“What if Sinefeld is still on tv today?” It is a question begged by weird Twitter iconoclast @Seinfeld2000, whose online persona is so strange, so honest, so detached from and yet at the same time completely attached to reality, that I think he might be writing the definitive history of American pop culture as we know it. It is on track to widespread acclaim as the definitive, indisputably final word on postmodernity. Experts may disagree, but @Seinfeld2000’s comedic palette synthesizes a uniquely chaotic array of bizarre funny, and one thing is for certain—one cannot read this guy’s feed and not begin to wonder what in all holy heaven his deal might be, whoever he is.
Unless of course, one has not seen the NBC classic zeitgeist sitcom to end all sitcoms, Seinfeld.
A Philosophy Professor at Conn once told me that Seinfeld is a show about horrible people who care only for themselves, and that it was very funny. Our “modarn day” narrator who uses his “imaginatiens” to “imagen what it would be like if Senfend on tv,” forces us to reconsider why we loved the Upper West Side foursome so much, whenever we first fell in love with Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer, or as @Seinfeld2000 affectionately calls them, “Jary, Garge, Elan, and Krame.”
Placed in a seemingly endless series of situations that somehow pertain to popular culture and/or the behavior of the characters from “Senfield,” this foursome of aging protagonists are exposed to be the materialistic and respectively womanizing, sociopathic, self-absorbed and racist-in-real-life individuals that they always have been. These situations, restricted to a description 140-characters in length, are a little less forgiving than those on the much more popular and less weird Twitter account, “@SeinfeldToday,” which is an older, marginally less funny/clever/original/creative account that would post things like, “Jerry gets stuck on a never-ending group text. ‘You used to be able to avoid people! Now they can choose to live in your pocket forever!’”
While @SeinfeldToday emphasizes the harmless, sometimes endearing characteristics of the leading men and woman, @Seinfeld2000 shows no mercy. Here’s an example where we’re reminded that George literally killed his wife (albeit with his frugality), through a “refarance” to the episode where George wants to tell his girlfriend that he loves her and is worried she won’t say that she loves him back—
“Garge txt his GF ‘ily’
JERY: But are u confedent in the ‘ily’ return
GF doesn’t reply so Garge end her life
Turn out her iPhone was broken”
Here’s another that reminds us that, despite a well-intentioned episode with him as the deserving-of-sympathy guest star on “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” Michael Richards is still probably a racist. While referencing a Netflix Original Series.
“Why did krame call the jack-o-lantern the N word?
orenge is the new black”
It gets weirder—some of these “twetes” reference “technalagical” computer hardware specs, while others undermine President Obama in a sort of definitive lampoon of the President’s right wing detractors. Some poke elegant yet crude fun at controversial figures like Rob Ford, George Zimmerman and Vladimir Putin, while others use photoshop to offer visual aids as to what Seinfeld would be like in 2014, like blending Elaine’s face onto the infamous Miley Cyrus Rolling Stone cover.
No one is safe from the atrocious spelling, nor an honest assessment from an enigmatic, anonymous internet zombie whose playfulness is only matched by his deadpan, concise thoughts that transcend irony and almost become a means of escapism for everyone who would otherwise get off on a 25 minute Buzzfeed kick. To follow @Seinfeld2000 is to momentarily escape this dimension and for an instant gaze down upon our image-obsessed, self-centered, messy society, and to know the absurdity of the human condition.
The plot keeps thickening. One of the most essential elements of this user’s persona is, and couldn’t not be, his comprehensive knowledge of Seinfeld. His tweets reference not just the classic Seinfeld situations—the puffy shirt, the contest—but also some of the more obscure moments from the series’ nine-season run.
One of my favorites is the rewrite of William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” as follows—
“So much depends
upon
a red
dot
on the white
cashmere sweater.”
—which thereby situates the obscure George-buys-Elaine-a-cashmere-sweater-that’s-on-sale-because-it’s-stained-and-hopes-that-she-doesn’t-know-it-but-she-does-so-George-gives-it-to-his-cleaning-lady-after-he-impulsively-has-sex-with-her episode within the context of rarefied modernist poetry.
His career was launched after Gawker published what is ostensibly a Seinfeld script entitled “The Apple Store.” He then created a video called “Seinquest2000” that begs viewers to consider “What it Seinfeld still coming on your tv every thurday night must see tv? Honestly, it’s a mystery that has intrigued the world’s greatest thinkers throughout the ages.” Through masking his exaggeration, dishonesty and weirdness in a cloak of at once loftiness and stupidity, as well as some seriously disorienting language, our narrator fulfills his own self-fulfilling prophecy that the spirit of Seinfeld—a show about nothing, everything and the ups and downs of being completely self-absorbed—has never been more relevant than it is today.
“Elane start dating Amazon tech support expert who appears live on her Kindle Fire HDX tablet whenever she push Mayday button.” This spirit pervades in an unprecedentedly direct and creepy fashion, but it also makes many die-hard Seinfeld fans experience that aura of subtly but shamelessly cruel situational comedy in a way that they haven’t since Season 7. “Jary finally just kill Newmen.”
@Seinfeld2K has written for Vice’s Noisey and live tweeted for them during the VMAs and the Grammys (with no shortage of Kramer at the Emmys references and a genius kick of comparing Pharrell’s Grammys hat to the J. Peterman Urban Sombrero Elaine is given the task of describing for the catalog in Season 8). In terms of objective internet ubiquity, with 32.6K followers, he’s really doing quite well given that he’s such a weirdo.
It’s really difficult to capture the essence of what this person is all about without reading a ton of his writing, and that’s why doing so is so magical. He creates a universe, much in the way that the creators of Breaking Bad or True Detective create universes to which it’s easy to develop a serious addiction. It’s not as if his system is consistent, predictable, or sound in any sense of the word, but rather as if there is an elaborate web of ideas with one or two many components. And it’s that slight over-the-topness, that makes this world so compelling—the more you submerge yourself into the universe, the more it begins to provide. The more familiar you become with the shtick, the more exhilarating it is when he once again shatters your expectations.
@Seinfeld2000 has elevated tweeting to an art form, just like The Sopranos elevated television to an art form and Watchmen elevated the graphic novel to an art form. He has enacted a modest but important shift in the paradigm of observational humor, of which his namesake is the Godfather. If you like Seinfeld—no, if you identify with any of the characters on Seinfeld, and if you can both laugh at and pity yourself and the rest of the world without any cognitive dissonance, then you might be interested in further delving into the question of what exactly it would be like if the Sinebird series is still on NBC.
If you check out the work of this beautiful mind, you may begin to see as I have that ironic post-modern entertainment has peaked, that reality has been perverted and clarified in a way that defies the so called laws of nature and that the question is no longer “Are we alone?” or “What’s the point?” or “How can I do better?” or “What’s missing?” or “Who am I?” Existential pondering is done—there is only one universal truth, and it lies below.
“It was the best of time’s, it was the worst of time’s
It was the age of ‘senfeld’ not being on TV, it was the age of imagining it still was” •
