"Like an old man trying to send back soup in a Deli" - The Seinfeld Supremacy

I trust we're not forgetting about Seinfeld? Fourteen years on from when it concluded, it remains unsurpassed, and probably always will be. If you've never seen it, or are starting to think of it as dated, get hold of a DVD right now and start with season 5 (or go straight to the season 6 episode The Jimmy) The first two seasons are good but quite gentle. The third season features some terrific episodes and the fourth even more, but the fifth season sees the show reach perfection, with the plotting and characterisation exquisitely balanced and every line, plot idea and nuance funny in a unique way. Seasons 5 and 6 are probably the show's peak, although 7, 8 and 9 are not very far behind.

Seinfeld is pure comedy: it isn't about detailed and believable characterisation, satire or tragedy. It must be understood in this way; no time for any of that "The Office is painfully real / Steptoe and Son is like a Pinter play / Basil Fawlty is quite a tragic figure really" stuff here. The same goes for the oft-cited "no hugs, nothing learned" rule: although it's true, this is never used to give the show airs of something more than comedy (as it happens, there is an episode of Seinfeld - The Betrayal - based on a Pinter play, but crucially it's a lot funnier than Pinter). Even the death of George's fiancé Susan is never allowed to be anything other than funny. Instead, the show plays with language. Choosing an episode at random for this piece, a glance at The Chicken Roaster reveals two linked throwaway lines with the signature flourish which none of Seinfeld's writers can stop generating but which British comedy writers these days can only dream of. Jerry runs into Seth, an old college buddy, who's got a meeting at work to go to, but Jerry insists they catch up on old times and asks "whatever happened to Moochie?" as they walk off arm-in-arm: "he's dead." "is that right?" Over lunch, Seth discloses that the meeting was rather important: he works for a big investment firm, and it was their first meeting with their latest investors. Seth subsequently loses his job, and stays cheerful, insisting it was worth it to catch up with an old college buddy: "I only knew you through Moochie," replies Jerry. Those two exquisite Moochie lines, almost throwaway by Seinfeld's standards, contain the show's aesthetic, and one that only comedy could have produced. The pleasurable effect of hearing a funny name like Moochie is linked to the poignancy of Seth's predicament and the destructive effect of friendship with Jerry.

 This linguistic playfulness can be found in every episode. "I don't WANNA be a pirate," says Jerry in The Puffy Shirt, adding a child-like high-pitched whine to "wanna" as he reprises a variation of the line in subsequent episodes each time someone demands he take on a role. "You're killing independent George!" wails George in The Pool Guy. "So Biff wants to be a buff," says Jerry in The Boyfriend. The Voice sees Jerry unable to kick the habit of saying "Hellooooo!" in a stupid voice, The Yadda Yadda is based in the idea that the titular phrase can be used to conceal important information, while The Summer of George sees Elaine irritated by men's tendency to make miaowing noises whenever a woman criticises another woman, even if the men made the criticism first. The title character in The Jimmy has an irritating habit of referring to himself in the third person. Lines from the Buddy Rich tapes - "I'm gonna show you what's it like", "this guy - this is not my kind of guy" and "we'll see how he does up there, without all the assistance" - are gleefully inserted into the dialogue of The Opposite, The Understudy and The Butter Shave respectively. Jerry Stiller's performance as George's father Frank - one of the funniest things ever caught on camera - peaks with those moments when what seems like the actor's struggle to remember lines lends them something you could never have imagined: "He had this big smiling face: it was like a biiiig...apple pie" (The Understudy). "I saw a provocative movie on cable last bight. It was called The Net, with that girl from the bus" (The Serenity Now). Best of all is this exchange with George's mother (the wonderful Estelle Harris) from The Puffy Shirt:

Estelle: Georgie, would you like some Jello?
Frank : Why do you put the bananas in there?
Estelle: George likes the bananas!
Frank : SO LET HIM HAVE BANANAS ON THE SIDE!"




The bizarre staccato roar in which Stiller delivers the last line is as good an example of what an actor can do to a line one could hope for. Phil Morris as the ultimate ambulance-chasing lawyer Jackie Chiles and Steve Hytner as Jerry's least favourite stand-up Kenny Bania also create their own verbal style, but to describe what they, Wayne Knight as Newman, John O'Hurley as J. Peterman and Len Lesser as Uncle Leo can do with a line would render this piece book-length.

   Sometimes it might be a non-verbal gesture that creates the poetry of comedy. The Pie starts off with the simple conceit of Jerry's girlfriend shaking her head when he offers her some pie. This baffles Jerry, but later on they eat at a restaurant run by Poppy (played with gusto by Reni Santoni), and Jerry sees him leaving a toilet cubicle without washing his hands. His girlfriend insists he tries some pie: all Jerry can do is shake his head in an identical way. Later, George is having lunch with prospective new employers and they pass him some pie, but George spots the chef watching furtively and realises he's an enemy from earlier in the episode who has contaminated his food in revenge. As his potential new employers demand he take a bite, warning him that they have no time for those who aren't team-players, George just shakes his head. A simple, funny physical movement, played with and threaded through a neatly-structured plot so that it becomes funnier and funnier: that's why this show is comedy in its purest form.


 

Other episodes of Seinfeld take a casual allusion and gleefully turn it into a riff. A episode about Jerry being nagged by his parents to see Schindler's List (The Raincoats) sees the episode's other central plotline - Elaine's latest boyfriend Aaron and his overbearing friendship with Jerry's parents - turn into a reenactment of that film's climax, nicely performed by Judge Reinhold:

No, I could've called the travel agency, got them on another flight to Paris, I coulda got them out. [...] This watch, this watch could've paid for their whole trip. This ring, this ring is one more dinner I could've taken them out to. Water, they need some water They'll get dehydrated on the plane! Get the Seinfelds some water. Please! Please!





An episode that has seen Kramer act increasingly like a dog (The Andrea Doria) throughout ends with a full on Lassie parody. An episode about condo elections (The Cadillac) in Florida ends with Jerry's dad recreating Nixon's exit from the White House. The Wig Master is painstaking in its goal to have Kramer become a pimp. First, another of the episode's plot strands provides him with a silver cane, then another one provides him with a Technicolour Dreamcoat from a production of Joseph, then someone's hat is blown away by the wind, then Kramer catches it and puts it on, accompanied by appropriate music and hip members of New York's nightlife exchanging the equivalent of high-fives with him as he saunters along the streets before reaching his car, and inadvertently stumbles into another of the episode's plotlines: prostitutes have been using the carpark in which George and Kramer park their cars to "turn tricks". After a 'John' flees the car and a hooker attacks Kramer for frightening away her trade, Kramer is apprehended by the cops as he is fighting her off. The punchline to this joyous riff - and to the episode - is Kramer's poignant cry as his mugshot is taken: "I'm not a pimp!": a child caught playing at being grown-up.

  Then there are the extraordinary textures the writers can create from playing with the convoluted nature of comedy itself, using its ludicrousness as a strength rather than a weakness. In The Chinese Woman, George spots his father talking to a man in a cape, (a cameo by Larry David, adopting an unashamedly ludicrous posture), who turns out to be his divorce lawyer. After the inevitable Superman comparison (one of the few things Jerry's interested in), we end with a scene in which the subject of the episode's other plot (a woman Kramer has apparently got pregnant) is about to throw herself off a bridge. A caped figure sidles towards her and gently guides her away. "Who are you?" she asks. "I'm Frank Costanza's lawyer," he replies. There are no astonishing moments like this in British comedy these days, and few the other side of the Atlantic. The caped lawyer can't give any other answers because that's all there is to him. In my pieces on Family Guy and Father Ted, I tried to pinpoint those extraordinary poetic moments unique to comedy, in which the gag folds back upon itself, and the writers revel in everything undefinable about it. This is one such moment: the fact that the character has been created purely because it is amusing to have George's father hold mysterious meetings with a man in a cape, and that the only reason for his appearance on the bridge is that it makes aesthetic rather than logical sense as those are the 2 plots left to be joined up, are all allowed to shine and refract as if through a prism. The example from Father Ted I used was Dougal's line, after Ted has raised the question of why they don't just take the rabbits back to the pet shop he bought his from: "It was a travelling pet shop, Ted, they won't be back till spring." Other examples include Sideshow Bob's line in The Simpsons "Well if it isn't my sworn arch enemy Bart Simpson, and his sister Lisa to whom I'm fairly indifferent." and numerous lines in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy such as this exchange:

Arthur: It's not so much an afterlife, more a sort of après vie
Zaphod: Hey, you dead guys! We're missing some ultra important thing here! Something somebody said and we missed it!
Arthur: I said it was more apres vie
Zaphod: Yeah, and Don't you wish you hadn't?



I love how that final line doesn't appear in the radio series, but was added for the TV series and the novel adaptation The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: an afterthought by Douglas Adams and an afterthought for the characters, acknowledging that they have to hear all these gags and don't always find them funny. All four examples use the way the gag works, the requirements of the gag, our expectations of that particular narrative and even the implausibilities it results in as walls to bounce the comedy off. They all parse earlier gags, and render everything funnier.

Other episodes take relish in distorting the shapes that we tend to associate with comedy narratives. The Bizarro Jerry sees Elaine encounter a group with the exact opposite qualities of Jerry, George and Kramer. Jerry makes the natural comparison with the Bizarro Superman. The episode ends with Bizarro Jerry saying "Me so happy, me want to cry" - we've gone from a reference to Bizarro Superman to using his very language, a quintessentially Seinfeld dynamic (the technique is one of displacement: compare it with the aforementioned climaxes to The Raincoats and The Cadillac, or The Jimmy, which starts with the title character's irritating habit of referring to himself in the first person, but by the end has George cathartically responding to his own storyline with "GEORGE IS GETTING UPSET!"). The Opposite sees George do the exact opposite of what he would normally do, resulting in the fortunes we've come to expect after five seasons being reversed. One has to marvel at Joe Queenan's bizarre claim that the sitcom has seen no innovation since the days of I Love Lucy: how can he say that when Seinfeld had such fun playing with the conventions and texture of the sitcom itself?

   Seinfeld is based around four people who aren't nice, demographically friendly or carefully constructed according to current audience interests, as those in Friends and The Big Bang Theory are. The scripts understand that not only are these not wonderful people: they aren't realistic either. What's most cloying about Friends and The Big Bang Theory is the constant insistence that these six people (in the case of TBBT it comes down to 2: girls and boys) are the only ones in the universe. Both those shows believe they are mimetic. Seinfeld, by contrast, revels in the fact that Kramer needs no job and yet has no money, that Elaine can't be bothered to keep up her anti-fur stance, that Jerry's "whole life revolves around cereals and Superman", that Jerry and Newman's enmity is little more than a kid's game that they both abandon when a more interesting game to play comes along. It also revels in the fact that these are not good people. To return to The Chicken Roaster, when Seth, jobless purely because of Jerry but bearing no grudge, is on his way out of Jerry's apartment, he picks up a newspaper and asks if he can keep it for the classifieds. Jerry replies "actually, I haven't read Tank McNamara yet..." and takes it back from him (Note that this occurs immediately after the "Moochie" line I mentioned earlier: in Seinfeld, these character details, grace notes, inflections, allusions to earlier lines and returns to earlier moments in a different key are combined to make comedic rainbows. It's why the delight the show gives never lessens after multiple viewings. You can watch it forever). The ingenious closing two-part episode - The Finale - was based around the idea that these are four odious individuals. They watch a fat man get carjacked with great amusement, and find themselves afoul of a new "Good Samaritan" law. They end up in prison, but the episode's tone is not self-consciously "dark": it's gleeful.

   The oddest thing about Seinfeld is the sublime effects they can get from Jerry Seinfeld's poor-yet-wonderful acting (Similar to the magnificent effects achieved by Larry David's awful-yet-brilliant acting in its sister show Curb Your Enthusiasm). This seems to be part of the same gag-parsing technique: when Jerry has to roar "Manya died - MANYA DIED!" out of a window in The Pony Remark, the phrase is made funnier by his inability to shout convincingly, as if the convoluted nature of a sitcom plot (Manya dies shortly after Jerry and Elaine offend her by saying they hate people who own or ever have owned ponies) is bounced back into the comic mix, strengthening rather than weakening it. It's because of this inexplicable effect that The Blood, in which Kramer has been storing blood everywhere, feels like a collision between Rabelais and Nabokov. When an accidentally-propelled scalpel falls toward Jerry, his whimper of terror sounds like a joke on the ridiculous nature of the moment. When he comes to and learns that Kramer has provided blood for a subsequent transfusion after the scalpel badly wounded him, all he can do is scream, and Kramer had no choice but to scream back. When the same thing happens with Newman stepping in as donor, all three of them scream. There's body horror here (Kramer has to store his blood in Jerry's car engine: it clots), and yet the script and actors are making us laugh at the absurd nature of that horror itself. If Jerry could scream convincingly, this effect would not be achieved. Jerry Seinfeld is actually a brilliant actor.

Jason Alexander as George Costanza gives one of the greatest performances in the history of television. As surely as with James Gandofini in The Sopranos or Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad, every little movement, every expression, just the way he walks into a room, tells us exactly what is going on inside his character's head. He brings tremendous rage and suffering to the part, outacting the entire cast of many 'serious' dramas. Consider the scene in The Boyfriend where George has given Jerry's address as his current place of employment, claiming to be a latex salesman for Art Vandelay. The unemployment office ring Jerry's apartment while George is using the bathroom, and Kramer answers. "VANDELAY! SAY VANDELAY!" roars George's voice from the bathroom. Kramer ignores him and tells them that they have the right address, but this is just an apartment. As he hangs up, George bursts in with his trousers round his ankles, and lies defeated on the floor. Jerry enters: "And you want to be my latex salesman...". Alexander's investment in his character is so intense, in the physicality of his rage and in his ability to perform pratfalls and emotion with equal integrity, that moments like this are simultaneously hysterically funny and a point at which we feel we know this person as well as anyone in fiction.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine overcomes all of the stereotypes attached to women in comedy. Firstly, she's a natural clown: think of her and the first image that comes to mind might well be her signature violent shove while exclaiming "Get out...?", her inability to dance or the increasingly ludicrous facial expressions she pulls why saying "You think I have grace...?". Secondly, her character is as obnoxious and as base as the male ones, with none of the gender-essentialism of The Big Bang Theory or Friends. The gag about men who are "sponge-worthy" in The Sponge, her detestation of the sex scenes in The English Patient in the episode of that name ("Give me something I can use!") and her struggle to keep up with the no-masturbation competition in The Contest are the kind of vulgar comedy gold all often seen as the province of men (The Big Bang Theory, by contrast, sees the scenes with its female characters as the space for jokes about clothes-shopping, nail-varnish and Eat Pray Love).

When Michael Richards, as Kramer, made his entrance in the first episode of Seinfeld I ever saw - The Couch - my Dad, watching it with me, remarked, "oh God, there's the standard wacky neighbour: look at his funny haircut..." but a moment later, Kramer collided with a sofa a removal man was bringing in. He fell to the ground and leapt back up in an oddly graceful way. My dad chuckled:'"He did do that fall rather well, I must say -can we just rewind that?". That seems to me to capture the magic of Richards as Kramer, and its effect on the viewer: at first it seems to be standard sitcom shtick, then Richards plays it in a way no-one else could. His performance in The Jimmy is wonderful in a way nothing else has ever been. This imperishable episode sees Kramer mistaken for a mentally-challenged person after he's encountered with one side of his mouth still frozen by Novocaine following a dental appointment. He's invited to a charity dinner, where Mel Torme sings "When You're Smiling" to him. Kramer beams, and what makes this moment so delightful is the lack of deception: Kramer, after all, is indeed a special person, and didn't set out to give a false impression. The mixture of audacious bad taste and sweetness makes even the most po-faced viewer want to hug themselves: this as far away from Gervais-style cruelty as could be imagined, just as The Bubble Boy is interested more in the humour of an angry, raucous Bubble Boy (and in the poetry of saying "Bubble Boy") than in gags about his suffering.

 

The show's commitment to comedy aesthetics above everything else allows the characters to perform monologues of sustained power. Here's the climax of The Marine Biologist (in which George has been pretending to be a marine biologist to impress a girl, but been confronted by a beached whale which she implores him to save; and in which Kramer has been practicing his golf shots down by the beach):

   George: So I started to walk into the water. I won't lie to you boys, I was terrified! But I pressed on and as I made my way passed the breakers a strange calm came over me. I don't know if it was divine intervention or the kinship of all living things but I tell you Jerry at that moment I was a marine biologist! [...]

The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to return soup at a deli. I got about fifty-feet out and then suddenly the great beast appeared before me. I tell ya he was ten stories high if he was a foot. As if sensing my presence he gave out a big bellow. I said, "Easy big fella!" And then as I watched him struggling I realized something was obstructing his breathing. From where I was standing I could see directly into the eye of the great fish!
Jerry: Mammal.
George: Whatever.
Kramer: Well, what did you do next?
George: Then from out of nowhere a huge title wave lifted, tossed like a cork and I found myself on top of him face to face with the blow-hole. I could barely see from all of the waves crashing down on top of me but I knew something was there so I reached my hand and pulled out the obstruction!
(George pulls out a golf ball)
Kramer (looking sheepishly at it for a while): What is that  - a Titleist? A hole in one, eh?
Jerry: Well, the crowd most have gone wild!
George: Oh yes, they did Jerry, they were all over me. It was like Rocky 1.
Diane came up to me, threw her arms around me, and kissed me. We both had tears streaming down our faces. I never saw anyone so beautiful. It was at that moment I decided to tell her I was not a marine biologist!
Jerry: Wow! What'd she say?
George: She told me to "Go to hell!" and I took the bus home.



Only comedy could create the effect that scene creates. The line "like an old man trying to send back soup in a Delhi," scans as gorgeously as poetry, and yet it's something other than poetry: it's irreducibly comedy.

Here's an equally brilliant vehicle for Michael Richards from The Fire:

KRAMER: she ran out of the building and a street sweeper ran over her foot and severed her pinky toe.
GEORGE: That's unbelievable!
KRAMER: Yeah! Then after the ambulance left, I found the toe! So I put it in a Cracker Jack box, filled it with ice, and took off for the hospital.
GEORGE: You ran?
KRAMER: No, I jumped on the bus. I told the driver, "I got a toe here, buddy - step on it."
GEORGE: Holy cow!
KRAMER: Yeah, yeah, then all of a sudden, this guy pulls out a gun. Well, I knew any delay is gonna cost her her pinky toe, so I got out of the seat and I started walking towards him. He says, "Where do you think you're going, Cracker Jack?" I said, "Well, I got a little prize for ya, buddy - knocked him out cold!
GEORGE: How could you do that?!
KRAMER: Then everybody is screamin,' because the driver, he's passed out from all the commotion...the bus is out of control! So, I grab him by the collar, I take him out of the seat, I get behind the wheel and now I'm drivin' the bus.
GEORGE: You're Batman.
KRAMER: Yeah. Yeah, I am Batman. Then the mugger, he comes to, and he starts chokin' me! So I'm fightin' him off with one hand and I kept drivin' the bus with the other, y'know? Then I managed to open up the door, and I kicked him out the door with my foot, you know - at the next stop.
JERRY: You kept makin' all the stops?
KRAMER: Well, people kept ringin' the bell!



This is a show famous for its "no hugging, no learning" rule, yet television has never been more joyous. The only emotion involved here is the warmth we experience when we experience great comedy.

Only two moments in the entire series allow the characters to express emotion towards one another. One is the scene in The Deal where Kramer gives Elaine the bench she wanted as a birthday present, along with a birthday card that quotes Yeats. Even this moment has a sting, though, as it drops Jerry in it for not getting Elaine anything. The second moment comes in The Wallet when Elaine returns after Julia Louis-Dreyfus has taken a few episodes off due to pregnancy. The four cheer and rejoice in a way that stays funny rather than schmaltzy, but there's still an uncharacteristic note of warmth.

Jerry's parents are highly skillful creations in this regard. It's been noted that Jerry is unusual as a protagonist in a sitcom for whom things work out, and crucial to this is his having relatively relaxed parents. They're  necessarily gentler than George's, but the achievement of Barney Martin and Liz Sheridan's performances as Morty and Helen Seinfeld is that they still make them funny. The scene in The Shower Head where Elaine demands that Helen provide a urine sample to help her cheat on a drugs test gains a curious comic edge from the latter's lack of offence, instead getting flustered about which glass she should use.   Even the scene in The Outing where they phone Jerry after rumors that he and George are a couple are circulating demonstrates that they are vexed -  "it's those damn culottes you made him wear when he was five!" - rather than offended. The episode's iconic line "not that there's anything wrong with that" sounds particularly natural coming from Liz Sheridan, setting us up for what it will sound like when Estelle Harris gets to say it. Helen and Morty succeed as creations because they reinforce the idea that Jerry has had irritatingly little to be concerned about (as he says in The Serenity Now, "I'm open, there's just nothing in there") as a source of humour, and so his parents are not demons like the Costanzas (not to mention the comedy gold that ensues when both sets of parents clash). Few comedies would be able to use a mother's unironic "how can anyone not like him?" (The Wallet) for comic effect, let alone as a catchphrase (not that its depiction of older people is rose-tinted - See The Cadillac for a splendidly acid portrayal of bitchiness and political rivalry among the elderly.)

 A more typical moment comes in The Serenity Now, when Jerry decides to try his hand at emotion: "What is this salty discharge?" he says upon shedding his first tears. He then insists upon opening up to George, who eventually relents and tells Jerry " All of my darkest fears, everything I'm capable of. That's me." Jerry stares in horror: "Yikes. Well, good luck with all that. [...] I think you scared me straight." Even eerier is the moment in the season seven finale The Invitations, when George's fiancé Susan, nicely played by Heidi Swedberg who gets us rooting for her, has been fatally poisoned by licking poor-quality envelopes when sending out wedding initiations (George insisted on the cheaper ones). The others react to the news, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus delivering the line "I'm...so sorry, George...?" as if Elaine is baffled rather than moved. It's the eeriest moment in Seinfeld's history.

Yet, to reiterate, this is not a "dark" sitcom. It's not designed for the "this makes me squirm and therefore it must be funny" school of comedy criticism. It revels in its own artificiality, realising that its characters and plots are driven by the requirements of comedy, not just human observation. This is what makes it the opposite of Friends. Seinfeld acknowledges that Susan's death happens because it's funny, while Friends can't help but see Ross cheating on Rachel as the worst thing in the world. Douglas Adams said of PG Wodehouse "He doesn't have to be serious - he's better than that." Here's a show that was never serious, except in its artistry, and consequently created a world.

The Genius of Father Ted

Father Ted isn’t a dark show. Neither it is it necessarily a warm-hearted show (but sometimes it is both). It isn’t a show based explicitly around fashionable social issues (though so many perceptive comments on them can be found in it), or a show with roots in Shakespeare, Dickens or Beckett. Writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, along with their cast and directors Declan Lowney and Andy de Emmony, worked hard to make the funniest show you ever saw. Every atom - every guest performance, every throw-way line, every plot detail, every visual gag, every turn of the camera - is directed towards the mystifying process of being funny. The show understands that true comedy - something so funny it’s almost inexplicable - scrupulously honed and structured can take us onto a plane of delight which no other art can reach, and can give us an entirely new understanding of life and society.

To start with the impossible task of trying to capture Father Ted's aesthetic (and I can’t, of course. It just has to be watched), let’s consider the episode The Plague. Father Dougal Maguire has just got a pet rabbit. Father Ted Crilly warns him that it will have to be out of the way when the fearsome Bishop Brennan visits, because a while ago the bishop was stuck in a lift in a department store and some rabbits got in with him (“How did they get in?” asks Dougal “Must have burrowed in - you know, rabbits…” replies Ted) and started “nibbling at his cape and everything.” Just before the Bishop arrives, Ted and Dougal find the whole parochial house is swarming with rabbits. “Oh wow” says Dougal, “It’s like a big rabbit rock festival.” Ted then inadvertently points out a potential plothole: he considers sending the rabbits to the same pet shop Dougal bought his from. “No, Ted, it was a travelling pet shop. They won’t be back till spring.” Bishop Brennan arrives, and after intimidating Ted and Dougal, mentions the time he was in trapped a lift and a bunch of rabbits got in and “started nibbling at my cape and everything.” Later Ted and Dougal, hunting for the rabbits, find them in Father Jack’s locked room: “they must have burrowed in - you know, rabbits…”.

There is much in the writing I have just outlined that is uniquely and inexplicably funny (and I didn’t even get round to one of the rabbits being the spitting image of “that fella, Harvey Keitel”) but crucial to the genius of Father Ted, I think, is the way it embraces its lunacy and uses its own plot flaws as walls to bounce the comedy off. The two plot discrepancies here - the absence of the pet shop and the need to make Bishop Brennan coincidentally terrified of rabbits - perform the same miracle as rhyme and metre in a great poem. The writing and the actors actually revel in the unconvincing explanations, making them so gleefully funny they become rabbit holes down which we tumble, into a world where comedy doesn’t have to persuade you that life is like this to be hysterically funny, and where we can laugh at the absurdity, joy and sublimity of comedy itself as well as the brilliantly drawn characters and finely observed take on Catholic life. How sterile and cloying a show like Friends is by contrast, with no sense of its own ridiculousness, and an inability to consider the fact that its characters are anything other than lovely people. Similarly, the episode Escape From Victory, which sees Ted managing a geriatric football match, seems to be having fun with its own ludicrousness, supplementing its plot with notes on the nature of what comedy requires from such a plot. Ted's star player dies, so Ted visits the body in an open coffin at the wake. Cutting from Ted boasting of how they can't lose the game as long as they have him to a shot of him in an open coffin is a standard sitcom technique, but the script parses it with the following exchange. "So there‘s no way he‘ll be able to play?" asks Ted. "No," replies the Priest, and adds "he's dead." "It’s completely out of the question, then?“ replies Ted, and after a pause adds: “Is it - is it completely out of the question?”

Many episodes of Father Ted work by bringing a bizarre why-shouldn’t-it-be-that-way logic to the surreal vistas Linehan and Mathews have dreamed up. Many sitcoms might alight upon the idea of a priest with a collection of Nazi memorabilia, but it's Father Ted that knows the funniest way to do this: first, establish the priest as a man of erudite references and well-stocked bookshelves. Then have him offer to show Ted his collection of Second World War memorabilia, which Ted's often heard of. Have the dignified and intelligent-seeming priest show Ted first one shelf of memorabilia, then a second, after which Ted enquires if he has anything from the Allied Side "No, I'm afraid that sort of thing wouldn't interest me at all." Surely the funniest possible way of parsing that gag. The idea of a Nazi priest becomes bizarrely mundane. Many sitcoms would be happy to have a comedy prop as obvious as a brick lying around the living room for an episode, but only Father Ted would have a character respond to claims that it brightens up the modern living room according to magazines with the retort "that may be alright for Will Self or one of those fellahs."

The episode Are You Right There, Father Ted? sees Ted, back from a stay at a better parochial house and deeply bored, put a broken lampshade on his head and do a Chinaman impression to amuse Dougal, only to find three Chinese people staring at him through the window. After their affronted exit, Ted, spluttering, demands to know who they are. Dougal replies that they must be part of that new Chinatown area on Craggy Island. Many comedy shows might have seen this as a source of comic mileage, but the joy lies in the way that the show enforces a sense of logic - why shouldn’t Craggy Island have a Chinatown area?

Another episode - Old Grey Whistle Theft - is a master-class in world-building, as surely as the work of Mervyn Peake or Tolkien. Mr Benson’s whistle is stolen, plunging Craggy Island into chaos. A simple enough idea, but the way this story is told gives it a grandeur unique to comedy. First the script establishes Mr Benson’s power, and the significance of his whistle. We see Ted trying to enjoy a picnic, and enduring an altercation with a rude couple who accuse him of taking their spot. An officious figure bursts out of a hut, blowing on a whistle. “Put the fork down!” he commands Ted, who drops his plastic fork like an outnumbered gunslinger as pastiche Spaghetti Western music plays on the soundtrack. Later we get Ted angrily wishing that someone would take Benson’s whistle off him, followed by a dramatic scene, shot from the unseen thief’s point-of-view, of someone doing just that. We then have some wonderful scenes of the resulting panic amongst the people of Craggy Island. The bored local policeman takes to circling the island in a helicopter, sniper rifle at the ready, while the man who runs the local shop explains to Ted that that would be on account of “this whistle ting”, and in turn proudly shows Ted the shotgun he’s bought and “wouldn’t hesitate to use it if anyone tried to take any of the whistles we have here.“ Ted then meets an old lady convinced that this will bring about a scenario similar to “that film, BoyZ in the Hood”, who goes home to lock herself in the cellar until the thief is caught, and he sees that the local paper has a a headline warning of anarchy and a special pull-out colour supplement on whistles. This magnificent exercise in absurd logic is balanced by an engaging, character-based plot, in which Father Dougal is led astray by a cool but wayward priest his own age (and who may just be the whistle thief). In Father Ted, you really do get everything.

However, the show’s sharpness cannot be underestimated. It’s affectionate towards Clerical life, but full of lines you’d never get in The Vicar of Dibley. Consider Ted's nightmare of being sacrificed to a volcano god in the episode Kicking Bishop Brennan Up the Arse. He pleads with a tribesman to consider the Catholic way of life, but the tribesman replies "sorry, father, I never could get onboard with that stance on artificial contraception." Or that fabulous moment in Rock-A-Hula-Ted where Ted, after being asked about scandals in the Church, replies "Say there are 200 million priests in the world and 5% of them are paedophiles, that's still only ten million." Or, of course, Dougal's cheerful aside, when being mistaken for Ted, "personally I don't even agree with organised religion."

Key to this is the deft way the essential decency of the priests is juxtaposed with the misery inflicted upon them by the dullness of organised religion. The embarrassed silence in Flight into Terror when one of them, as it becomes clear their plane is going to crash and ideas are being pooled, suggests a moment of prayer, and the moment in A Christmassy Ted when Ted's likeable priest colleagues are staying over at Christmas and find they've missed the Christmas film (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) but dutifully try and sit through the midnight mass before nodding off are rather poignant. Who could not be moved by Ted's friends standing up to the monstrous Father Finton Stack in New Jack City after he interrupts their attempts to watch a video with Ted with abuse. "I must say, I think you're a very rude man!" says one of them, to which the demonic Father Stack replies, while smiling sweetly, "If you ever say that to me again, I'll put your head through the wall." To Ted's distress and ours, they leave.

Yet while this is an affectionate show, it's not a sentimental one. Father Dougal is an idiot but no savant, (a sadly unfilmed scene in which he counts a spilled pile of matches like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, only to be told he wasn't even close, demonstrates just how much Linehan and Mathews understood these characters, even outside of the broadcast episodes.) Like Seinfeld, the show has the knack of allowing us to see the characters from a different light and realising just how far they are from nice people, without allowing the theme to dominate in an attempt to make it self-consciously 'dark'.

And then there's the cast. The late Dermot Morgan (I still remember the moment when I heard of his death in 1998 as if it were the loss of a family member) had an energy hard to describe, but what made him an ideal lead was his ability to play voice of sanity to Father Dougal's worst excesses and a wildly funny character in his own right, without the viewers ever seeing the join. He was authoritative when demonstrating to Dougal the difference between objects that are small and objects that are far away (toy cows helped) and yet joyously childish when trading insults with the Hubert Laneish Father Dick Byrne or hurling Trogg's tape-style abuse at Dougal when they try to record a Eurovision song. Has there ever been a funnier running gag than the references to what happened to "the money from that Lourdes Thing"? The joy comes from watching Ted's composure break every time someone brings it up: "that money was just resting in my account" is usually his response, and sometimes "it was a simple allocation of funds." It's our love of Morgan as a performer that makes the anticipation of his reaction as funny as the reaction itself. His performance conveys such a poignant sense of frustrated ambition. Consider his conversation with John and Mary in the episode Cigarettes and Alcohol and Rollerblading. "We're going to Rome, Father, we might see your friend." "Who's that, Sophia Loren?" gushes Ted. "The Pope, Father." "He's no friend of mine!" roars Ted, only to realise he's taken the joke too far. Morgan achieves something heartbreaking with these moments of thwarted joy.

Ardal O'Hanlon also gives the performance of a lifetime throughout these 25 episodes. Every facial expression and the delivery of each line works hard to uncover something new in the quest to make the stupidity of Father Dougal Maguire endlessly surprising, and to turn a trope derived from Trigger in Only Fools of Horses into a creation with a life of its own. In moments such as Dougal's blunt "What's wrong wicha?" when Ted tries to cheer up a suicidal priest, his "it was resting for a long time Ted - a good long rest" about the Lourdes money in Ted's account, or his realisation that one of the locals always wears a police uniform because he is a policeman ("I thought he was just having a laugh"), O'Hanlon conveys the sense of a gargantuan engine of imbecility. The sublime scene in the first broadcast episode, Good Luck, Father Ted, in which an animated cartoon is used to depict fantasy and reality switching places inside Dougal's mind (we see a sketch of someone's head, with 'reality' labelled outside the head and 'dreams' labelled inside it, and then we see the two switch places to jolly music as animated rabbits appear and frolic) is a synecdoche for Father Ted itself: the normal and the mad have swapped round, and what will be created for half an hour will be unlike anything you've ever encountered. As we've seen, there will indeed be rabbits running around; there will also be a hamster on a bicycle, a sequel to Speed on a Milk float, a group of priests trapped Vietnam-style in Ireland's biggest lingerie section, and a cameo by Richard Wilson.

The other two members of this magnificent quartet are Frank Kelly as Father Jack Hackett and Pauline Mclynn as Mrs Doyle the housekeeper. Again, it's hard to paraphrase the joy we experience whenever they appear, and the endless affection their performances inspire. In the case of Father Jack, the septic, encrusted alcoholic of unfathomable age, the delight comes from what you don't expect him to say. We all know he's going to smash his way through the parochial house living room window to make his exit, punch Ted when he tries to stop him drinking and drink toilet duck when no booze is available. However, who would have expected him, after angry demands for an apology for telling Bishop Brennan to "feck off", to hold out his hands like paws and croon "I'm sooooo, sooooo, sorrrry" and make a bizarre ingratiating gesture somewhere from the backwaters of sarcasm which can only be described as rabbit-like? (Rabbits, incidentally are getting to be something of a motif). Who would have expected Jack of all people to be the one that defeats Bishop Brennan by finding a tape of him playing on the beach with his illegitimate son, or to frolic with puppies and children when a seasonal change comes upon him?

The perfect Father Jack scene occurs in the episode Speed 3 when Jack takes a liking to the aforementioned brick, attaching a lead and taking it for walks. "I LOVE MY BRICK", he intones, with a struggling but unmistakable sincerity. Ted finds this touching: "perhaps we're seeing another side to Father Jack - a more caring, compassionate..." At this point, of course, the brick strikes him upon the head: "Ah, feckit!" snarls its owner: "Fed-up with [adopting another bizarre version of a sarcastic tone] breeiiiiiiicck." Again, the notes in that little piece of music are exquisite.

Mrs Doyle is the final cog; with her in place the show is perfect. As with Jack, it's the audience's anticipation of how Pauline McLynn will handle these moments that takes centre stage here. The dainty way her legs wobble as she tries and fails to climb rather than fall down from the windowsill after putting up the Christmas decorations, the look of High Tragedy on her face when Ted buys a tea-maker and her 'test' after making sandwiches (she selects one, takes a bite, contorts her face while desperately beating her neck and chest and then announces "they're fine") Her initially simpering and then demonic exhortation when serving tea - "Go on, go on , go, on guan guan guan GUAN!" - has rightly joined catchprase history, but Linehan, Mathews and McLynn pushed it further in the scene where Mrs Doyle approaches Father Finton Stack - a priest with a predilection for the Ghetto-blaster - and, drowned by the endless rap music, produces cascade of cardboard placards upon which these words are emblazoned in felt-tip. It's a lovely moment of dumbshow (each "go on" has its own card), and comes just as we were wondering how Mrs Doyle might react to the unexpected and boisterous presence of Father Stack in the household.

There's so many supporting characters to praise: John and Mary, Tom, Father Larry Duff, Father Noel Furlong. Each one gets funnier the more you get to know them, and each one lends their performances their own distinctive sound within this comedic orchestra. John and Mary are a married couple who run the local shop. Whenever we meet them, they are usually mid-way through a hideous row, trading blows as well as insults, but when Ted or Dougal show up they instantly put up a facade of sweetness. "Hello, Father!" says John when Ted enters the shop while Mary is forcing his head in a bucket of water, "Mary was just washing my hair." Several novels' worth of detail about the duplicity of marriage, the torture of Catholic sanctions on divorce and the different relationships between the private and public faces of marriage and religion are conveyed in scenes lasting barely five minutes, simply by the accumulative effect of having those two characters return every other episode.

Father Larry Duff is built around a straightforward running-gag premise: Ted gives him a call on his mobile whenever he's in need of guests, as "Larry's tremendous fun." During, immediately after or as a result of the phone call, something terrible happens to Larry. Yet consider two of these scenes. In one, Ted is trying to get rid of the aforementioned rabbits and remembers that Larry often mentioned that one of his all time fantasies was to have a few rabbits running about the place. Ted phones Larry, who replies that having a few rabbits around the place was indeed one of his all time fantasies. Ted explains his problem. "Ah, sorry Ted, I don't think I'll be able to take them," replies Larry, "I thought the rabbits idea was a bit far-fetched, so I got twelve Rottweilers instead." the camera pans back. There are hideous dogs flanking him. "I'd take them, but I think the Rottweilers would upset them."' After hanging up, he simpers at one of the dogs: "Oh you're a bad dog - don't you look at me like that! You're a very bad dog...." He then screams as, offscreen, the Rottweiler attacks his outstretched hand. We know why that is funny, but why is it so funny? It's yet another way of making the standard comic situation sublime by acknowledging its contrived nature (note the way Larry instantly uses the same phrase "a few rabbits around the place...one of my all-time fantasies", transforming it from an incongruity into a given) but Larry's sheer presence, with actor Tony Guilfoyle's beatific face and his way of delivering his lines in a chirpily over-enunciative tone, gives us the sense that as the plot is handed over to each of these characters, it becomes funny in a different way. The characters are like different valves on an organ.

The second scene, in Old Grey Whistle Theft, sees Ted phoning up Larry to ask about a picnic they've planned. Larry, held at gunpoint, tells Ted they won't be able to make it: "You know Father Williams who was driving us? Well, they found a big box o' machine guns in his house." Ted is astonished. "Well, you think you know someone..." sighs Larry. As Ted rings off to continue with the episode's picnic plot, another priest makes a run for it and, as Larry looks on, a soldier opens fire, and we cut back to Ted. A tough little vignette about the relationship between faith and violence in Ireland, rendered extraordinary by being put into the mouth of the serene Father Larry Duff. The phrase "Big box o' machine guns" becomes poetry.

This celebration wouldn't be complete without discussing the extraordinary performance of Jim Norton as Bishop Brennan. Appearing in just three episodes, the Bishop is responsible for ensuring that these three failures of priests are kept hidden on Craggy Island. Norton is playing a familiar figure (Superintendent Chalmers in The Simpsons comes to mind), but brings such ferocious energy to the screen that he never seems to be playing the straight man, even though ostensibly his role is to find out what Ted, Dougal and Jack are up to and get angry. The episode Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse, in which Ted, having forfeited a football game with Father Dick Byrne, has to carry out the mission of the episode's title as a result, is built around an inevitable outcome: of course Bishop Brennan will realise that Ted kicked him up the arse, but when this moment comes, it's frightening. The sight of Bishop Brennan's cape flowing like Batman's as he runs towards the Parochial House howling for Ted's blood is hard to forget, and while the episode has gained much comic mileage from seeing how many times it can use variants of the phrase "kick him up the arse", hearing the Bishop use them himself is sublime, as if the same joke the episode has been giving is being sung in yet another key:

What brings me here, Crilly? Well, I suppose I would have to say the company, hah? The fresh air, the view from my window of that great pile of sludge - but number one on the list would be the matter of you kicking me up the arse - yes I think that is the one I would prioritise. Don't try my patience, Crilly! You kicked me up the arse: try to deny it and I will have you fed to the dogs!

The other reason for Bishop Brennan transcending the role of mere foil is the little touches of dignity and verisimilitude that Norton embellishes him with. There's his reaction to Dougal calling him Len, his occasional profanities (Don't call me Len, you little prick!", "you address me by my title, you little bollocks!"), his reaction when Ted suggests a moment of prayer (“No! I don't want - allright then, alright carry on, carry on“), his snarl of "what are yeee looking at?" after shoving the Pope aside in his realisation that Ted DID kick him up the arse, his witty moments of sarcasm ("Ah, the Kraken awakes," he sneers when Jack comes out of his slumber). My own favourite is the look of uncharacteristic amusement on his face whenever his PA - renowned as the most sarcastic priest in Ireland - displays his talent ("Did you come by car?" "No, we flew in from Southern Yemen."), even gesturing towards him and looking at Ted with a "doesn't he just kill you?" expression on his face. This is the kind of little touch that makes Father Ted endlessly rewatchable: its strong gags and characters are parsed by notes of verisimilitude, like lines of poetry made to scan in surprising ways.

Father Ted is the greatest comedy from this side of the Atlantic, and along with Seinfeld the greatest comedy of all time. That's the closest I can come to explaining why.

Comedy for Comedy's sake

One thing critics seem unable to grasp is that comedy itself is an artform as surely as literature or jazz, with its own unique strengths when written well and weaknesses when written poorly. Instead, the tendency when praising comedy is to compare it to literature or theatre, as if this legitimises the work. The greatest sitcoms - Seinfeld, Father Ted, I’m Alan Partridge, The Simpsons before its decline – have all been dedicated to the profound, mystifying process of being funny. Father Ted and Seinfeld should invite critique and analysis as surely as Philip Roth, yet so far the critics haven’t reached the nineties yet. Fawlty Towers, for instance, appears to have been vaguely canonised, but you are more likely to hear someone praising it for its tragedy, its psychological realism and its similarities to Shakespearean and Beckettian comedy than for what actually makes it so enduringly funny. I recall a critic once praised Rob Brydon’s Marion and Geoff by comparing it to Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. This missed the point: the sharp black humour of Brydon’s show is a very different strength to Bennett’s. We don’t have to insist that a comedy show is as good as a drama in order to recognise its value. Shows like The Office and The Royle Family may invite comparisons with Beckett and the theatre, but they are funnier, and this sets them out as part of a different artform to theatre with its own strengths. This is why a lot of poor comedy – Extras, Saxondale – gets praised because of its fruitless aspirations towards profundity.

There are three main cul-de-sacs that modern comedy faces. The first is darkness, which always attracts praise but is no more or less an indication of merit than lightness. BBC2’s Nighty Night initially attracted praise for its unflinching blackness, but it soon became apparent it had nowhere else to go. Saxondale was the kind of show that attracted praise for having greater character depth than the infinitely funnier I’m Alan Partridge, but making the protagonist more miserable and giving him dialogue about the bleakness of his predicament does not increase psychological depth. Whilst in Curb Your Enthusiasm there is a terrible logic to the hero’s misanthropy, Lead Balloon – a show heavily influenced by Curb – simply has its protagonist do the most unpleasant thing possible according to the situation. True black comedy can be sublime, but blackness isn’t automatically clever or hilarious.

The second is self-referentiality, an aspect of post-modernism that is a good deal less interesting than most people seem to think. In shows like Extras and The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle, the presence of cameras and tv shows within tv shows is presented as if it affords us a fascinating glimpse into the world of celebrity, when in fact it’s no more interesting than any other setting. The nadir was reached with the climax to the Extras Christmas special, which seemed to believe that launching into a diatribe against Big Brother and celebrity culture constitutes satire rather than yet another aspect of celebrity culture, no better than Big Brother itself. It’s much the same school of thought that persists in thinking that celebrities playing themselves in an unflattering light is both incredibly brave of the celebrity and deeply subversive.

The third is the tendency towards realism, in sitcoms which focus on characters with shabby, self-obsessed lives. The influence of Peep Show and The Office is strong here, and the excellent (and inexplicably axed) Pulling also demonstrated that this can be done well. The problem with these three fine shows is that their influence – along with the improvised, pseudo-documentary style of Curb Your Enthusiasm, probably the finest currently ongoing comedy series – has lead a generation to believe their own lives are funny enough to base a comedy show around.

Father Ted, Seinfeld and I’m Alan Partridge are not brilliant because they are dark, nor because they capture the humdrum reality of everyday life, nor because they are postmodern, and not because they achieve any effects similar to Beckett, Dickens or Shakespeare. In fact, some of those things they don’t attempt to do at all. They are brilliant because every aspect - the performances, the dialogue, the structure of their ingenious little plots, the characterisation, the gags, the imagery – has been scrupulously worked on so that each contributes to an overall effect that is unique and incomparable to any other artform. There is nothing more complex than something that succeeds in being funny, and nothing more valuable for sanity. In comparison with this achievement, postmodernism seems a very small thing indeed.