Jerry and Elaine rekindle their sexual relationship, only for arguments and misunderstandings to ensue.

Written by: Larry David
Directed by: Tom Cherones

This one tends to pop up a lot in people’s least favourite Seinfeld episodes. Historically, a lot of my preferences in media tend to be idiosyncratic, but I’m with everyone else on this – I don’t think it’s an unwatchable episode, but it does get genuinely cringeworthy at points. Larry David famously described the show’s ethos as ‘no hugging, no learning’, and this episode feels dangerously close to breaching that, at least with Jerry and Elaine realising they’re mostly better off as friends. It’s not that it’s not funny or even inherently out of lockstep with the show’s goals – I’ll get to this – but the humour itself starts becoming too cutesy. Someone once said that the genius of Seinfeld was that it was obscene without being profane and profane without being obscene, and those moments somehow manage to be neither. “This, that, and the other” sounds like something my salt-of-the-earth grandmother would have said.

That said, there is a lot to like here. The basic idea of two characters trying to have friends with benefits is ripe for the kind of humour Seinfeld dives into; for my money, the funniest setpiece is Jerry breaking the news to George, because we get so many great faces and lines out of it (this is the funniest context for Jerry’s inherent smugness). Now, I know that thousands and possibly millions of people manage to have sex every day without giving it a second thought or imploding their relationships over it; many a bad sitcom episode has come from writers who seem to be trying to convince me that things I have personally witnessed are totally impossible.

Seinfeld is just trying to be funny and it has no pretentions about even understanding other people, let alone explaining them to the viewer. I can take it as a kind of confession – when George lays down the law, that’s just him explaining how he sees things. It’s an exploration of a particular form of neuroticism, and I can recognise that neuroticism in both myself and others. What we have here is two people trying to control human nature through a clear system of rules and finding out, just like every neurotic and social engineer and ideologue before them, it doesn’t work. Human emotion simply cannot be contained or quantified by a set of predictable rules. Of course, that’s the basis of Seinfeld. It’s just normally a bit funnier at expressing that.

TOPICS O’ THE WEEK

• Jerry’s outfit in the opening standup might just be his ugliest yet.
• Here we have it: the one and only unironic use of the phrase “What’s the deal with” that the show ever did. And it wasn’t even Jerry saying it – it was George!
• Speaking of George, him being won over by the first rule only to turn on the next (“You got greedy!”) turns the scene into a real journey, which is very funny to me. Much like Homer Simpson or Bender, pushing him out of the plot only serves to make him funnier.
• We finally meet Elaine’s roommate Tina! Siobhan Fallon perfectly sells the character and how she would immediately be one of the most grating people you ever met.
• We get some early examples of the show playing with structure; Kramer unintentionally calling back to Elaine’s comment about the avuncular nature of giving money as a present and George giving her exactly half of what Jerry gave her are both basic farce but very funny.
• At one point, George contemplates being in prison. It’s a shame this idea was never followed up on.

Biggest Laugh: George’s spectacular reaction to the bombshell is great, but for some reason it’s “I thought you’d like that,” which gets me.

Next Week: “The Baby Shower”.