Seinfeld excelled at criticism of the everyday. A few months ago, in a fine essay in the NY Times, Sam Anderson suggested that Roland Barthes was the father of pop cultural criticism and that we are all now cultural critics in the Barthian vein, “decoding everything.” Perhaps. But if Barthes gave us serious criticism of popular culture, Seinfeld taught us to be ironic critics of the utterly mundane. Case in point: toilet paper.
via Gizmodo-Toilet Paper: A Brief and Sometimes Painful History