaborators like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who argued that “political correctness, insofar as it equates to tolerance, is obviously fantastic” and anyone complaining about it raises a “red flag” for her. “Comedy is risky and it can be offensive, but that’s what makes it so enjoyable,” she added later. “I personally don’t buy the conceit that this is an impossible time to be funny. Maybe some people aren’t laughing at your jokes, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be made.”
In the new interview, Seinfeld goes on to compare comedians to Olympic skiers like Lindsey Vonn who is going to “make the gate” wherever you put it on the mountain. “Whatever the culture is, we make the gate,” Seinfeld says of stand-up comics. “You don’t make the gate, you’re out of the game.”
Elsewhere in the podcast episode, Seinfeld disavowed comments that have long been attributed to him about refusing to perform on college campuses because they have become too “P.C.”
“Not true,” he says now. “First of all, I never said it, but if you think I said it, it’s not true. … So that perception that I don’t play colleges—wrong. I do, I play them all the time, and it’s not a problem.”
What he actually said in a 2015 interview was, “I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near colleges. They’re so P.C.’” Seinfeld did, of course, face walk-outs by students over his support of Israel when he delivered the commencement address at Duke University earlier this year.
“So, does culture change? And are there things I used to say that I can’t say that everybody’s always moving?” Seinfeld asks Papa, whose third Netflix special Home Free is set to premiere on Oct. 29, towards the end of this part of their discussion. “Yeah, but that’s the biggest, easiest target. That accuracy of your observation has to be a hundred times finer than that.”
In other words, it’s up to the comedian to be good enough to adjust to the current culture and not fall flat on their faces in the process.
“So I don’t think, as I said, the ‘extreme left’ has done anything to inhibit the art of comedy,” Seinfeld concludes.
For more, listen to Tom Papa on The Last Laugh podcast.
