Jerry Seinfeld has blamed political correctness for hurting comedy and even says some of the storylines in his hugely successful Seinfeld sitcom would not be possible in today’s environment.

The veteran comedian, who will return to screens next week in the Netflix movie Unfrosted, lamented his perceived absence of comedy on television saying it was the result of “PC crap”.

“[In decades past, people] just expected there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight,” Seinfeld said in an interview with The New Yorker.

“Well, guess what? Where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

The 70-year-old said people were seeking out stand-up comedians because their material was not “policed by anyone”.

“The audience polices us. We know when we’re off track. We know instantly and we adjust to it instantly,” he said.

“But when you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups – ‘Here’s our thought about this joke’  – well, that’s the end of your comedy.”

In his New Yorker interview, Seinfeld acknowledged that his Seinfeld co-creator Larry David was producing edgy content in Curb Your Enthusiasm, but said that was because it was “grandfathered in”.

“If Larry was 35, he couldn’t get away with watermelon stuff and Palestinian chicken,” he said.

The Curb Your Enthusiasm Watermelon episode in season 11 poked fun at racial (and racist) stereotypes, while season eight’s Palestinian Chicken lampooned Jewish-Palestinian tensions.

“[Curb Your Enthusiasm streamer] HBO knows that [kind of comedy is] what people come here for, but they’re not smart enough to figure out ‘how do we do this now? Do we take the heat, or just not be funny?’ And what they’ve decided to be is, ‘well, we’re not going to do comedies anymore.’ There were no sitcoms picked up on the fall season of all four networks. Not one. No new sitcoms,” Seinfeld said.

Seinfeld said the Rickshaw episode of Seinfeld in 1998 would not be possible today.

“We did an episode where Kramer decides to start a business of having homeless people pull rickshaws because, as he says, ‘they’re outside anyway’,” he said.

“Do you think I could get that episode on the air today? … We would write a different joke with Kramer and the rickshaw today. We wouldn’t do that joke. We’d come up with another joke.”

Unfrosted, written, directed and starring Jerry Seinfeld alongside a cast of high-profile comedians, is a light-hearted telling of the birth of the pop tart.