Jerry Seinfeld: "I find the Blackberry people, they... the pupils don't focus."
In a clip that now plays like a tech time capsule, Seinfeld explains the two instincts of the domesticated father and accidentally documents the exact moment the Blackberry ruled the world.
Asked how he is enjoying family life, Seinfeld says he loves having kids, then immediately reframes fatherhood as a set of male instincts.
The first is the arrival announcement:
"All fathers must announce, 'Daddy's home. This will change everything.'"
In his telling, the father expects worship and receives nothing:
"In our minds we are thinking family members are now going to drop to their knees and weep at their good fortune, but they do not because they know once your jacket is off that concludes your involvement with anyone or anything going on in the house."
The second instinct, he says, is avoidance, which is why golf exists. To Seinfeld the word golf has only one possible meaning: "get out, leave family."
When the interviewer worries his own family might want to play with him, Seinfeld has a simple fix: "Well, put these clothes on. I guarantee you they won't."
Then the conversation drifts into what makes this clip feel like a snapshot of a specific era. The interviewer admits he uses a Blackberry. Seinfeld does not, and he turns the device into a character study.
He describes how Blackberry users hold the thing constantly and quietly compare your face to their screen, deciding the screen is winning:
"I think there's more buttons here than on your face."
That leads him to the bigger complaint hiding inside the joke: "Do we even know what rudeness is anymore?"
When the iPhone comes up, framed as the device "all the cool people use," Seinfeld dismisses it the way only someone living right at the Blackberry-to-iPhone handoff could.
His pretentious show business friends all have one, his wife has one, but he has found its fatal flaw:
"You can't slam the iPhone down when you're mad."