Kanye’s VMAs Speech Was Turned Into Stand-up, Then Into Seinfeld

Completely ignoring the red light.

Kanye’s Video Vanguard award speech at the VMAs was already funny. That’s not to take anything away from it — the speech was many things: impassioned, poignant, self-aware, surprising, also not surprising — but by the nature of its rhythms and the seeming randomness of its trajectory, plus the whole president thing, it was an amusing thing to watch unfold.

The next day, it became funnier. YouTuber and TV writer David Elmaleh saw in Kanye’s speech the natural pacing and pauses of a comedy set, so he turned it into one, editing it and adding a laugh track to accentuate non–punch line punch lines.

Then we hit peak stand-up send-up: @Seinfeld2000 took a 30-second clip and added the Seinfeld theme, making it better still.

At this point, the only thing that could further legitimize it as stand-up would be accusations of political incorrectness in his “removing the stage from arenas” bit.

Kanye’s VMAs Speech As Stand-up, and As Seinfeld