Jerry wants to end a friendship with a childhood friend but can’t figure out how to do it. Kramer invents the concept of a pizza place where the customer makes their own pie (it’s all supervised).
Written by: Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld
Directed by: Tom Cherones
Here we are: the weakest episode of the show that isn’t the finale. I’ll admit, it’s not quite as bad as I remembered; any episode that invents both Kramerica Industries and the customer-made pizza pies can’t be all bad. When revisiting an older series, one often sees not just elements that worked right out of the gate, but prototypical versions of ideas played out much better, and I don’t think it’s ever been as obvious as seeing what is basically a dry run for “The Boyfriend”. One of my favourite recurring themes in Seinfeld is that romantic relationships have been heavily codified and ritualised over the years. As the episode points out, if you want to break up with your partner, you just have to say “I don’t think we should see each other anymore”, and if you want, you can precede it with “We have to talk”.
But what do you do when you want to break up with a friend? Even today, when TikTok is filled with terms like ‘beige flag’ or ‘soft launch’* or other terms quantifying every element of their romantic life, I still see people asking variations on ‘how do I break up with a friend I realised I don’t like?’. You can say what you will about the expectations and rituals of romantic life, but at least its an ethos. As Jerry explains, friends just seem to accrue around each other for almost no reason. I can take his incorrect observation that men only talk about sport and women in stride because he hits at the core truth that men as a group tend to just start talking to each other about nothing and a friendship blooms. Certainly, it happens to me a lot!
Where the episode falls down is in the specifics. The idea of two men breaking up a platonic relationship is funny, but what we see in this episode is one scene of Jerry trying to break up and the rest is him talking about the idea. That one scene really doesn’t work for me because it finds this uncomfortable middle ground where it’s neither a realistic response to an absurd idea nor an absurd exaggeration of realistic behaviour. That direct comparison to “The Boyfriend” helps here – in that, we have Jerry running into Keith, meeting up with him at a bar, helping him move and such, and it’s Jerry neurotic overthinking and Keith’s puzzled reaction that makes it not just funny but funny in different ways. This just plugs in traditional romantic behaviour. It doesn’t quite work. We’ll see the show do better soon enough.
TOPICS O’ THE WEEK
- We get another example of the show’s good blocking when Jerry’s on the phone with Joel and we can see George reacting with annoyance in the background.
- One thing from the break-up scene that does work for me is watching Jerry trying to make actual conversation with Joel and getting nothing back in return. I’ve had many similar conversations with grown-assed adults with marriages and mortgages and good jobs who would selfishly horde the entire conversation for themselves like a child. It was baffling. Then you get the reverse when George describes sitting through the most uncomfortable silence in the world so he can enjoy his sandwich – a case of it actually being funnier to describe something rather than show it.
- It’s amazing how well Kramer landed – we have his conspiracy theories, his outlandish business ideas, his unblinking refusal to acknowledge a polite request, and best of all, the way he flings his hands around and claps as he talks. That said, his idea doesn’t seem quite that bad to me – Jerry is essentially saying he doesn’t understand why a person would cook.
Biggest Laugh: It’s really about the off-hand delivery here.
