#7 - Daniel Hoch - Seinfeld Stereotyping

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I discovered the next piece that I’m choosing to blog on through my girlfriend who watched it in a Theatre & Film course. This video is of comedian Daniel Hoch and in this bit he is explaining the time that he almost guest-starred on an episode of Seinfeld, but was fired when he refused to play his offered role the way that the writers wanted it played. Daniel Hoch is a white, American writer, actor, director, and performance artist. Danny (as he is more commonly called) grew up in the city of New York and is very into the hip-hop culture. Hoch considers his comedy more as theatre, which provides adept monologues in the languages of the people he grew up observing. Although he plays characters of different origins in his acts, their lives are not represented solely by the accents he allows their personalities to define them more than that. In 1995 Danny was contacted by casting directors of the show Seinfeld and asked to come play a character called “the Pool Boy” (named “Ramone”), a guy that works at the fitness club Jerry goes to. The writers had seen his work on HBO and hoped that he would bring his personality to their show. Although he had never seen the show, Daniel knew that it was popular and knew that it would be a good way to get his name out. The only problem that he had with the script was that his character was written to be Hispanic, but Hoch wasn’t cool with playing “the Pool Boy” as the stereotypical Hispanic, pool boy. The writers assured him that they loved his work and that they were completely comfortable with him playing the character however he wanted, but as he sat through the first reading of the script, he became very uneasy as his part came up. He chose to play “the Pool Boy” as a high-strung, hip-hop, Brooklyn kid (much like himself). After the reading, Jerry, himself, and one of the other writers approached Danny and told him that his way was good but that the part would be funnier if he played it with a Spanish accent. Daniel went back to his hotel that night and the next day he found out that he had been replaced, and never got paid for the work he had done. I chose this piece because I wanted to find something that related to the Takaki Chapter 12 that we read recently. Also, although the bit was designed to be funny, it was also very serious and had a serious message.

As I stated, this Daniel Hoch bit relates very well to the Takaki chapter concerning the “Borderland of Chicano America.” Just as Mexicans that emigrated here during the expansion of the United States, Mexicans (and people of Hispanic origin in general) today are often stereotyped as manual laborers. When our country started, they were hired as farmhands, factory and mill workers, and railroad builders. However, even now in the 21st Century, Hispanics are pushed into labor jobs because they are sometimes thought to be better suited for it. As was stated in Zinn Chapter 9 (I believe), whites were thought to be better overseers, while other races were used to do the actual labor. It sometimes seems that that mentality still exists, in a sense, today. When Jerry Seinfeld and his team of writers wrote “the Pool Boy” as a Hispanic man, they were playing on the stereotype that that sort of job is suitable for Hispanic laborers and counted on people to make this connection and find humor in it. Being that the majority of Seinfeld viewers are white, they were likely to find the character funny, without being offensive or racist. Another interesting aspect of the “Ramone” character is that he is obsessed with Jerry and wishes to befriend him. Johnson (and even Takaki) would find it interesting that this Hispanic-American would be written to idolize and want to be like a white man.

I applaud Hoch for standing up against the behemoth that was Seinfeld and for sticking to his morals, even though it meant risking (and eventually losing) the money and exposure he could have gained from being on the show. Portraying racial stereotypes in the media is one thing (sometimes the media can be used in order to draw attention to the generalizations), but creating characters that are stereotypical without even addressing the fact that they are stereotypical only prolongs oppression. Television is one of those systems that, with individual participation (which Danny refused), create our society. Also, even though I have seen several episodes of Seinfeld and have found them to be funny, the ways in which Hoch describes his perspective on the “Ramone” character makes me wonder what other characters on television have been offensive to the peoples they represent. There is a very fine line between satirical social-commentary, and blatant stereotyping and racial-bashing. Sometimes the line is crossed in things that we find funny, but that line is different for every single person in this world, depending on their point-of-view.