Yada, Yada, and Soon, Nada

Asthma just about clobbered me the other night. It was nearly curtains.

My hacking cough almost did me in. My wheezing was uncontrollable, my breathing constricted, my nose clogged and runny, my eyes watery, my neck itchy.

I owed it all to “Seinfeld.� Old “Seinfeld.�

I went for my inhalers. I popped a pill. I plopped into a chair, gasped through my mouth and stayed inert while waiting for the medicine to take full effect. Gradually it did, in about 10 minutes.

Actually, I have only mild asthma. Rarely am I hit by such savagely convulsive and debilitating attacks. But when I do get them, it’s always for the same reason. Laughter. Lots and lots of laughter. Too much for my own good. I shouldn’t subject myself this way. But what can I do? I can’t stay away. I’m hooked. The monkey is on my back.

Damned “Seinfeld.�

I mention this now, of course, because of word from Jerry Seinfeld that this season--its ninth--will be his show’s last. An end to first-run “Seinfeld,� lowering the curtain on the most endearingly rotten, self-obsessed, lying, cheating, back-stabbing characters in the annals of sitcomdom? Pulling the plug on a masterpiece of nothingness that epitomizes the sitcom as art? One that in episode after episode has been uproarious in the way it seams together seemingly unrelated subplots--that are not just far-fetched but out-of-sight-fetched--in such absurdly contrived ways that you can see the jagged stitches? One whose co-creator with Seinfeld, Larry David, is a comic genius, and whose cast--Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards--ranks with the best ever?

As the planet’s No. 1 “Seinfeld� disciple--the spiritual leader of “Seinies� everywhere--I have mixed feelings about it ending production. I hate to see it leave, on principle, but would feel much worse were its older--and better--episodes not so accessible in syndicated reruns.

True “Seinies� watch “Seinfeld� not only in prime time on Thursday nights, but plan their lives so that they are in front of the sets when the reruns air, taking the occasional bad with the good. That’s my compulsion, even though watching the reruns at 7:30 on KTLA-TV Channel 5--which I do religiously just about every weeknight--is hazardous to my health.

This time the near-lethal catalyst was “The Gum,� a 1995 episode from season seven written by Tom Gammill and Max Pross. Describing it here will get me going again, and I won’t be able to finish this column. Let’s just say that it was “Seinfeld� at its absurd, illogical, lunatic best, ranging from Kramer imposing some manly chewing of gum on Jerry to Jerry wearing inch-thick spectacles that rendered him almost sightless and, thus, unable to recognize George at a critical moment. Well, you had to be there.

“The Gum� originally aired between two episodes that were at least as funny, “The Sponge� and “The Rye,� neither of which I will go into now, preferring to avoid a relapse.

Not that “Seinies� need a primer on the show. They can tell you when George first evoked his alter ego Art Vanderlay, when George’s self-loathing blossomed, when he started living with his parents and when George Steinbrenner entered his life. They can tell you the origin of Jerry’s Superman worship and the universe of the bizarro. They can imitate Newman’s maniacal laugh. They can tell you when Elaine introduced her “Get out!� shove, the episodes that displayed her cleavage and when she stopped having bad hair days. They can tell you when Kramer was liberated from idiocy so that he could pursue his true calling as that visionary savant, the K-man, who invented the man’s bra (“The Bro�) and a coffee-table book whose topic was coffee tables and was a coffee table (a book with tiny legs). And so on and so on, from Jack Klumpus to J. Peterman. That was older “Seinfeld.�

Although its whopping average audience of 32 million might disagree, this season has been “Seinfeld’s� least funny and least consistent. So you could make a case for the boss getting out before his show goes the way of some other champion series that hung around like punchy prizefighters long past their prime.

This has nothing at all to do with the prospect of NBC getting no more automatic hits with so-so comedies at 9:30 Thursday with the gigantically profitable “Seinfeld�--presently ranked second in the national Nielsen ratings--missing as its omnipotent lead-in after this season. Nor is it related to whether Seinfeld’s decision to withdraw will be recorded as historic for his network, signaling serious decline, foreshadowing a “Seinfeld�-less NBC slipping further back toward the herd after so many years of near-invincibility in prime time. Networks are like nations, after all, their time in the brightest sun being temporary.

That’s for NBC and its owner, the General Electric Co., to worry about. Viewers have a different agenda, and so does Seinfeld, apparently, having stated in the past his desire to return to stand-up comedy.

If he does do that, he’ll be enormously successful, of course, but the old challenge may not be there. Even his “B� material will put them in the aisles and bring on the asthma attacks, his audiences having been primed by years of “Seinfeld� to now laugh at everything he says.

But what do we “Seinies� care? We’ll always have Art Vanderlay.