Lady Gaga went to a baseball game, flipped off some fans, yadda yadda yadda, now Jerry Seinfeld is mad at her.
Retirement is said to soften people, but in the decade since his show went off the air Jerry Seinfeld has shown a remarkable pugnacious streak. He’s bickered with Larry King, engaged in a cookbook battle, and taken NBC’s side in the 2009 late night war. Now he’s going after Gaga, a popular target of late*.
*A brief rundown of recent Gaga criticism:
“She’s not progressive, but she’s a good mimic.”– M.I.A. in the NME
“Using blasphemy as entertainment is as cheap as a comedian telling a fart joke.”–Katy Perry on Twitter
“There’s not much in her music to distinguish it from other glossy, formulaic pop. … [But] she seems to take herself so oddly seriously, the way she talks about her music in the third person, like she’s Brecht or something.”– Joanna Newsom in The Guardian. Truly there is just something about her that other celebrities dislike.
The inciting incident of the feud about nothing was Gaga’s visit to a New York Mets game earlier this month. The singer showed up in the front row of Citi Field in a theatrical leather-jacket-and-lingerie getup and, when the inevitable attention got too much for her, flipped photographers the middle finger and retreated to a private box — Seinfeld’s box.
Seinfeld, a die-hard Mets fan, originally brushed off the incident. But in a radio interview on Monday, Seinfeld sang a different tune. “I changed my mind. This woman’s a jerk. I hate her,” he told New York sports station WFAN. “I can’t believe they put her in my box, which I paid for. You give people the finger and you get upgraded? Is that the world we’re living in now?”
He continued with a riff that NewsFeed could not believe was the work of the actual Jerry Seinfeld and not a Seinfeld impersonator: “What is she giving the finger [for]? What’s the finger anyway? Speaking of interesting and new, how old is the finger? How did it even get to be the finger?”
But the comedian’s best insult was at the top of the bit: “You take one ‘A’ off of that and you’ve got ‘gag.’” Seinfeld-burned!
The Mets, for their part, appear to be unfazed by the incident. Tonight is “Mets Fans Go Gaga for [David] Wright Night.” Fans who show up for the game against the Detroit Tigers will receive foam fingers advocating the third baseman’s place in the All-Star Game.