Did Jerry Seinfeld DESTROY Duke Univ. Protesters?

What's the Deal with Clickbait Headlines? (And What Did Seinfeld Actually Say at the Graduation Ceremony?)

Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines from Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement address to the graduating class at Duke University on Sunday. I did. The most prominently displayed articles on the interwebbies led with the rather small “protest” of people opposed to Seinfeld’s “support for Israel.”

I’m not going to analyze Seinfeld’s connections to Israel, nor will I take sides between the awful governments of Israel and Hamas, nor try to defend any of their cheerleaders (*reader breathes sigh of relief*).

I’m also not going to barrage you with references from the “Seinfeld” sitcom, a nine-season, 180-episode series (*reader breathes even bigger sigh of relief*) … though I will gives props to a satire site for their well-done joke about the Duke incident, featuring Jerry’s on-screen foil.

Instead, I want to cover what Seinfeld actually said during his generally well-received speech (*reader is attracted and intrigued by this angle*), which Duke University posted online:

‘What’s the deal with … ?’

The multi-talented entertainer, known for his stand-up comedy and sitcom “about nothing” overflowing with funny observations (“Did you ever notice … ?” “What’s the deal with …?” etc.), admitted his own peculiarities early in his address:

I have truly spent my life focusing on the smallest things imaginable, completely oblivious to all the big issues of living.

And, as could be expected of a successful comedian, he stumped for the humanness and preciousness of laughter, especially near the closing portion of his remarks:

The slightly uncomfortable feeling of awkward humor is OK. It’s not something you need to fix. …

Not enough of life makes sense for you to be able to survive it without humor. ... It is worth the sacrifice of an occasional discomfort to have some laughs. ...

And humor is not just for the stress relief or even just the simple fun of laughing, but for the true perspective of the silliness of all humans and all existence.

In between, he acknowledged what I call “good suffering.”  Encountering and pushing against our own limits can make us stronger:

Find something where you love the good parts and don't mind the bad parts too much: the torture you’re comfortable with. This is the golden path to victory in life. ... Work, exercise, relationships. They all have a solid component of pure torture, and they are all 1,000-percent worth it.

And he flipped the script on the trope that nobody looks back on their life and wishes they had spent more time at their job:

Don’t blame work. Work is wonderful. I definitely will not be looking back on my life wishing I worked less.

His advice was perhaps not what many were expecting to hear, but the challenges he laid out for the graduates were presented in an uplifting, humanity-affirming manner.

The means and the ends

Most of all, I sensed that Seinfeld has an appreciation for the process of human existence. Three chunks of his speech — near the start, middle, and finish — are worth highlighting, as they emphasize being a limited, sometimes-messy person in a world that is both teeming with possibilities and beyond your totalitarian grasp:

Effort always yields a positive value, even if the outcome of the effort is absolute failure of the desired result. ... “Just swing the bat and pray,” is not a bad approach to a lot of things.

…

[We’re] so obsessed with getting to the answer, completing the project, producing a result, which are all valid things, but not where the richness of human experience lies. ... Stop rushing to what you perceive as some valuable endpoint. Learn to enjoy the expenditure of energy that may or may not be on the correct path.

…

Don’t think about having. Think about becoming. Having is fine, but focus on becoming.

AI-generated image of … I’m not really sure … but it seems appropriate.

These insights and observations speak to the humane ethics of Christianity and anarchism/voluntarism, particularly because those are deeply about the importance of embarking on a good, honest process rather than insisting upon favored, temporal results.

As I wrote in the Concluding Prayer section of my book Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen (Amazon, B&N, Lulu):

To do God’s will, involves putting aside any control-coveting tendencies and treating others as God does, always respecting the dignity of each person. For a Christian, the ends never justify the means. Evil tactics fundamentally taint any allegedly good goals.

If anything, the means justify the ends! Really, when you have the right attitude and make an honestly good effort, you’ll often find you can accept the results — even if they’re not what you initially wanted — and move forward.

You might even be able to laugh about it.

Time to ‘commence’ with the Comments!

How’s your sense of humor doing? How do you handle the inevitable awkwardness and spontaneous/revealed order of life?

What did you think of Seinfeld’s remarks to the Duke grads?

What inspires you to make a good effort, knowing you can’t totally control the outcomes nor the other people you encounter?

Anything else on your mind after pondering the themes of this article?

Share your (awkward or non-awkward) thoughts in the Comments section …