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Seinfeld Sez Scientology Helped Him Control Audiences
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Who are these people who credit the controversial religion Scientology for changing their lives for the better? One of them is tv's Jerry Seinfeld who told the typically worthless Parade magazine that the church helped him communicate early in his career so that he could control his audiences.
I last really studied, oh, it’s almost 30 years ago. But what I did do, I really liked, in terms of it’s very...it was interesting. Believe it or not...it’s extremely intellectual and clinical in its approach to problem-solving, which really appealed to me. I actually got to it from my auto mechanics teacher in high school, who was into it, and he was telling me about it. In my early years of stand-up, it was very helpful. I took a couple of courses. One of them was in communication, and I learned some things about communication that really got my act going. It was just things about understanding the communications cycle... Even the volume at which I’m speaking now is the right volume for where you’re sitting. I’m almost performing, in a way.”
You would just understand that there’s this kind of voice, and then there’s this kind of voice, and then there’s this kind of voice. I wasn’t a natural performer at all, so I learned. I was always a pretty good writer in the beginning, but I really had to learn how to perform. Just a little thing like that, understanding that really helped me on stage to understand how you have to invade the space of the audience a little bit. I learned that early on. It was a very helpful thing to learn. You have to invade them just a little bit. Not too much, because then it’s obnoxious. But you can’t be short of them either, or you won’t control them.
One thing that made Seinfeld's tv show so good was they were never afraid of poking fun at anyone. After the jump, Seinfeld chides Scientology in their third season.
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