George picks up Jerry at the airport, and on a whim decides to pretend to be O’Brian to get a free limo ride – only for O’Brian to turn out to be a Neo-Nazi leader.

Teleplay by: Larry Charles
Story by: Marc Jaffe
Directed by: Tom Cherones

This is my all-time favourite example of Seinfeld‘s take on edgy comedy, and a perfect example of why I think the show’s overall attitude works and why it’s aged like fine wine: it’s just trying to be funny. We are in an age of intense analysis of edgy comedy, where people argue both for and against the value of offensive comedy – an age that I suspect is an eternal aspect of the human condition, considering it’s been going on in one form or another over the course of my own short life – and one argument that comes up on the ‘against’ side is that many ‘offensive’ comedians are really intentionally being provocative, like a child acting out for attention.

You may be familiar with the term ‘clapter’, an accusation often thrown against the late eras of both the Jon Stewart version of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; essentially, that the shows were less about making jokes and more about telling the audience what they wanted to hear, provoking applause rather than laughter. A lot of offensive comedians run under the same principle; saying naughty things out loud hoping to provoke anger out of people they don’t like as opposed to genuine laughter.

Seinfeld doesn’t operate under this principle, and this is a clear byproduct of the leadership of both Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David (it’s interesting how they contrast over this too – Seinfeld talks about making people laugh with the sincerity and philosophy of a preacher or Marxist-Leninist, while David has a more workmanlike approach of just jamming funny things together). Note how there’s no serious moment in this episode – no moment of reflection on how Nazis are evil, no genuine moment of fear (even when guns are pulled).

This is just a series of escalating absurdities, no different in structure to Jerry and George getting increasingly uncomfortable having a drink with Elaine’s father – it’s just a different topic filtered in the mix. Seinfeld has no interest in telling you that you’re smarter than Neo-Nazis or in trying to tell you there are stupid people in the world; in fact, the joke isn’t really about Nazis at all, it’s about the absurd behaviours George and Jerry are acting out. It’s about George’s absurd attempts to hold up a lie, and Jerry’s inability to take any situation 100% seriously, and the Nazis are more a window-dressing that makes that even more absurd.

It’s what makes this show so accessible across cultures and times – it’s very hard to come away from a Seinfeld episode feeling like it’s made fun of you, personally, the way a queer person can come away from a lot of old comedy feeling like the butt of a joke. Behaviours are universal and very easy/fun to joke about. There is room in this world for ideologically-driven humour, but by its own nature it’ll tend to come and go in terms of relevance in a way that Seinfeld never will.

TOPICS O’ THE WEEK

• Unlike Seinfeld, I want to clarify that I think Nazis are evil.
• I’m preoccupied by Jerry’s opening standup about the idea that shop owners in airports are completely disconnected from the rest of the world. It’s tempting to see him as projecting a lot there, given his frequent out-of-touch comments, but it is a very funny articulation of his recurring theme of liminal spaces.
• Jason Alexander’s delivery of “Okay” in response to Jerry being “Dylan” is very Larry David.
• This technically contains our first appearance of Estelle Costanza.
• We have two separate examples of Seinfeld characters indulging in a famous Seinfeldism of getting stuck on a word – Jerry and George getting stuck on the word ‘jig’, and Jerry later getting stuck on the word ‘Murphy’.
• Elaine and Kramer are stuck awkwardly on the outside of this plot, but Kramer is a character who, like Homer Simpson and Bender, flowers on the edges; we have both him completely misinterpreting what’s happening to Jerry and George (not even being accidentally right) and him flipping with full force over those trash cans.
• What do you suppose the ethics are of sending a black female reporter to cover a Neo-Nazi rally?
• George swapping seats in the limo to talk to one of the Nazis is a clever bit of blocking to shift the visuals up a little.

Biggest Laugh: It’s amazing how well-structured this sentence is to be as funny as possible. It’s also a perfect example of this show making plot turns inherently funny.

Next week: “The Good Samaritan”