Jerry Seinfeld is right: ‘PC cr*p’ is killing comedy

TV comedy just isn’t funny anymore. That’s the verdict of Jerry Seinfeld, stand-up comedy legend and star of Seinfeld, one of the biggest sitcoms of all time.

In an interview with the New Yorker at the weekend, he said:

‘It used to be, you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, “Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M*A*S*H is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.” You just expected, there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well, guess what – where is it?’

This dearth of new comedy is no accident, according to Seinfeld. ‘It’s the result of the extreme left and PC crap’, he says. ‘People [are] worrying so much about offending other people’, he warns, that nothing risky, innovative or actually funny ever gets made anymore: ‘When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups [that say], “Here’s our thought about this joke”. Well, that’s the end of your comedy.’

Seinfeld might seem like an unlikely defender of the right to be offensive. After all, this is a comedian who refuses to swear on stage and who delivers observational stand-up routines about supermarket food and airplane etiquette. Seinfeld was famously a show ‘about nothing’. His latest project is a comedy film about the invention of the Pop-Tart. So when even he feels he has to – repeatedly – defend comedy from woke, we ought to sit up and listen. Indeed, he has been warning about the scourge of the PC police for almost a decade now.

There has been a typically unhinged reaction to these latest comments. Woke bores have lined up to denounce him as out of touch and even as a handmaiden of fascism. These idiots seem blissfully unaware that they are only proving Jerry Seinfeld right.

Thomas Osborne is an editorial assistant at spiked.