George turns down his date’s offer of coffee late at night, and, realising his mistake, tries calling her until he loses his temper and leaves an angry message on her answering machine. Embarrassed, he tries to retrieve it with the help of Jerry. Meanwhile, Jerry’s date likes a commercial he dislikes, ruining his relationship with her.
Written by: Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David
Directed by: Tom Cherones
George is one of the greatest comedy characters ever written, and “the Phone Message” feels like the first full flowering of that. This is where his sweaty, desperate need to control everything around him at all times and the chaos he can wreak with that really emerges. I like the fictionalised Larry we see in Curb Your Enthusiasm as well, but as has been pointed out to me, there is a major difference between that Larry and George: the former is living totally comfortably and his farces are inconveniences that will embarrass but not ruin him, whereas George really is living desperately from one day to another. Larry’s theories come from a place of privilege; George’s theories, in his mind, are his way of scrabbling to the top – or at least the only way to keep his head above water, sexually as well as financially – and the reason he’s funny isn’t even necessarily that he’s wrong (though he usually is) but that he can so drastically escalate a situation by overthinking it and then coming to a black-and-white conclusion.
In George’s mind, he has to come up with the perfect solution to everything that ever happens to him – the one fix that will solve everything. I’m particularly struck by his first phone call to Carol, where he feels like he’s said the wrong thing and tries to fix it until he’s babbling like an idiot. This is something I’ve both done and witnessed many times – where you desperately hope this is the combination of words that’ll make them like you again. It’s an attitude that flows out into George’s actions for the rest of the episode; he’ll do anything possible to avoid looking like a fool and then causes it to happen with the very actions he took to prevent that.
Meanwhile, we have a (somewhat famous) subplot of Jerry ruining his relationship with Donna over a commercial. I was surprised at how even-handed that subplot was – I’d forgotten that he didn’t break up with her because of it, she broke up with him because of the way he spoke about her. One of the recurring themes of Seinfeld – best exemplified by the A-plot – is how little control a person actually has over other people, and the situation here is so specific as to be impossible to ‘learn from’ – Jerry was kind of a dick about it, but Donna struck me as especially sensitive about his criticism, so I see no neat way of resolving this absurd situation.
TOPICS O’ THE WEEK
- Jerry’s opening standup bit on television feels like an ‘explanation’ for why they do the show: there are too many happy, emotionally balanced people on television. Having neurotic weirdos will make us all feel better about our lives. I’m also amused about his complaint that you can’t slam a cordless phone matches up with what older people say about mobile phones of today.
- You can tell this is still early Seinfeld in how neither Elaine nor Kramer have real plots. The former has a bit of the stereotypical ‘woman reacting to the absurdity rather than driving it’ going on and the latter shows up for one scene to suggest standup to Jerry.
- Jerry’s career pops up as a gag again.
Biggest laugh:
