It's emerged that Jerry Seinfeld was in a terrifying-sounding car accident last weekend in The Hamptons when his brakes gave out and, in trying to prevent a more serious accident, he flipped his vehicle. 

Miraculously, Jerry Seinfeld emerged from the crash completely unscathed – something that's being put down to either remarkable fortune, the quick-thinking of Seinfeld himself or the cushioning effect of the 45 pillowcases stuffed with high-denomination banknotes that Jerry Seinfeld always keeps on him as small change.

When a celebrity crashes their car it's usually only their fault. Sure, they'll blame the paparazzi whenever they can in the hope that they'll be able to glean a fragment of Princess Diana-style pity from the incident, but that tends not to disguise the fact that they were slammed off their shit on booze, talking into three telephones at once and wearing a Juicy Couture blindfold because they saw that bitch Kim Kardashian in the same thing a week before.

But sometimes, just sometimes, celebrity car crashes aren't a celebrity's fault. And that tends to be the case more often if you were in a successful 1990s American sitcom. Ellen Degeneres' crash was due to another driver and Jerry Seinfeld's recent crash was mostly due to his car being a lousy no-good piece of crap. 

That's right, Jerry Seinfeld crashed his car a few days ago. Well, maybe 'crashed' is a strong word. We meant 'flipped it over like a blimmin pancake'. Don't worry, though – Jerry Seinfeld doesn't need your pity. He came out of it totally unharmed, as E! Online reports:

Seinfeld was motoring by himself along Skimhampton Road in East Hampton when the harrowing accident occurred at about 7:40 p.m. Saturday. "The brakes went bad," East Hampton Police Chief Todd Sarris told the newspaper. "He had to pull the emergency brake." According to authorities, the 53-year-old comic's car was headed directly towards traffic on Montauk Highway when he lost control, forcing him to swerve drastically to the right to halt the 1967 Fiat BTM's momentum. The two-door sedan reportedly rolled over onto its passenger side, then the roof, before coming to rest just several feet shy of the other vehicles at an intersection on the driver's side.

It sounds like a rare combination of luck and good judgement came into play for Jerry Seinfeld on Saturday – if the circumstances were even slightly different then he could have been seriously injured or worse. Unless, you know, the circumstance that changed was that his brakes were OK. This'd be quite a dull story if that were the case.

But it just goes to show, you can be as rich, as famous or as mullety as you like, but brakes can go bad on anyone. It was just an extremely unlucky accident, that all, nobody's to blame for it.

Although we wouldn't be surprised to see the publication of a new cookery book called The Sneaky Chef : 20 Mouthwatering Ways To Get Your Kids To Eat All That Brake Fluid I Syphoned Out Of Jerry Seinfeld's Car When He Wasn't Looking The Other Day in the next few weeks.

What? It's a joke.

Read more:

Seinfeld OK After Scary Car Wreck – E! Online

A food writer who claims that Seinfeld's wife ripped off her idea for a healthy cookbook has now decided to sue Jerry Seinfeld himself. Why? Because on TV he happened to make the innocent assumption that the writer in question was probably a murderer. Absurd, of course – we all know that people who eat healthily don't possess the physical strength to even pick up a gun, let alone fire it without the recoil dislocating their entire skeletons.

There's a lot of talk about 'the Seinfeld curse' – the near-compulsive inability of actors who appeared on Seinfeld to find other successful sitcoms to star in – but there's a chance that the real Seinfeld curse is the near compulsive inability of actors who appeared on Seinfeld to open their mouths in public without being uncomfortably offensive. 

First there was Michael Richards and his unusual upsidedown pitchfork-based ethnic cleansing model, and now Jerry Seinfeld's getting in on the act, too. Only Jerry Seinfeld is being a little more specific with his targets. So specific that he's just offended one woman, really – Missy Chase Lapine, the author of The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals.

You see, the whole point of Missy Chase Lapine's book is that you can make children eat anything – fruit, vegetables, seeds, ritalin, incriminating fraudulent documents – by chopping them up really small and mashing them up with things children do like to eat, like chocolate, hamburgers, rabbit turds and whatnot.

And the month after it was released, Jerry Seinfeld's wife Jessica published her book Deceptively Delicious that preached the very same messages, even to the point where it contained almost-identical recipes for spinach brownies and avocado in chocolate pudding. And as far as Missy Chase Lapine is concerned, that's plagiarism.

Then, in October, when Missy Chase Lapine was already on Jessica Seinfeld's case, Jerry Seinfeld went on Letterman and – realising that Missy Chase Lapine has three names – came to the following conclusion:

"Now you know, having a career in show business, one of the fun facts of celebrity life is wackos will wait in the woodwork to pop out at certain moments of your life to inject a little adrenaline into your life experience…. If you read history, many of the three-name people do become assassins. Mark David Chapman. And you know, James Earl Ray. So that's my concern."

And, somewhat unsurprisingly for a woman who's prepared to sue because someone other than her puts potatoes in cheese sandwiches, this little outburst has caused Missy Chase Lapine to, yes, sue Jerry Seinfeld. According to the Associated Press:

The lawsuit said a reasonable person watching Seinfeld on Letterman's show would conclude that he had described Lapine as mentally ill with "potentially violent or, at a minimum, hostile, tendencies, proclivities and activities." It argued that Lapine was not a public figure, does not suffer mental infirmity, is not a celebrity stalker, is not violent or dangerous, and does not engage in extortion or lies.

Now, speaking from experience we know that it's an incredibly bad idea to call someone who isn't a murderer a murderer. And we also know how tiring it can be when people you've never even heard of say that you've ripped them off. So we're eminently positioned to be able to rule fairly on this messy Seinfeld case. And what do we rule?

We rule that anyone who's really that bothered about squidging up a carrot and putting it in a trifle – or whatever these books tell you to do – should probably find something better to do with their time, like sitting in a corner clawing at their face with their hands, for example.

Read more:

Author Sues Seinfelds Over Cookbook – Associated Press