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JFL Toronto Review: David Lynch's Seinfeld
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There's a lot to love here. In a Canadian comedy festival that mostly hires Americans, it's great to see a show by some of Toronto's best performers. I wanna talk about how many of the cast deserve to be Canadian Comedy Institutions, in a country with no star system and a limited industry, but then I would have to single out certain cast members, which also feels wrong.
It's wrong because everybody nails the Seinfeld member that they are mimicking. There are plenty of callbacks to the series for die hard fans, which also feel natural in the plot of the episode. Also, frankly, it even works as a solid Seinfeld episode on its own. The cast members who wrote this are clearly fans who know the tropes of the show inside and out.
That said, my only major criticism is that there was not enough Lynch in my Seinfeld. Most of the overlapping references just stayed in the realm of Twin Peaks. That's fine. They only have an hour for the festival, so why make their lives harder than it needs to be. However, I feel like the premise is such a fantastic gift that they gave themselves, but yet didn't really play with.
Don't get me wrong. There are good laughs throughout this whole show. Most of the cast are Second City main stage alumni. Ken Hall, who plays the role of Kramer, is even a fantastic performer in the art of clown. We are not lacking for talent to sell this thing. Even the people who play side characters for the show totally kill it.
Yet, where is the David Lynch of it all? Which is odd, because when they do utilize the mashup, it's some of the hardest laughs of the show. The TV sitcom as a format is begging for deconstruction and meta commentary. I mean, Seinfeld is the only sitcom in history where two of the cast members are billionaires. Even just playing the game of where Seinfeld and Twin Peaks overlap would've been enough in itself. The existential dread of it all.
Again, it's not that I didn't enjoy it. It just felt like there was still money left on the table. This is where I have to restrain myself from pitching you my own episode ("Who killed Susan with the poisoned envelopes?"), but it's not like the blueprint for this didn't already exist...
David Lynch, back in 2002, made a short film called Rabbits, which you can still find on YouTube. Rabbits is literally a stop motion puppet film about the deconstruction of the sitcom genre. It's as if Eraser Head was a multicam primetime show.
For that matter, Seinfeld even has an episode called "Pinter". The episode plays itself out backwards, is all about Kramer's friend Pinter, and is literally an homage to the French existentialist playwright Harold Pinter.
If you're looking specifically for stage adaptation, there is a fantastic play called Mr. Burns. It's all about humanity reforming itself after the apocalypse, using an episode of The Simpsons as a campfire mythos – specifically the episode where Mr. Burns blocks out the sun – and how it influences the next era of man. It's about how we evolved as a storytelling culture and also a deconstruction of nostalgia itself.
If you're looking to support Canadian content, might I suggest the films of Guy Madden, who I consider to be Canada's David Lynch. If you want something specifically Toronto, there are video screenings at "Eyesore Video" of a film collective that mashes up in-camera video effects over cult cinema and pop music. My personal favorites are Oh Chemical Brothers Where Art Thou and The ABBA-dook. Fun Fact: the host is Showbiz Monkeys contributor and multimedia artist J.D. Renaud.
Again, I actually loved the show. Please go see it and support local talent. If I'm breaking down the genre itself, it's only to point readers in the direction of cool supplemental media. It's a great episode of Seinfeld, but here are some other things you should check out if it doesn't scratch the experimental media itch.
Tags: JFL Toronto, Just for Laughs, David Lynch's Seinfeld, David Lynch, Seinfeld
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