George breaks up with his girlfriend and Jerry starts dating her, causing him to feel guilty. Elaine gets frustrated when an acquaintance stops acknowledging her. Kramer buys cantaloupe.
Written by: Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David
Directed by: Tom Cherones
A lot of people say the show doesn’t get great until season three, and I would agree with that. Some people go so far as to say every episode in the first two seasons is bad, and this I cannot countenance. Much like The Simpsons and Always Sunny, Seinfeld was constantly evolving; the famous colliding plots (in which a B plot would, without warning, crash into an A plot) didn’t really pick up until season four, for example, and the show would crank up both the absurdity and the Seinfeldian conversations in season eight. But it is with this episode that the base level of good Seinfeld is established; the only thing missing is that the theme isn’t connecting nearly as many scenes as it will, keeping the energy a bit low even as the pacing has significantly picked up. But this is a fun, solid episode!
In Seinfeld, if platonic relationships are a lawless Wild West in which chaos reigns and there’s no language for getting what you want, romantic relationships are suffocated by rules, regulations, and rituals. Fundamentally, what Jerry and George (and to an extent Elaine) want is to never be upset and for nobody to be upset at them; a line that’s always stuck with me from Breaking Bad is “There must be some combination of words that can explain all of this”, and Jerry and George are constantly looking for that right combination of words to unlock the outcome they want. You may also be familiar with a bon mot about so-called Nice Guys: ‘women are not vending machines where you put friendship tokens in and sex comes out’; these ‘friendship tokens’ are the logic the Seinfeld characters operate under for everything.
You can see this in George’s whining over trying to break up with Marlene. Surely there must be some combination of time and place and way of wording it (“I started with the word ‘listen’.”) where she’ll take the news and not make an uncomfortable scene! You can also see the inverse in Elaine’s little plot, where she is deeply offended by a guy not playing out a little social ritual. By her own account, she barely knows this guy and seems to have no personal investment in him, but by god will she get her little nod out of him. Jerry, in turn, is worried that he’s done wrong by George by hooking up with his ex-girlfriend immediately after, something that offends George significantly less than betraying his principles over the chiropractor.
Sometimes I’m laughing at these characters, but often I’m laughing with them. We’ve already had discussion about the ‘relatability’ of the Seinfeld gang, and I think it’s that we recognise both the power and emptiness of the social contract. Whether you personally believe the right way to be broken up with is after a date, in your kitchen, starting with the word ‘listen’ is meaningless when you’re trying to do it with someone else and trying not to get them mad. And come on, however mature or emotionally resilient you are, it’s not really nice to have people be mad at you, is it?
TOPICS O’ THE WEEK
- Jerry’s standup is pretty funny this week (“This is the secret lane, no one knows about it.”). Personally, I’m overjoyed that waiting rooms aren’t the nightmare they were pre-smartphone. There was a chunk of my adult life where I had no access to smartphones and waiting rooms were a nightmare at that time.
- One bit where Jerry becomes hard to relate to is when he remarks that he doesn’t understand rereading books. I actually had a conversation with my cousin about this recently; when I was younger I had such a shoddy memory that rereading and rewatching things yearly was a way of keeping them in my head. Now I’m older and developed my memory so that’s become less necessary. Conversely, my cousin never understood rereading and rewatching until now, when he knows what he likes and wants to escape into. Though I will acknowledge Jerry is correct when he observes most people seem to keep books like trophies.
- My two favourite bits of blocking this episode are Kramer trying to feed Jerry cantaloupe and George’s energetic description of his breakup with Marlene.
- One thing I like about this show is that Jerry’s standup career does actually factor into the plot a lot. In this case, it causes his breakup with Marlene.
Biggest Laugh:
Next week: “The Pony Remark”