That’s not how anything works in a collaborative enterprise. Yes, there’s usually someone who makes the final decision on what stays and goes, but it comes after (and is made better by) a lot of back-and-forth and pitching and debate. Every competent show runner and producer I’ve met understands that.
Or, put another way, mcme was describing a situation that simply doesn’t exist and never did in sitcom writing. If one is talking about “comedy by committee” in the context under discussion then the only real-world situation that comes close to describing is indeed a writers room.
The truth is Jerry was the least funny part of Seinfeld.
We all know now that Larry David was the real genius & source of the humour, all Jerry did was play the straight man to the excellent comedic actors he worked with.
His smug delivery of his barely humourous observations was the boring wire coathanger that a great ensemble piece hung upon.
As noted by @Otherbrother it was written for the movie. Robert Altman’s instructions were that it should be called Suicide is Painless and it should be, and I quote, “the stupidest song ever written”. Altman tried to write the lyrics himself but couldn’t come up with anything he felt was bad enough, so he recruited his then 15-year-old son Johnny to write them.
Altman was paid seventy grand for directing the movie, while Johnny made over a million in royalties.
If anything, comedy right now is better than ever. Today’s best comedians get laughs without having to punch down or up or at all. The old guard is just pissed about their own comedic irrelevance and so are blaming cultural forces when the fact of the matter is that they’re just not funny. Because what’s funny has evolved beyond them independently of wokeness.
The Dick Van Dyke Show had a secondary plot set in the writers’ room at the Alan Brady Show, a thinly-veiled homage to the writers’ room of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. The “committee” in that case consisted of comrades Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Selma Diamond, Joseph Stein, Michael Stewart, Tony Webster, and Carl Reiner. (List taken from the Wikipedia article.)
Speaking as a Boomer living in NYC when that show was originally on – and thus supposedly his ideal audience – I can say that it was popular despite the fact many people including me didn’t find it funny at all. Obviously, it resonated with enough people at the time to become a hit show.
Apparently now not as many people find him funny. Have they come round to my way of thinking, or do they just prefer the many better comedy choices now that there are more options than basic TV and cable?
If he wasn’t able to keep his audience, that’s on him.
Again, that’s the only form of “comedy by committee” that actually exists with the kind of sitcoms he’s describing as funny. Despite the whinging of those on the right, writers rooms aren’t Maoist srtuggle sessions (at least in terms of being politically correct – you have to have a thick skin to survive the constant roasting in those places).
Yeah… I’ve only done like hobby writing groups which are pretty gentle. But most of art school is learning to critique and accept critique both from peers and people who have power over you… and all of them are not necessarily going to like it or you for that matter. Learning to deal with that and function is kind of just up to the person to handle and on one hand some one like Seinfeld has to be great at this to have gotten where he did.
But it is also true that sometimes people who don’t like to hear the word “no” and have a history of successful ideas sometimes still need to be told “no” and that’s fine.
Once upon a time, Jerry Seinfeld was a young grump. I found something deeply refreshing in his cynicism, which felt in tune with its era. (Seinfeld, 70 last month, may be a boomer, but temperamentally he’s kind of Gen X.) Now he’s an old grump, as are many of us, the ones who watched his show so religiously that the sudden appearance of kind and friendly characters blew our minds the way Pop-Tarts blew young Jerry’s. I look in the mirror now, and it’s my whininess, my resistance to change, my smug dissatisfaction with everyone else that I find least appealing about myself. Seinfeld embraces his misanthropy, as he always has—he’s never pretended to anything different—but it feels different now, in a darker world. Is a pure, decent human being really so bad?
I’m technically X but always identified more with the millennials. I was born close to the line between the two, and by some definitions might be a xennial. I had an early-adopter dad so my life was always very digital (his first PC was manufactured the same month and year I was born) but I also lived in a mostly analog world until high school. Then coming out as trans in the pandemic, I started second puberty immersed in gen Z trans internet culture and kinda took a lot of that in as well.
It’s why I sort of hate the whole generation discourse. I don’t feel like it really applies to me at all.
Yeah, I was referring to Stewart in that comment. Seinfeld hasn’t been relevant in decades and his adherence to the idea that comedians being called out for punching down = a restriction of their speech is a big reason why.
The generous read is that “Comedy by committee” in this context is after a show having randos come up to you and give you notes, and expect you change your jokes. Which happens and is bullshit.
However, if the crowd doesn’t like it, show after show, well the committee has spoken and you gotta take it back to the drawing board.
No one likes the former, but the later is, like 50% of the job.
John Stewart was the one saying he lost 2 words in 35 years and that it did not affect him… an apparent rebuttal to Seinfeld’s comments.
