George has what he believes to be a heart attack, only to discover he needs his tonsils out. In trying to dodge a medical bill, he sees a holistic healer recommended by Kramer. Meanwhile, Elaine dates George’s doctor and Jerry tries to decipher a joke he wrote half-asleep.
Written by: Larry Charles
Directed by: Tom Cherones
You know we’re entering the great period of this show when an episode becomes difficult to write about because there’s so much going on. This is a really great example of the weirdos of Seinfeld; I’ve said before that what makes them work is that the show makes no effort to explain or understand them, because it’s less interested in explaining anybody than it is in presenting funny behaviour. You can compare it with The Simpsons in its prime, where jokes are based around articulating the very specific worldview of a character – their background, their intelligence, and their personal biases. With Seinfeld, its dedication to specific behaviours means we feel like we’re moving through a very strange world.
Funnily enough, what I’m thinking here is less Steven Tobolowsky’s holistic healer and more the two ambulance drivers who get into a fight. Not only do they show up for less than two minutes of the episode, they’re already arguing when we meet them (one thing that brings The Simpsons and Seinfeld together is both always have the implication there’s always something even more absurd happening offscreen). Their one appearance manages to drastically turn the nature of the story, too! Sometimes these people collide with our lives and then vanish.
But Tobolowsky’s Ekkman is worth a look too. The thing that fascinates me about the humour of Seinfeld is how it isn’t quite mean. Confused, often, but never outraged or dismissive. The joke isn’t that Eckman is stupid, it’s that he’s weird, and there’s no big scene of a character dressing him down for being a quack. One could imagine how this story would play on, say, Community or Scrubs, where we’d get some big Winger speech; both of these shows work this kind of thing naturally into the plot and comedy, but they do put them in, and most shows would be much worse about it. Here, it gets nothing more than an eyeroll from Jerry, and to my eye he makes cracks less because he’s trying to humiliate Eckman and more because it amuses himself.
Not to say that it doesn’t make me think of bigger things. George himself only buys into any of this because he’s too cheap to pay for proper medical care; Eckman himself dismisses mainstream medicine as ‘big business’, implying that the reason people fall for this kind of quackery is at least a little bit because they’re trying to get around both the cost and unethical practices of the American medical industry – forgetting, of course, the crucial part that medicine that works in socialist countries probably works on Americans too. It’s funny to me that George’s escapade ends up costing him far more (both literally and in dignity) than if he’d just gotten surgery in the first place, and I think it’s a good comedic choice to underplay that in a few lines. Anything more and you’d be doing what I’m doing, which to quote Paul McDermott is not funny, but true.
TOPICS O’ THE WEEK
- Jerry’s opening standup made me laugh, because I too enjoy doing whatever the fuck I please as an adult.
- I skipped over the entire runner of Jerry trying to figure out what he wrote half-asleep! I always love how much Jerry’s standup factors into the stories – indeed, he only joins in on the holistic healer because he’s looking for material – and I always find his complaints and problems relatable, even if I’m much less successful. I too have written notes in the middle of the night, only to find them meaningless in the morning. His exasperation when he figures it out is one of Seinfeld’s better acting moments.
- I also skipped over the entire plot of Elaine dating the doctor. This has an early example of one plot splitting off another – from George’s ‘heart attack’ to Elaine meeting him – but not colliding back the other way.
- We almost immediately get another Larry David cameo – this time as the guy in the movie.
- This is our first mention of Kramer’s friend Bob Sacamano. It makes sense that Kramer is big on a herbalist; an extremely common fan observation is that Kramer today would be an anti-vax 9/11 Truther. If you like, Kramer is the American who latches onto this stuff, not out of cheapness or fear, but because he compulsively believes that the obvious answer to any question is obviously incorrect.
- Jerry deliberately aggravating George’s fear before the latter finds out he’s fine and George being smug about getting the plastic neck brace at the end are two classic bits of Seinfeld characterisation.
- There are a number of continuity issues in the scene with the healer. I don’t care about that, but I do find it interesting as a reflection of how this show was much more stitched together than you’d expect from a three camera sitcom.
Biggest Laugh:
Next Week: “The Deal”.