Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson Read Free Book Online

being sarcastic to each other. The jokes themselves make no reference to anything outside the frame of the conversation that contains them—beyond the bare-bones “situation” that the sitcom itself is grounded in. (A guy pretends that he’s gay so he can shack up with two women.) To parse the humor of more nuanced shows— Cheers or Friends, for example—the scripts will sometimes demand that you know some basic biographical information about the characters. (Carla will make a snotty reference to Sam Malone’s sobriety, without bothering to explain to the audience that he once had a drinking problem; or Rachel will allude to Monica’s overweight childhood.) Nearly every extended sequence in Seinfeld or The Simpsons, however, will contain a joke that makes sense only if the viewer fills in the proper supplementary information—information that is deliberately withheld from the viewer. If you haven’t seen the “Mulva” episode, or if the name “Art Vandelay” means nothing to you, then the subsequent references—many of them arriving years after their original appearance—will pass on by unappreciated.
    At first glance, this looks like the soap opera tradition of plotlines extending past the frame of individual episodes, but in practice the device has a different effect. Knowing that George uses the alias Art Vandelay in awkward social situations doesn’t help you understand the plot of the current episode; you don’t draw on past narratives to understand the events of the present one. In the 180 Seinfeld episodes that aired, seven contain references to Art Vandelay: in George’s actually referring to himself with that alias or invoking the name as part of some elaborate lie. He tells a potential employer at a publishing house that he likes to read the fiction of Art Vandelay, author of Venetian Blinds ; in another, he tells an unemployment insurance caseworker that he’s applied for a latex salesman job at Vandelay Industries. For storytelling purposes, the only thing that you need to know here is that George is lying in a formal interview; any fictitious author or latex manufacturer would suffice. But the joke arrives through the echo of all those earlier Vandelay references; it’s funny because it’s making a subtle nod to past events held offscreen. It’s what we’d call in a real-world context an “in-joke”—a joke that’s funny only to people who get the reference. And in this case, the reference is to a few fleeting lines in a handful of episodes—most of which aired years before. Television comedy once worked on the scale of thirty seconds: you’d have a setup line, and then a punch line, and then the process would start all over again. With Seinfeld, the gap between setup and punch line could sometimes last five years.
    These layered jokes often point beyond the bounds of the series itself. According to one fan site that has exhaustively chronicled these matters, the average Simpsons episode includes around eight gags that explicitly refer to movies: a plotline, a snippet of dialogue, a visual pun on a famous cinematic sequence ( Seinfeld featured a number of episodes that mirrored movie plots, including Midnight Cowboy and JFK ). The Halloween episodes have historically been the most baroque in their cinematic allusions, with the all-time champ being an episode from the 1995 season, integrating material from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Godzilla, Ghostbusters, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Pagemaster, Maximum Overdrive, The Terminator and Terminator 2, Alien III, Tron, Beyond the Mind’s Eye, The Black Hole, Poltergeist, Howard the Duck, and The Shining.
    The film parodies and cultural sampling of The Simpsons usually get filed away as textbook postmodernism: media riffing on other media. But the Art Vandelay jokes from Seinfeld don’t quite fit the same postmodern mold: they aren’t