This is Pastor Tim’s Article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, May 14, 2024
The date of the publication of this article, May 14, 1998, is the 26th anniversary of the airing of the last episode of the TV show Seinfeld. I have to admit, I am probably the only Gen Xer on earth who was never into Seinfeld. It was billed as a show about nothing, and that was true. The characters stood for nothing, the plots led to nothing, and the whole point of the show was nothing.
Seinfeld ran for 9 seasons from 1989 to 1998 and to everyone’s utter shock, they stopped making the show when it was absolutely at the top of its game. The whole world was just blown away because the show was still firing on all cylinders. I have to hand it to Jerry Seinfeld; he did not want to stay longer than he was welcome and God bless him for that.
My biggest memory of Seinfeld is when I was on my way to be introduced to the first church I served in Fort Recovery. It was in May of 1998, and I was riding in the car with my District Superintendent, and I vividly remember her asking me about whether or not I watched this last show.
In recent weeks, Jerry Seinfeld has been back in the news. He has made some comments about the death of comedy in our modern times. He spoke about how it is nearly impossible to be funny on a college campus anymore because everyone is perpetually offended by everything. He was lamenting that we process every piece of comedy through a focus group to sanitize it from anything offensive and that sanitizing process strips away any possible humor.
Which takes me back to the 1990s. I graduated from high school in 1993, so my entire high school and college years were in the decade of the 1990s. I have to tell you kids today; I am so sorry you didn’t get to grow up when I did. The 90s were a great time to be young. If there was a time machine that could take someone in their early 20s from today back to the 1990s when I was in my early 20s, one of two things would happen. They would either have a cardiac arrest because of how offended they were by the world of the 1990s or they would laugh uncontrollably because they would be exposed to comedy for the first time in their lives.
Case in point: the man who is famous for making a TV show in the 1990s billed as “the show about nothing” is too offensive for audiences today. For the love of God, can we please get over ourselves? There is a lot of funny stuff out there to experience but instead of laughing at it we view it as a personal attack. And the scary part of this is, our culture has made this shift in just 26 years.
Does this even matter? I mean every generation’s idea of what comedy is changes. I laughed at stuff my parents cringed at, today kids laugh at things that I truly do not understand. Is that what this is? I don’t think so. This is different because when my parents were not laughing at the stuff I found hilarious, they may have made me turn it off, but they did not start a campaign to cancel it. Most of the time, they enjoyed me laughing at it even when they didn’t understand it.
When we experience laughter, we usually do it together. There is nothing better than being with a crowd that will laugh. About once or twice a year, I get a joke to land at Wayne Street where the congregation will actually laugh rather than their usual groan at me. Those are cool moments of bringing a crowd together.
But when we decide to be offended, that is by definition a disconnection. Even if other people are offended along with you, it is still not a unifying experience. Truth be told, we don’t laugh enough. I think a lot of the anger and resentment being displayed in our culture today could be helped if we would just laugh with each other more often. Heck, it might even be an improvement if we would laugh at each other, but we can’t do that either.
This is a problem that even King Solomon understood 3000 years ago when he wrote Proverbs 17:22: A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength.
What I see in the world today proves Solomon was correct.