Image via Wikipedia

“To me, the difference between being single and married is the form of government.  When you’re single, you are the dictator of your own life.  You have complete power.  When I give the order to fall asleep on the sofa with the TV on in the middle of the day, no one can overrule me!  When you are married, you are part of a vast decision-making body.  Before anything is accomplished, there’s got to be meetings, committees have to study the situation.

“And this is if the marriage works.  I think this is the reason why divorce is so painful.  You’ve been impeached and you weren’t even the President.”

–Jerry Seinfeld, SeinLanguage

Jerry Seinfeld’s humor—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say his observations about life—are about life’s timeless absurdities.  (That after all is probably why so many of us—myself included—still watch Seinfeld, eleven years after it went off the air.)  And these sort of absurdities fill the pages of SeinLanguage, a very short book you can finish in maybe two to three hours.

Of course some topics in this book are out of date (there’s a joke here about Chrysler for example) but most jokes—like the observation about marriage above—never really go out of style.  Chrysler may not be in any position to sell a parking space any more but a marriage is still a marriage and men and women still shop for clothes—and still do it differently and we are still all born and we still all die and we still do something in between.  And most of the book is about that, not the outdated topics. 

Of course some of these jokes loyal Seinfeld fans will also have heard on Jerry Seinfeld, the sitcom.  How many, I couldn’t tell you.  Some of the jokes did sound familiar but I couldn’t tell you what percentage of them came from the series.  What I can tell you is that it is a very bad idea to try to read this book next to a spouse who is trying to get some sleep as your non-stop chuckles will occasion a major Board meeting.

But I do recommend this book.  Some things just don’t go out of style.  And Jerry Seinfeld’s humor is (in my opinion anyway) one of them.