Watching “Seinfeld,” the greatest sitcom in television history, I can’t help but think of Socrates, Shakespeare, the Buddha, and Lao-Tzu, among the greatest minds in world history. Huh? You’re wondering how I can compare Greece’s wisest man, the Bard of Avon, and the founders of Buddhism and Taoism, respectively, to Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine? Sit back and listen. and I’ll make my case.
Socrates is remembered for standing on the street corners of Athens speaking to the Greek youth, saying that the “unexamined life is not worth living.”
Jerry Seinfeld is remembered for standing up on comedy club stages in Athens, Georgia and throughout America examining parts of life that few people ever thought to examine. The stand-up bits he did as lead-ins to his sitcom did just that, as did many of its episodes.
While Socrates focused his inquiries on Truth, Justice, and the Good, the New York Four on “Seinfeld” concerned themselves with questions like is soup a meal?; how can I do as little work as possible without being fired?; and when is it okay to break up with one’s girlfriend and start dating her roommate? Socrates was considered the wisest man in Athens because he claimed to know nothing. “Seinfeld” is a sitcom that concerns itself with nothing.
In “The Opposite,” in Season Five, Jerry plays a Socraticlike role for George, inspiring the latter to make an enormous transformation. Realizing that trusting his instincts almost invariably has led George down wrong paths, Jerry, like a philosopher-comic, says, “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.”
With which George agrees.
So he gets up, approaches an attractive woman, and “breaks the ice” (a phrase from “The Taming of the Shrew”), and hopes to charm her with just a few anti-George tidbits of truth: because “brevity is the soul of wit” (from the same play). He confesses he’s unemployed, lives with his parents, yet she’s interested. In a job interview with George Steinbrenner, he blasts the Boss for his selfish, erratic behaviors, and is hired on the spot.
“This has been the dream of my life,” George says. “And it’s all happening because I am completely ignoring every urge toward common sense and good judgment I’ve ever had!” “Seinfeld” and Shakespeare As Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet,” “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” “Seinfeld” featured the comic mantra, “not
that there’s anything wrong with it,” about aberrant behaviors. The show about nothing reminds Shakespeare fans of the famous “Macbeth” quote about life being “a tale told by an idiot,” (do you hear that, Kramer?) “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Got it, George?)
“Seinfeld,” Lao Tzu and the Buddha Both Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, and the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, taught that peace of mind comes from knowing the reality of this nothing. Yoga masters remind us that the word Yoga means yoking or uniting your individual mind with Universal Consciousness, or from the world of things to That which is no thing. “Seinfeld” was created by its eponymous star and comic Larry David to be about nothing, and the Universe was created by God out of nothing. Perhaps that’s why Jerry and his friends were forever exploring coffee shop discussions about… well, nothing.
Lao Tzu wrote of the Tao, the highest power in the universe, that “the Tao that can be named is not the Tao.” This non-changing essence is thought of as nothing. As he wrote in his “Tao Te Ching”:
Yet Tao engenders One One engenders Two Two engenders Three Three engenders the ten thousand things.
In his great classic of Taoism, Lao Tzu introduced the idea of wu-wei, which translates as action in non-action. While the truth of this concept is profound –enlightened people are instruments through whom Cosmic Intelligence operates, and the source of their many actions is the Universe rather than themselves – the idea of action in non-action reminds us of the comic characters who make up this great sitcom’s funny foursome. Interestingly, the series finale finds them sentenced to a year in prison for failing to act to prevent a mugging.