Jerry Seinfeld has an important question: What is the deal, metaphysically speaking, with donut holes? Millions of donut shops and grocery stores sell these sugary little delicacies, but what are they? “You can’t sell people a hole,” he passionately insists. “A hole does not exist! Words have meanings!” Rogue video editor Dominick Nero has underlined the cosmic significance of this stand-up routine by juxtaposing Jerry Seinfeld’s words with ethereal New Age music, swirling colors, and images of the night sky in a philosophical new video entitled “Seinfeld’s Holes.” That name may suggest something in the field of pornography, but what Nero has concocted here is closer to the halfway point between Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, provided the titular comedians were enjoying donuts with their coffee, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.
Sounding almost professorial, Jerry Seinfeld explains, “A hole is the absence of whatever is surrounding it. Okay? If they were really donut holes, the bag would be empty.” By placing this prosaic routine in such a grand, consciousness-raising setting, Nero has transformed Jerry’s harmless “donut holes” bit into a miniature philosophy lesson. Transported aloft by the spacey music and the imagery, the viewer is invited to contemplate wormholes, black holes, and other lofty matters. To ponder the riddle of donut holes is to meditate upon the difference between existence and nonexistence. Nero himself describes the clip along philosophical lines:
Jerry Seinfeld has been a public figure for longer than most us have been alive. Watching him obsess over the same trivial questions, again and again, after all these years, has become quite an existential experience— will he ever understand the mystery of donut holes? How far will he go to uncover the truth of life’s most boring minutiae? How many comedians, sports cars, and cups of coffee will it take to bring the aging comedian peace of mind? It felt only natural to juxtapose some of these questions with the sounds and images of the grand, infinitely mysterious cosmos.