It's too bad that the show Seinfeld is no longer on the air - Jessica Seinfeld's travails with her family cookbook, "Deceptively Delicious," would make a great sitcom storyline. So says Jerry Seinfeld, who can't believe that his wife has been accused of plagiarising vegetables.
“Hil-arious! Hilarious. Hilarious,” the comedian told EW. “I was saying to her this morning, I’m really regretting that I’m not doing the sitcom right now. 'The Puree Plagiarizer’ is a Seinfeld episode: ‘You stole my mushed-up carrots! I invented mushed-up carrots!' It’s just absolutely a riot to me."
He later went on David Letterman and said that the whole debacle makes a mockery of the very idea of plagiarism. “I love the term ‘plagiarism’ for this little event,” he said. “Because it used to be you had to really take a theme from a major novel, some sort of literary narrative. Now, you’re in your kitchen making brownies, you sneak a little spinach in there, your name’s dragged through the mud.”
Okay, so that's pretty funny. Jerry Seinfeld's a funny guy. But I still suspect that his wife is a bit of a douche who probably knew that there was a book like hers that had already been published but didn't care because, hey, she's Jessica Seinfeld and of course her book is going to sell bigger and so why should she give anyone credit? Nobody sells a book project without checking the market to see what else is out there - and Seinfeld's publisher had received and rejected the first book (“The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals” by Missy Chase Lapine) only months before picking up Seinfeld's project. And in any case, the whole controversy got fired up when Jessica Seinfeld claimed on Oprah that she did, in fact, invent mushed-up carrots. Which, end of the day, is the most ludicrous thing about this so-called controversy: a spoiled socialite who is best known for spending her gazillionaire husband's money on shoes expects us to believe that she just one day, while hovering over a blender, 'came up' with the idea of sneaking pureed vegetables into her kids' food. This, when really, I'd bet good odds that she's not touched a single kitchen appliance since becoming Mrs. Seinfeld. I don't believe it, and I'm pretty gullible. (I'm also pretty lazy, and have to admit that I wouldn't be laboring over blenders if I had a gazillion dollars. I'd hire a blender-jockey, for sure. But I digress.)
So, yeah, the whole thing would make a good Seinfeld episode. But it would totally be a Sue Ellen Mischke episode, and the Jessica-inspired Sue Ellen would send Oprah 20K worth of designer bras to thank her for promoting the book idea that she ripped off of Elaine. Classic.
