David Puddy

“Ahead of its time: Seinfeld’s chosen family queers straight friendship.”

See? It’s almost too easy. The Salty headline is there for the writing, dangling like a dirt farmer dangles a carrot in front of a mule, as Jerry might put it. Judging solely by the way Twitter is curating my feed, it appears a Netflix-spurred Seinfeld resurgence is afoot, and the queering—tongue-in-cheek and otherwise—is in full swing.

But for real, though. Seinfeld is about four straight adults in their thirties¹ who never marry (let alone maintain long-term monogamous partnerships, plus or minus a Susan), nor do they seem to really want to; even as the main cast’s sole woman, Elaine’s occasional expression of desire for matrimony is based in thirst, either for JFK, Jr., or for status. Her longest onscreen relationship, with David “Puddy” Puddy, the absurdly funny Patrick Warburton, is off-and-on and decidedly rooted in a mutual antipathy dipped in a hard shell of sexual chemistry.

Even during the final episode, which aired around my 10th birthday, Seinfeld’s writers string us along with the possibility of Jerry and Elaine getting back together for good, which of course they never do. Watching in the 90s, there was a real tension around this will-they-won’t-they (I felt one, anyway, at my tender age). Watching in 2021, the notion that this pair of narcissists might somehow completely change their personalities for a walk down the aisle, just for the sake of appearances, is absolutely laughable.

That’s the funny thing about Seinfeld. As reactionary and mean-spirited as the humor is (don’t get me started on the man himself, famed Zionist and dater of the underaged), the show really does successfully resist wedlock, the big enchilada of white hetero normalcy. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t also reinscribe said enchilada, thereby creating the template anew for its successors: American sitcoms about grown adults living together in what’s seen by straight, white, middle-class people as arrested development, as not real life, over the years penetrating deeper into adulthood to keep pace with the diminishing returns of neoliberalism’s crumbling middle class and skyrocketing household debt. Unlike on Friends (or Living Single, the black show that the white Friends ripped off), or New Girl, Girls, How I Met Your Mother, etc., none of Seinfeld’s main characters ties the knot. Even when compared with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Seinfeld’s more offensive but also more socially-minded spawn, Jerry’s show about nothing resisted the temptation to make something out of the lives of its Upper West Side wretches.

How does it accomplish this? With simplicity. The characters aren’t complex and Seinfeld, clever as it is, is not nuanced, not when we zoom out from the manners microdrama. This doesn’t make the gruesome foursome relatable, in the way that ensembles of self-involved, mostly white people strive to be, but it does make them realistic. That’s Seinfeld’s and Larry David’s talent, I think: the ability to tap into mainstream resentment with an artfully concealed hostility, the kind that even when writ large with gags about deporting immigrants and anti-indigenous slurs, or with the show’s distinctive approach to racial segregation, is belied with its star’s unsettlingly blank yet toothy delivery.

I’m not saying that Seinfeld is actually queer, although that would be quite hilarious of me. We’ve wised up enough that we can now anticipate the corporate-sponsored sites, mags, newsletters, and services that churn out ~content~ about how queer this or that product, and thus primed for purchase with our rainbow dollars. But that doesn’t mean that Seinfeld’s anti-family values don’t resemble, if not mirror, ours. Unlike your standard them² piece pointing this out, though, we don’t celebrate assimilation or appropriation with a brand partnership. Better to interrogate it: What’s the deal with Seinfeld’s chosen family?

David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), here.

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1. I’m lumping in the ageless familiar, Kramer, with his three friends.

2. For whom I have written more than once, on topics vapid and, I hope, otherwise. They used to pay pretty well.