My Own Private Seinfeld Episode

One of the stranger episodes in the run of the show Seinfeld was where a stand-up comic played by Kathy Griffin (right) decided to make deriding Seinfeld her act.

The episode was doubly ironic in that Griffin then made a career out of it. Her stand-up act remains, essentially, a put-down of bigger celebrities, and she even produced her own reality series based on the premise, called My Life on the D List. All this despite the fact that, as I read online, her own life remains shamblous (a shambles) while Seinfeld and his young family seem quite happy and content.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I have always enjoyed Jerry
Seinfeld’s work, because I know how hard he works at comedy. He always
has, and he has little stomach for those who, like me, try to be funny
without putting in the work.

Indeed I was among the audience for his first
bit, a story that kids could go to the Godfather’s door on Halloween
and cadge a $5 bill. Carlo Gambino, the crime boss, did indeed live on
the same street as Jerry’s family, Club Drive in Harbor Green. But all
who were around then, in the early 1960s, at Birch Lane Elementary
School in Massapequa Park, will remember the frisson of fear, and hidden laughter,
exchanged when we told or were told the story.

For an 8 year old kid, it was a very good bit indeed.

So it was with some degree of amazement and a bit of humility that I recently learned I have been the subject of that Kathy Griffin episode of Seinfeld.

In my case, Griffin is played by the author of Print, a WordPress blog which actually has had more page views than this one. (It’s as though Seinfeld were dissing Griffin.) The author, who remains anonymous, not that there’s anything wrong with that, even has an entire category devoted to attacks on little old me,  where you will learn I am a lazy reporter, a horrible writer, and a terrible, mean, really bad person.

I just wish I had Seinfeld’s career so all these insults would make sense. But I’ll keep trying.