Jerry Seinfeld Delivered The Graduation Speech At Duke As Protestors Fled For Their Lives
Manny Carabel. Getty Images.As Mr. Seinfeld, who has recently been vocal about his support for Israel, received an honorary degree, dozens of students walked out and chanted, “Free, free Palestine,” while the comedian looked on and smiled tensely.
Many in the crowd jeered the protesters. Minutes later, as the last of the protesters were filing out, he approached the mic. His first words were: “Thank you. Oh my God, what a beautiful day.”
Outside Duke’s stadium, graduates walked around campus, chanting: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.” When they arrived at a green space, they were joined by hundreds of other people — including faculty, relatives and other protesters — who organized a makeshift graduation for them.
Another day, another demonstration that seems born of the imagination of the Onion's writing staff. We've got a handful of students from the graduating class of Duke walking out of their own graduation to protest JERRY SEINFELD.
You know, the comedian who built an empire telling jokes about seatbelts, PopTarts, and dry cleaning; who, as far as I can tell, has never uttered a swear word in public. But he happens to be Jewish (he lived for a time on a kibbutz as a kid) and recently made a visit to Israel. He's also posted a few supportive messages on social media, and and his wife posted that she had bankrolled a counter protest at Cal.
For these sins, a hundred or so Duke seniors decided to miss their own graduation.
I don't know about you guys, but graduation was a big deal for me. Four years spent working toward that goddamn diploma. $200,000+ that dear old mom and dad forked over for me to walk on that stage in a judge's robes, wearing a hat with a placemat stuffed in the top, to a smattering of tired applause given that even ELLIS—landing in the front third of the alphabet—was already hundreds of students in to the procession. Parents, grandparents, and godparents made the trip. There were rocky goddamn moments during those four years, and I wanted to grab that diploma, take my picture, and get off stage as fast as I could before they found some improperly cited paragraph from a paper to disqualify me. The point is, I wouldn't have missed my graduation ceremony for all the world.
But, of course, I'm a privileged white dude with no natural predators so how could I possibly know why someone would choose to walk out on Jerry Seinfeld blah blah blah.
Just a reminder: this isn't Bibi Netanyahu or Alex Jones or even Chappelle, Rogan, or Roseanne speaking. This is Seinfeld. The guy whose show plays on a loop in psychiatric wards for patients who need something soothing and lighthearted to distract them from the demons in their minds. The man is a tonic for the troubled; a palliative for the perturbed. And to a group of 22-year-old Duke students, he is too much to bear.
The image of a bunch of proud protestors standing outside the stadium on some over-walked, grass-bare ant hill, holding an overflow ceremony to the sound of squirrels scampering and crows squawking, is both hilarious and heartbreaking. It has the feel of a rain-audibled wedding. Except it was a choice.
Seinfeld has been misattributed with saying he refuses to play colleges due to pervasive wokeness on campuses. He clears that up here:
Still, it's not hard to decipher, or guess at, Seinfeld's true feelings on the current state of humor. One of my favorite clips is of Seinfeld's speech at the SNL 40th Anniversary special, where he talks to Larry David about how they could never make their show in today's climate:
"It's like we had the last two tickets before Disneyland burned down."
That said, I'd guess that Seinfeld is much too smart to let his true feelings fly openly. Even this speech at Duke was relatively guarded. He seems to know to keep his head down, his personal opinions private, and to enjoy his millions (billion?) in the comforts of many grand homes. To me, he will always be the personification of class in the comedy world. May his show continue to reign across TBS, NBC, Netflix, and all manner of minor channels for decades to come.