What’s the deal with Jerry Seinfeld, anyway?
That’s a rhetorical question that plenty of people have been paraphrasing after a press tour that’s found the veteran comedian speaking his mind about the state of film and comedy, among other things.
But it’s also a question that might earnest occur to anyone who actually watches what Seinfeld is out there promoting in the first place: Unfrosted, a comedy for Netflix wherein he plays, alongside Melissa McCarthy, an architect of the beloved Kellogg’s breakfast treat.
It’s Seinfeld’s first movie as a director, and his first movie project at all following the 2007 animated oddity Bee Movie (which was written by the same team of Seinfeld and two of his sitcom staffers).
Together, these two films comprise the majority of the comedian’s non-stand-up-related output since the end of his classic sitcom Seinfeld, 26 years ago this May. As such, it feels like we should be able to turn to Unfrosted to figure out what, exactly, a now 70-year-old Jerry Seinfeld finds funny.
In this sense, Unfrosted will be familiar to fans of the massively popular – and still, it should be said, all-time-great – self-titled sitcom. It touches upon a number of favoured Seinfeld motifs: food, particularly cereal; the bizarre social rituals that inform the most absurd situations, in this case the development of a breakfast pastry; and the barely-contained lunacy of corporate concerns, which were typically viewed through the various employment humiliations of George Costanza (Jason Alexander) on the old show.
There’s also some Kramer-scheme zaniness throughout Unfrosted, and that’s part of how the movie wears out its welcome: What initially feels agreeably similar to the zanier Kramer plots of later-period Seinfeld winds up feeling more like the kind of idiotic project Kramer himself would have cooked up, and that we would have been spared actually experiencing at length.
There’s nothing wrong with a famous comedian getting silly at feature length, and there are times when Unfrosted has the amusing daftness of a loopy cartoon – something it shares with Bee Movie, which stubbornly and sometimes hilariously refuses to follow the formulas of DreamWorks animation (at one point, Seinfeld’s Bee character gets into a courtroom altercation with honey pitchman Ray Liotta).
A brief Mad Men scene – Jon Hamm and John Slattery cameo as their characters, appropriate to Unfrosted’s 1960s setting – is like something out of a Muppet movie; the cereal-centric funeral of a Kellogg’s employee is decidedly Simpsons-y. There’s accidental currency, too, in the way that the movie parodies the recent spate of product-and-marketing origin stories like Air, Flamin’ Hot, and Tetris. Flamin’ Hot is nearly as ridiculously made-up as this movie, and it takes its own fabrications way more seriously.
Unfrosted can’t sustain itself, however, with plenty of hacky or underline jokes overpowering the light absurdity, and it’s so larded up with celebrity cameos that none of the characters (beyond maybe McCarthy’s) have any chance to stick.
Moreover, Seinfeld’s flimsy excuse for a movie comedy makes a bizarre companion piece to his complaint that comedy is currently hampered by “extreme left and PC crap” that apparently prohibits people from being funny.
These kinds of comments aren’t especially shocking from a 70-year-old, and in the midst of providing countless counterexamples of comedies that currently do exist and push the envelope, it’s even possible to concede some form of Seinfeld’s points about caution in comedy, even if he appears to conflate monoculture with lack of censoriousness.
When he popped up on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update referred to only as a Man Who Did Too Much Press, it felt like an opportunity for Seinfeld to walk back his comments, or a least joke about them. Instead, it was another mock-woe-is-me rich-guy gag about how he’s done so much promotional work for his new project that he doesn’t know where he is half the time.
Mostly it emphasised that Seinfeld has been rich and famous for the majority of his life at this point, making him perhaps less than authoritative about what actual comedy audiences are looking for.
And when he does get seeming carte blanche to make comedy, it’s not as if he produces something startlingly edgy. If anything, the sharper edges of Seinfeld seem more attributable to Larry David, whose own sharp-edged comedy series just ended a 12-season run.
Unfrosted, then, has the opportunity to reconcile those two sides of Seinfeld: The complainer who thinks comedy has gone soft, now in full control; and the lighthearted chronicler of cultural minutiae, free to explore his retro whims.
In this context, the most disappointing thing about the movie (well, maybe second-most, after the dry spaces in between its laughs) is how Seinfeld fails to extract even a fleeting, comic meaning from the idea of treating the competition to produce the best breakfast pastry as a space-race-style undertaking.
Seinfeld was a kid and then a teenager in the 1960s; that’s surely responsible for his gee-whiz semi-parody of the era, but surely he recalls something more than that about that version of America, in the midst of such profound social change? Maybe something about how our many moral failings as a country that reverberate to this day were muffled by the cheerful futurism of repackaged sugar?
I know, I know: That’s not what Jerry wants out of this stuff. He’s said that he has no aims for Unfrosted beyond people getting a “couple of laughs” out of it. Mission accomplished, I guess; I got my handful of LOLs, though they didn’t look especially substantial spread across 90 minutes. (Wouldn’t such an experienced stand-up understand what a lousy ratio that is?) But for as silly as Unfrosted is, it seems to exist right on the verge of telling us a little more about who Jerry has become since Seinfeld. After all, that show delighted in revealing characters’ hang-ups through absurdity and silliness.
Instead, the press tour swirling around a movie as empty as Unfrosted instead recalls an unholy hybridisation of Pop-Tarts and Seinfeld’s famous self-description: It’s a pastry with a big nothing at its centre.
This story originally appeared on Decider and is republished here with permission.