I get much the same feeling from "Seinfeld." It is consistently one of the highest ranked shows, and Entertainment Weekly recently named Jerry Seinfeld the second funniest person alive. Quite some honors for a show that is as stiflingly unfunny as "Seinfeld" is.
Seinfeld is the type of show for which the laugh-track was invented: if it wasn't there, the viewers wouldn't know when to laugh. And just to mak sure that the studio audience is appropriately jovial, the audience consists principally of friends and relatives of the cast and crew. Working with such a "home-town crowd", the writers and actors don't have to worry about providing jokes or humorous situations: they just have to emit any ridiculous non-sequitur or riff on some aspect of modern life in the manner of an "observational comic" and the studio audience will roar with endless laughter.
Certainly there may be some pretentious theater types who will defend "Seinfeld" and its characters by using terms like "farce" and "commedia dell'arte." To them, I say "phooey ka-flooey." Even a farce must have likeable characters: it is possible to identify even with the masks of a commedia dell'arte. "Seinfeld," however, is populated with the most obnoxious parade of caricatures it has ever been my misfortune to watch on a television series. Jerry, George, Elaine, Kramer, and Newman are all hateful grotesqueries. One prays for them all to die quickly.
"There's a sucker born every minute." "Seinfeld" proves this adage true anew. Convince people that they are somehow "in" on the joke, and they will watch and laugh endlessly. Take away the laugh track, and people will realize how unfunny the show actually is. There are many animated shows on television today, but "Seinfeld" is more cartoony than any of them.
