No way to exit.

Seinfeld as Sartre

So, what did you think about the last episode of "Seinfeld?" I asked my class on the morning of May 15.

"It sucked," said a girl in the front row, and two hundred heads nodded in agreement. Later that day, when my wife picked me up, she told me both her classes reached the same consensus. And when we got home and checked out the newspaper, we found that the Associated Press guy panned it too: unfocused, rambling, not funny. So I have to bet that if you watched it you agree with our students and the A.P.

And here I am, your trusted media wallah, master of my domain, to tell you that you're wrong, wrong, wrong.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Look. The fun of writing a novel is writing the first sentence and the most herniatingly difficult part, apart from the stuff in the middle, is writing the last sentence. Literary critics and psychologists love to talk about "closure," but really getting there is tough. How do you know when you're done? And doesn't it have to be the same for a sitcom of the quality of "Seinfeld," which was essentially a nine-year, episodic comedy of manners (albeit bad manners) - in other words one of the best written, best acted, most consistent TV novels in the history of the technology? (Virginia Woolf once observed that there are three rules for writing a novel, but, unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.)

So here's what Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, the original writers, did, and it's brilliant.

Since early on in the series, Jerry and George Costanza - George, the Jim Thorpe of fecklessness - have been trying to sell their idea for a "show about nothing" - i.e. "Seinfeld" itself - to NBC. As the last episode begins, Jerry gets a phone call from NBC in Hollywood. They're going to buy the show. Jerry and George are to leave New York for California, to make the idea of the TV show, "Jerry," the reality of the TV show, "Seinfeld" (got a little shiver of systematic self-consciousness up your spine, there?).

But before Jerry and George leave, NBC - here's the only hard-to-buy departure from reality - grants them a trip in a private jet anywhere in the world with Kramer and Elaine. They choose Paris. But after the plane takes off Kramer begins stomping madly about the cabin. He's got water in his ear, you see, because he's just come from the beach, and....(Do you know how hard it is getting any "Seinfeld" plot down in properly grammatical, subordinated sentences? It's like trying to herd gerbils.)

Anyhow. Kramer's stomping causes some malfunction in the plane, which is forced to land for minor repairs in a small Massachusetts town. Strolling through town, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer witness a guy being robbed, at gunpoint, in clear daylight. Kramer videotapes the heist, while the other three make sarcastic comments - recorded, natch, on the tape.

And the quartet is then busted by the cops. Seems there's a new Massachusetts law, making anyone who witnesses a crime without trying to assist the victim liable to up to five years in prison.

Now comes the genius. Anybody who's watched the show knows that these four characters are as irrecoverably selfish as the worst - which means the most unforgettable - of Jane Austen's or Dickens's characters. And now they're put on trial - get it, put on trial - for the very sin that's made them funhouse mirrors of ourselves all these years.

Of course, at the end, they're all found guilty and sentenced to one (not five) year to contemplate their inadequacies. But not before a trial that becomes a national media event - as the last "Seinfeld" itself was a national media event - covered by, in a beautifully self-parodic turn, our uncrowned king of schlockmeisterism, Geraldo Rivera.

But guilty of what, precisely? Well, of Pride (Jerry), Lust (George), Envy (Elaine), and Sloth (Kramer): the four most unavoidable of the seven deadlies, that is, guilty of being human. (I don't know or care if Seinfeld/David planned it this way, but that's how it turned out.)

During the trial almost every major/minor character who has appeared in the series shows up to take a curtain call and to testify that, yes indeed, our four main guys were just as crummy, selfish, and mendacious as we all know ourselves to be most of the time. And in the stunning - there's no other word that serves - last scene, all four are in prison and Jerry is doing his standup act for the cons, and only Kramer is laughing at his jokes.

There's something authentically Kafkaesque about this: "Guilt is never to be doubted," wrote little Franz in "In the Penal Colony." The series about "nothing" written by Jerry and George will not be made; but the series has been made, and is concluding, but concluding in an infinitely-recursive loop. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer will always be there, in their prison clothes, locked each within the other - since each of the seven deadlies is all of the seven deadlies - acting out for us, in rerun heaven, the gorgeously tacky comedy of being, just, human.

"Sartre. No Exit," said my wife Celeste after we watched the last episode. She's right. The last "Seinfeld" disappointed so many of the show's fans - not all - because it raised the ante, and most fans weren't ready to call the raise. I don't want to get too lit-crit on you here, but it's metacomedy: comedy, that is, about what comedy is for, what it's about. And I don't know another sitcom, not even the splendid "Dick Van Dyke Show," "Newhart," "Cheers," or "M*A*S*H" that managed to rise to that level of intelligence.

I am now convinced that W.H. Auden was the greatest critic in the English language of this century. And, writing in the early '40s (in Commonweal, it so happens, under the pseudonym "Didymus"), he remarked that while art can never make us want to be good, it can at least preserve us from the illusion that we already are.

Has a wiser thing been said? I think not; certainly nothing more apposite to the last episode of "Seinfeld." It is, and always was, a story about silly people, little people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel. And, as with Aristophanes, Plautus, the Shakespeare of Much Ado, Voltaire, Jane Austen, and Thomas Pynchon, it made us less silly by reminding us of how silly we really are. That, I think, is comedy's real gift to us: medicinal anarchy.