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Jerry Seinfeld is talking to his friends Elaine Benes (Julia LouisDreyfus ) and Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) about a new friendship he has struck up with Keith Hernandez (making a cameo appearance), and at the mention of the baseball legend’s name, Kramer recoils; simultaneously, a wild-eyed and exasperated Newman (Wayne Knight) appears in the open door to the apartment. “I hate Keith Hernandez!” exclaims Kramer.1 Foaming with contempt, Newman adds: “I despise him!” Then the two begin to spin a wild tale. On June 14, 1987, they attended a baseball game at Shea Stadium, where the Mets lost against the Philadelphia Phillies. After the game, Kramer and Newman waited outside the stadium in the parking lot in order to confront Hernandez, who, according to Newman, “opened the door to a five-run Phillies night and cost the Mets the game.” As Hernandez exited, the three passed one another and Newman shouted, “Nice game, pretty boy!” “Then, a second later,” Newman says, “something happened that changed us in a very deep and profound way from that day forward.” “What was it?” Elaine inquires. “He spit on us,” says Kramer. The dialogue then goes on to introduce one of the subplots of “The Boyfriend,” an hour-long episode of the sitcom Seinfeld that parodies how Zapruder’s images shaped the style and the narrative of Oliver Stone’s JFK. There had to have been a second spitter. Behind the bushes on the gravelly road. // Jerry Seinfeld, “The Boyfriend” F O U R No Hugging, No Learning 8 0 // Z A P R U D E R E D In this chapter, I will address how the Zapruder quotations in “The Boyfriend ” can be said to perform what Linda Hutcheon calls a “stylistic confrontation .”2 Quoting thus represents a kind of doubling that exposes the logic of a particular kind of storytelling, that of the docudrama. Unlike the allegorical doubling of Ant Farm’s midseventies video, the metapictorial play in Seinfeld is directed at how a genre depicts a particular vision of history. “The Boyfriend ” invites the audience to laugh at the visual rhetoric of a contemporary morality play and simultaneously comments on its own identity as an antididactic situation comedy. In the process, it provides, in the words of Geoffrey O’Brien, “a brief and reliable pleasure”—always a primary goal for a sitcom.3 In an essay published in the spring of 1987, Ronald Berman admits to missing the satirical American comedy of the past. “Comedy has many desires , and not all of them are respectable,” he insists, and bemoans contemporary comedy for being “full of advice about hot social issues.” “Sitcoms in the eighties often tell us how to run our lives,” he claims.4 Indeed, from the moment it premiered, on July 5, 1989, and throughout its nine seasons, Seinfeld, whether it was the kind of show Berman called for or not, broke with what he saw as the dominance of comedy informed by cultural politics. Focusing on the many trivialities of everyday life, Seinfeld was the product of a meeting of the minds of two stand-up comedians, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, who set out to make a television show that would be as funny as it would be adamantly uninstructive. “The crucial guideline,” O’Brien writes of the show, “is that the characters do not learn from experience and never move beyond what they intrinsically and eternally are.”5 The self-proclaimed “show about nothing,” Seinfeld was not as much about nothing, however, as about advocating nothing, David Marc suggests. It is about “details,” and is thus about “nothing” in the sense that it is not concept driven and does not address big social or political issues explicitly.6 The show could thus be considered antithetical to the “melding of historical fact and dramatic form” that is docudrama, in which “coherence and narrative structure emerge, and fragments of memory are made whole.”7 Never about the major events of historical narrative, Seinfeld’s “plot formula,” Amy McWilliams argues, played with the traditional and expected story arc, and in particular with the “problem/resolution format.”8 An episode of Seinfeld seldom resolved toward the end, and if there was some sort of resolution, it was ironic; as a result, the comedy was, in the words of Larry Charles, one of the show’s supervising producers, “very dark.” “The idea that you would have an unhappy ending . . . this really shook the foundation of the sitcom genre...

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