Written by: Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David
Directed by: Tom Cherones

It only took to the second episode to get a bona fide classic! It isn’t just that we now have Julia Louis-Dreyfus, it’s that the addition of Elaine has solidified the chemistry of the show in ways that, thinking about it, extend far beyond her even just being in the actual scene. I love talking about and trying to quantify chemistry in art because it’s a nearly impossible task; I know from my own collaborations that you can never see where you end and your collaborator begins. I notice people often say that Seinfeld is really the Larry David show, which is understandable – aside from having the best post-Seinfeld output, he was clearly a driving part of the show’s practical organisation when you look behind the scenes – but I think Seinfeld’s contributions can often be understated. He seems the more ruthless editor of the two, really working to boil a joke down to its funniest expression, but he also strikes me as the more curious of the two.

Obviously, this can go some silly places – I’m not as cold on post-David Seinfeld as others, but I can see how it’s much sillier than what came before, and after that you have things like The Bee Movie and this commercial for Seinfeld going to Netflix – but it also extends to curiosity about other people and what they’re thinking. It’s enticing to think of this being tempered by David’s presence, where Seinfeld focuses his creativity on normal human behaviours and thoughts. Certainly, Elaine is a way for these two guys to ponder what women want and think about, and to find the funniest expression of that. It also makes Jerry and George into more specific characters, because now there are things Elaine will say that they ‘don’t have to’, and in a broader sense how Elaine reacts and relates to other women.

You also, of course, have Louis-Dreyfus’s acting. The first time I watched this episode, I was slightly put off by how Jerry and Elaine seemed to be trying too hard to amuse each other, but it seems I’ve gotten used to it. Speaking of creativity, I feel that Louis-Dreyfus is the most actively creative performer of the main cast, always trying to find the most interesting way of expressing individual lines, and she ends up bringing this out of Seinfeld as an actor in return. Though it isn’t demonstrated much in this episode, by comparison I think of Jason Alexander as a much more psychological actor – trying to work out why George is saying what he says and what he would feel and do in the moment; Michael Richards is less focused on character and more on trying to find what will make an audience laugh.

As for this episode in particular – man, it’s easy to slip away from that at this early stage! – we have a classic case of a minor social situation made way harder than it needs to be. The whole situation is, naturally, based on something Larry David actually did. I’ve always been intrigued by the way David can cram his actual life into these things, as if he always were a TV comedy character just waiting for the right expression of it, but I’m even more intrigued by how different this story comes off when Jerry is acting it out. We already get the fundamental similarity and fundamental difference between Jerry and George: both are hyperaware of the existence of the social contract, but Jerry accepts it as a basic fact of the universe and rarely tries to weasel out of it the way George does.

You can best see this in the sequence where Jerry is trying to talk to Vanessa when Elaine starts talking to him. I was giggling in recognition of how it feels to literally navigate the various conversations going on, and trying to elegantly steer the whole thing in the direction you want to go, as well as trying to correctly interpret signals and relationships. You also see it in his relationship with his parents; you have the collision between two people trying to out-selfless each other when his mother is trying not to mooch off him and he’s trying to put them up for the night.

And, of course, there’s the beginning of Jerry and Elaine’s platonic friendship. I’ve had many friendships with women like this over the years; as Jerry points out in the standup, it’s nice to have that perspective, even if it risks jealousy and envy (which we have no risk of in the ever-detached Jerry). I read a criticism of this episode which said it verges way too much on sentimentality that Seinfeld normally avoids, which I suppose, but it was funny enough to get away with it for me.

TOPICS O’ THE WEEK

• Jerry’s behaviour towards Vanessa can be interpreted as stalking, though I personally think it’s harmless – obviously, it helps that he’d take ‘no’ for an answer.
• George shows up for one scene, but he makes the most of it – establishing at least four different running gags, including pretending to be an architect and Art Corvelay – sorry, Vanderlay. It also has him getting slightly too into the fantasy and forgetting why they’re there, which feels like a proto-form of classic Always Sunny scenes like this.
• My own mother is a board game fanatic – skipping right over Scrabble and into collecting games about prohibition and submarine battles – so she wouldn’t cheat the way Jerry’s mother does.
• There’s a scene where Jerry’s relatives make the hacky observations about his career – “Watch what you say, he’ll put it in his act!”. I’ve always been intrigued by how Seinfeld is one of the few standup-starring sitcoms to not only be about a standup comedian (as opposed to reporter or sports writer or whatever) but to center many of the plots around it. This is probably the weakest engagement with the idea, even if it’s reminscent of complaints by comedian friends have made.

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