Unfrosted is not grrreat!

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Watching Jerry Seinfeld’s new movie Unfrosted, which is supposed to be a comedic counterhistory of the invention of the Pop-Tart, I’m reminded of an incident a long time ago when I ordered a bowl of Cream of Wheat in a diner in Clark Fork and ended up waiting for a solid 30 minutes for my food to emerge from the kitchen. I was with friends, including Publisher Ben Olson, after a long, debaucherous weekend in Montana and had an especial need for something nourishing for breakfast. 

Everyone else’s food came out long before mine. I even watched them eat the majority of their biscuits and gravy, omelets and bacon before my hot cereal finally arrived. When it did, the server shrugged and simply said, “Cook couldn’t get it to do what he wanted it to do.”

It was probably the most terrible and baffling breakfast I ever had. That’s Unfrosted — though in this case, the “cook” is mega-millionaire comedy icon Jerry Seinfeld, “it” is whatever this movie was supposed to be and what it “do” is suck in so many terrible, baffling ways.

Out of respect for readers, I’ll keep the plot summary as brief as possible: Set against the backdrop of a simpering late-Boomer-nostalgic early 1960s, the Kellogg’s and Post cereal companies are duking it out in Battle Creek, Mich. for dominance of America’s breakfast tables. Why anyone cares about this is unclear. Kellogg’s is winning (led by Jim Gaffigan); Post is losing (led by Amy Schumer). I won’t bother with using the characters’ names, since 90% of the reason for this film’s existence is to serve as a vehicle for cameos. 

Into the mix is Seinfeld as a chipper young 70-something-year-old “idea man” who dreams of one day being able to afford a sod lawn (“har har,” the suburbs). He’s never been able to crack the concept of a toaster pastry, but soon finds out that Post has but only because they stole his material… uh, research. Then with one-dimensional sidekick Melissa McCarthy in tow, it’s a race to see who can roll out what becomes the first Pop-Tart. 

Again: Who cares? Well, Seinfeld sure as hell does. Remember Jerry’s apartment in the Seinfeld TV show? Remember how it had about 50 boxes of cereal on the shelf in about 45% of all the scenes? Jerry Loves Cereal. Why? Because it’s funny! Breakfast! It’s a meal that’s not lunch or dinner, and it has two words in it like “break” and “fast” because you “break” your “fast” while you were sleeping and it’s funny, with its eggs and it bacon and all that stuff that have you ever noticed you don’t eat any other time of the day and isn’t that weird and funny! Hahaha! See, it’s funny! It’s funny!

Therefore, we are asked to consider a world that turns on breakfast foods — from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the nightly news with Walter Cronkite (the latter being the only reliably entertaining part of the film, along with a deadpan Mad Men skit starring John Hamm and John Stattery as their characters from that now almost-10-year-old series).

Normally, hilarity would ensue. Instead, it’s an unrelenting psychic assault of mundanity, dead-eyed cringe, half-assed butt jokes and outright lameness that is so vapid and mindlessly, arrogantly stupid (and freighted with gassy, outdated self-importance) that it feels malicious.

Seinfeld literally made his name playing an insufferable, whining misanthrope. It is clear that he was not acting and, sitting atop his mountainous fortune accrued from decades of homebound, bored binge-watchers, looks down on us all with pure hatred.

No one who loves their fellow creatures — or even has a touch of regard for them — would make a movie like this. Certainly no one with any respect for comedy, and only Jerry Seinfeld could have made it. There is simply no reason for it to exist otherwise. The provenance of this film is so clearly one of Seinfeld’s schticky setups — “What’s the deal with … ?” — that it feels like he’s robbing from himself. 

Meanwhile, those bits of “observational” comedy were the worst parts of Seinfeld, and to see one of them allowed to grow to such freakish enormity as Unfrosted is frankly monstrous. When Jerry delivers a line like, “The beauty of cereal is you’re eating and drinking at the same time with one hand,” as if it’s some kind of devastating bon mot, you know he’s lost the plot. Or, more likely, never had it unless Larry David handed it to him. 

Yet, this is the comedy that Seinfeld has been so strident in defending against the “extreme left and P.C. crap and people worrying so much about offending other people,” which he told The New Yorker’s David Remnick has ruined comedy.  

Get this: It turns out that Jerry Seinfeld — whose other main contribution to comedy has been going on self-congratulatory Sunday drives with his celebrity pals in his fleet of luxury vehicles — thinks comedians just can’t be funny anymore because some sensitive soul will get mad at them. 

The number of reasons why this is not true are too staggering to recount (there is more biting, whip-smart, gut-punching and downright raunchy comedy on TV now than ever before). It’s also too obvious to merit much exploration other than to point out that he is a very rich white man bemoaning “cancel culture” in an interview with a magazine that publishes more than 1.2 million copies and logs many millions more monthly web visitors while he’s promoting a movie that he wrote, directed and starred in and Netflix is streaming for him.

It’s hard to believe he’s not putting on an act. Comedians are supposed to be self-reflective and observant. He has to know he’s no Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Redd Foxx or George Carlin. Everything else aside, Seinfeld has been famously inoffensive throughout his entire career. He has never said or done anything in his comedy that remotely challenges anything, other than low-talkers, close-talkers, puffy-shirt owners or big-handed women. His whole persona has always been “about nothing,” which is really the opposite of what comedy should be.

And that’s why, despite what hand-wringers like Seinfeld say, audiences don’t care about so-called offensive material in and of itself. They just don’t like comedians who aren’t funny. Think of the “anti-woke” crew: Tim Allen, Howie Mandel, Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, Rosanne Barr, Rob “Deuce Bigalow” Schneider, Jimmy Carr, and (to lesser extents) Ricky Gervais and Dave Chapelle.

With the exception of Chapelle, these are hardly august names in the pantheon of contemporary American comedy history. As The New Statesman wrote in September 2023, the world of anti-woke comedy is above all “tedious,” with its “jokes” rooted in what amount to an extended complaint that its practitioners might be held accountable to their audience if what they say isn’t funny. Meanwhile, the people who bemoan “cancel culture” are the same ones who stamp their feet over declining moral standards in every other aspect of life.

There is no pleasing these people other than to surrender to them. They love to frame themselves as daring truth-tellers with their lazy misogyny, transphobia and irritable “back-in-my-day-ism,” but they’re really just shallow assholes. As Tennessee Williams put it, “All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”

I won’t say that Seinfeld is “cruel,” but I will say that he is among the last people to whom we should listen for thoughts on the current state of comedy. His first and hopefully last movie is so bland and toothless, it should have been about unseasoned oatmeal. And if you think that little zinger is lame, do not by any means subject yourself to whatever Unfrosted is supposed to be.