Written by: Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld
Directed by: Art Wolff

How do you summarise Seinfeld? I came to it very late – diving into it in 2019 – so I long had this vague impression of it. The show was famous for being so popular that it reshaped the entire sitcom genre; characters could now be unsympathetic assholes instead of likeable and relatable, and they could talk about pop culture and awkward social situations and other ephemera, and they could speak with a staccato rhythm. Indeed, TV Tropes has a whole page called Seinfeld Is Unfunny, named after the fact that people who came to the genre after Seinfeld would go back and watch it and be unimpressed by details and style that were now old hat.

So you can imagine my delight when I was shocked by something totally unique. Despite its influence, Seinfeld operates by rules I’ve never seen before, creating a tone I’ve never seen elsewhere. Jerry’s standup at the end of the pilot ends up summarising a big part of the morality that will define this show for its entire run: I don’t know why people do what they do. Jerry’s talking about women specifically, but he does also express puzzlement as to why men honk horns at women; I might know men generally do it as an expression of power, or because they think they’re supposed to, but that doesn’t make Jerry’s observation any less funny.

More important is the unspoken subtext: I have accepted that I don’t know why people do what they do. This is famously a series about observations, but an important aspect is that those observations are meaningless in the grand scheme of things – by which I mean that it doesn’t matter to the series if they’re correct or incorrect. This is a show about behaviour, and it makes no attempt to explain or understand that behaviour. Observations matter less than the act of observation itself and what consequences it causes. I clicked onto this series when I realised Seinfeld isn’t just a show about a standup comedian – it’s about what would happen if you acted like a standup comedian all the time, even when it would be ridiculous.

I think that’s why it’s managed to age pretty well, even being written by staunchly heterosexual men. Famously, much of this show is drawn from the personal lives of the creators – a real turning point for me was when I watched the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David points out he actually ate an eclair from the trash, just like George. For one thing, the logic of what happens makes sense because it actually happened. If a woman seems strange, it’s because that particular woman was strange.

For another, it’s all in-character. If the things Jerry or George say seem self-serving, hypocritical, or incoherent, it’s because Jerry and George are self-serving, hypocritical, and not that bright. Much like Futurama, this is a show where the highest ideal is being funny.

This episode has much of what we’ll come to expect from Seinfeld in proto-form. Fans tend to dismiss the first two season entirely; I think this is overstating it (the show really gets cooking with “The Pony Remark”, for one thing), but this whole first season will be incredibly rough. The worst part is that the rhythm isn’t there yet – it feels like there are long stretches of dead air and scenes often just kind of end rather than build to a punch.

You can see the worst of this when Kramer – here, referred to as Kessler – comes in. Jerry makes a joke at his expense and ‘Kessler’ just laughs it off instead of escalating with an even more absurd statement. On the other hand, you can see a genuine classic Seinfeld moment when Jerry and George discuss the different ways women greet and break down their various meanings, only to get surprised by the woman doing the eye grab thing.

Best of all, the basic ideas of the characters are locked in. George is the strongest character here; not only do we have him getting neurotic about the waitress potentially giving him the wrong coffee (and then stressing about it later when she makes a joke about it), we have him confidentally giving Jerry incredibly specific advice. Kramer/Kessler is already invading Jerry’s fridge, revealing both his thoughtlessness and his enthusiasm for being helpful when he insists on talking to Jerry’s friend.

Above all, we have the presentation of a normal social situation and the awkwardness of navigating it. It was just last week that I was trying to smoothly work out how available someone was and it came up organically in the conversation, and I was as exasperated and as accepting as Jerry is here. A lot of people dismiss Seinfeld (comedian) as a weak actor, which is obviously true; sometimes this extends to dismissing the character, even if it’s damning with faint praise as “oh, he has to be less interesting than the other three because he’s the straight man for everyone to bounce off”.

I think Jerry only looks uninteresting within the context of the show – he’s as driven by neurosis as any of the other characters, he just expresses it through detatched sarcasm. In his own way, he’s just as weird as everyone else, he’s just less emotionally unstable.

TOPICS O’ THE WEEK

• While taping the game has become obsolete, spoilers have, if anything, taken over the culture.
• I’m not going to bother looking it up because it may be funnier to make a fool of myself, but aren’t the cottonballs for applying touch-ups to makeup?
• Jerry is correct that a date is really like a job interview. The nice thing both ways is that as much as they’re evaluating you, you’re evaluating them.

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