Open micJerry SeinfeldJerry Seinfeld’s Clio acceptance speech is a standup routine for our times
Seinfeld’s rant about advertising is an astonishing feat of comedy and raises an important question – whither satire when its targets laugh so hard?
Usually when I see a comedian fronting an ad campaign, this Bill Hicks routine comes to mind. (I may not always agree, but it comes to mind.) This week brings another happy marriage of comedy and selling stuff. “Comedian Rob Brydon has been revealed as the face of P&O Cruises’ new campaign,” run the reports. But now is not the time to re-tread Hicks’ argument (“there’s a price on your head, everything you say is suspect, and every word that comes out of your mouth is like a turd falling into my drink”). Nor, say, David Mitchell’s defence. “I don’t see what is morally inconsistent with a comedian doing an advert,” said the Peep Show man amid flak for his and Robert Webb’s Apple campaign. “It’s alright to sell computers, isn’t it? Unless you think that capitalism is evil – which I don’t.”
Now we have a new reference point for when comedians and Mad Men intersect. In October this year, Jerry Seinfeld was given a Clio award for services to advertising. Wikipedia tells us that these are “the world’s most recognisable international advertising awards”, and who am I to disagree? So why does the ad industry love Seinfeld? Well, he used to co-star with Bill Gates in commercials for Microsoft, he writes the ads for “luxury automotive brand” Acura that book-end his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee web series, and he once made a pair of short films to promote American Express. Probably there’s more: he’s no Bill Hicks. (Although who knows what Hicks might have gone on to do?)
But then came Seinfeld’s acceptance speech, which has been doing the rounds on social media for a few weeks. It’s a comic mini-masterpiece, simultaneously a deft feat of ethical evasion and a sharp-toothed gnash on the hand that feeds. “I love advertising, because I love lying,” Seinfeld tells his crowd of ad-industry bigwigs. Of the commercials that promise us beautiful lives, “we know the product is going to stink. We know that.” As for the execs in the crowd, a captive audience to this extraordinary speech – well, Jerry tells them, they have “phoney careers and meaningless lives”.
Seinfeld has previous with irreverent acceptance speeches. Back in 2007, collecting a gong from HBO, he said: “All awards are stupid … The whole feeling in this room of reverence and honouring is the exact opposite of everything I have wanted my life to be about. I really don’t want to be up here. I want to be in the back, somewhere over there, saying something funny to somebody about what a crock this whole thing is.”
At points in that speech, but more so in the more recent one, the comic mode is unflinching, Stewart Lee-like sarcasm. But more nuanced, because – at least in the Clio speech – we can’t be sure Seinfeld is being sarcastic. After all, he’s taken the Mad Men’s dollars. He’s accepted the award. Maybe he really does (as he says here) “think that just focusing on making money and buying stupid things is a good way of life”? At points, this feels like a breathtakingly amoral, but honest, engagement with all (most) of our complicity with consumerism. He’s not being pious; he’s admitting that it’s easy – fun even – to succumb to coveting and buying stuff.
But then he’ll look his audience in the eye and say – with a butter-wouldn’t-melt grin, “I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of their hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.” At which points, the speech takes on a more combative edge.
But the audience – at least as far as we can tell from the video – laugh and laugh. You might think Seinfeld’s being brave, but maybe he’s just accurately gauged the levels of self-loathing in the advertising industry.
Or is it self-irony? Not everyone – certainly not everyone present – will agree with Seinfeld’s jaundiced take on advertising. And yet, the cheerfulness that greets his speech is still striking. Truly, this is a standup routine for our times, and watching it, the questions pile up. Whither satire, when the satirised react like tickled kittens? Does comedy awaken people from their moral compromise, or comfort them in it? And do we admire Seinfeld for speaking truth directly to commercial power – or regret that he’s so cosy with power in the first place? A bit of both, I’d say. But if as a comedian you do find yourself in such gilded company, this is the way to behave: impertinent, subversive, unclubbable. As if you were “in the back, over there somewhere, saying something funny to somebody about what a crock this whole thing is”.
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