Wayne Knight Revives the Spirit of Newman For Political Ad
A wise man once said the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There's never a letup, it's relentless. Every day it piles up more and more, and you gotta get it out, but the more you get out, the more keeps coming in!
That wise man, of course, was Newman, the vindictive postal worker who lived down the hall from Jerry and Kramer on Seinfeld. One can only imagine what Newman would have made of media reports of a massive mail slowdown under the leadership of the new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Well, now we don’t have to imagine it, as Knight appears in a new anti-Trump political ad, assailing the President and his Postmaster General for their assault on the United States Postal Service.
For legal purposes, it must be stated that Wayne Knight isn’t technically playing Newman. But he is playing an angry postman character who just by coincidence has a lot of Newman’s mannerisms. Watch it below:
More than 20 years removed from the end of Seinfeld (the series finale aired in the spring of 1998), Knight still has Newman down — the gestures, the inflections, the choking on food. It helps that the spot was written by David Mandel, who worked as a writer on Seinfeld before producing Veep.
This would have made for one of those great “Current Day Seinfeld” premises: Jerry wants to vote by mail, and asks Kramer to stick his ballot in the mail. But then Kramer forgets, so Jerry has to beg Newman to take his ballot after the deadline, but Newman refuses to violate the rules because he hates Jerry. Newman!!
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