A class about nothing

Professor Tobias of Rutgers University teaches psychology to medical students through reruns of Seinfeld. They analyze Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine for greater insight into narcissism, obsessive-compulsion, and inability to forge meaningful relationships.

Does anybody besides me have a problem with this? Is it gauche to point out that Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine are sitcom characters? These are not real people. They are made-up. They have no true existence. They have no deep-seated motivations, no real histories, no actual upbringings, no formative years. (On an even older sitcom, That Girl, a mortician-turned-shoe-salesman played by Paul Lynde flatly explains to a disgruntled customer that the shoes he has purchased could not possibly have been expected to last long since they were made for people with no body heat!)

That’s it. The Seinfeld characters have no body heat. “So what?” someone will defend. “The New York menagerie still demonstrate classic psychiatric disorders and serve as useful illustrations, as a picture is better than a thousand words.”

Not even so. The Rutgers professor is not merely adducing illustrations; he is studying the episodes like Rommel studying a map of North Africa. He has created a database of every Seinfeld episode and its teaching points, and he assigns two episodes a week. He has written an academic paper on Elaine and her boyfriends. This means the man really thinks he can learn something about human behavior here.

Why is this beyond silly?

Picture: A dozen people with BFA degrees lock themselves in a writer’s room with Chinese take-out and, for a paycheck, generate as many laughs per minute as humanly possible. Hemmed in by the preferences of the producer, the studio, and the network, they create characters that look authentic enough to be believable conveyors of their jokes. (Remember the adage: What people want today is authenticity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.)

‘Hmm,’ pontificates the college prof, stroking his beard while studying Kramer bursting through Jerry’s door.

These studio writers pick up notions about personality pathologies from the same place you and I do—other sitcoms—and they run with them. Imagine the horror of your average waitress–moonlighting comic upon learning that doctors of psychology in medical schools are trusting her for organic portrayals of human behaviors. Her one-off gags are parsed for Freudian depths in the ivory towers of academia. “Hmm,” pontificates the college prof, stroking his beard while studying Kramer bursting through Jerry’s door, “undoubtedly a case of Borderline Personality Disorder with Axis I Comorbidity.”

The closest I can come to it in the Bible is the dim-witted idol-maker: “He cuts down cedars. … He takes a part of it and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. … And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it. He prays to it and says, ‘Deliver me, for you are my god!’” (Isaiah 44:14-17). In a bizarre demonstration of self-delusion, he makes a lie—then believes it.

It is as though the painter of a watercolor of an imaginary red barn is so taken with his own rendering that he starts wondering what is on the other side of the barn. Someone needs to tell the man that the other side of the barn does not exist; all that exists is the side he painted, a two-dimensional projection of a nonexistent place.

C.S. Lewis once said about people who look to nature for philosophy, “If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn” (The Four Loves). In the same way, the well-meaning Rutgers educator is caught in a weird circularity unawares, deriving from Seinfeld what he already expects to find. How very convenient. (Pray tell, will he ever find the concept of sin?)

The Bible is different. Cain, Lot, and Absolom are real people, with real childhoods and real thought processes. Even if you don’t know much about their formative influences, you know they had them. They invite analysis because they are solid and not holograms. Their most bizarre behaviors (How did wise Solomon become so foolish?) confirm their authenticity. You may err in your analysis sometimes, but at least it makes sense to try. It makes no sense to try to find motives in cardboard facsimiles. It is good to stand on solid ground.

Email aseupeterson@wng.org