J. Peterman Jumps to Jerry Seinfeld’s Defense After Anti-Woke Tirade
John O’Hurley says that his old pal Jerry Seinfeld is right about what the “extreme left” has done to American comedy, claiming that America has “lost our ability to be silly.” I suppose that J. Peterman will start the search to find it again in an exotic location like Myanmar — or Burma, as it will always be to him.
Though he’s best known for playing the eccentric and fictional head of the J. Peterman Company on Seinfeld, O’Hurley is more than just a charismatic purveyor of fine furs and linens from faraway lands – he’s also the guy who hosted Family Feud before Steve Harvey. And, on top of that, O’Hurley is one of the many outspoken conservative voices in comedy who feels the need to chime in every time Fox News finds a new talking point about how the Republicans are the only funny people left, a narrative that they will push in between promos for Rob Schneider’s newest Fox Nation special.
One such angle that has had Fox anchors salivating at those sweet, sweet anti-woke clicks for the last two weeks came from O’Hurley’s old colleague, Seinfeld himself, who recently claimed that the liberal agenda killed comedy on television with all their “PC crap.”
Last week, O’Hurley appeared on Jesse Waters Primetime to concur with Seinfeld’s assessment of leftism’s effects on comedy while defending old and uncomfortably racial plot lines from his time on Seinfeld that even caused a stir back in the 1990s, saying, “Historically, ethnic groups would be searching to be included in the comic repertoire of our culture.”
O’Hurley must have written his comments on the show after a hit of what he calls “The Chinaman’s Nightcap.”
Waters asked O’Hurley about the plot line from Seinfeld that the series’ namesake says couldn’t be made today — Kramer’s scheme to employ homeless people as rickshaw drivers in “The Bookstore” — and O’Hurley agreed with Seinfeld’s claim that the episode wouldn’t fly on TV today. “There are several actual episodes of Seinfeld that have been stripped from the syndication because they didn’t pass mustard back then,” O’Hurley continued, specifying, “I think it was the Puerto Rican flag one.”
In the episode O’Hurley mentioned, “The Puerto Rican Day,” Kramer accidentally sets the flag of Puerto Rico on fire with a sparkler during the Puerto Rican Day Parade, inciting an angry mob to attack him. After the episode aired in 1998, Puerto Rican activists and politicians criticized Kramer’s comments following his inciting of a minor riot, in which he said, “It's like this every day in Puerto Rico.” As a result to the condemnation and despite objections from the cast and crew of Seinfeld, NBC pulled “The Puerto Rican Day” from syndication for four years, though the episode would return to the rotation in 2002.
How that minor controversy from a quarter of a century ago proves that Woke Twitter killed comedy is known only to O’Hurley.
O’Hurley confusingly pointed to Seinfeld’s notoriously clean act and non-divisive style of comedy as proof that the sitcom star is a credible expert on controversial humor, further suggesting, “The problem is that we have lost our ability to be silly. That’s a sad thing when you think about it.”
O’Hurley lamented that, as a culture, “We have lost our sense of humor,” opining, “Our comedy is no longer silly, it’s not about that. It’s mocking and it’s sarcasm, and that’s not comedy.”
If O’Hurley thinks that mocking and sarcasm aren’t comedy, I just have to ask — has he ever seen Seinfeld?
