Jerry meets a man who asks him to meet his son, who lives in a plastic bubble. On the way to visit him, Jerry ends up lost, leaving George and Susan alone with the boy. Meanwhile, Kramer takes Jerry’s ex-girlfriend to Susan’s father’s cabin and accidentally burns it down.
Written by: Larry David & Larry Charles
Directed by: Tom Cherones
There’s always so much going on in any given Seinfeld episode, and to my great pleasure, this feels like six normal sitcom episodes worth of plot stuffed into twenty minutes. This actually opens with Jerry breaking up with a woman in record time, getting barely two minutes into things before a phone call from George ruins everything. The stuff with the Bubble Boy isn’t even so much the most interesting comedic stuff as it is what everything else is structured around.
It’s a great comedic move to have the immunocompromised boy be such a prick, too. If he were nice, it would just be sad, but there’s no room for real sympathy in Seinfeld (such a great statement of intent to have Jerry react to a crying father by wiping his mouth). The initial sympathy seems to be what causes George to stick around when he doesn’t need to, but it almost immediately becomes a game of oneupmanship – I love that George maintains ‘moops’ all the way through getting choked.
Meanwhile, this episode also dives into Jerry’s in-story fame. It fascinates me that Seinfeld was directly responsible for a wave of sitcoms starring standups, and yet it’s one of the only ones to actually be about a standup comedian, and I love that it figures into the plot a fair number of times. One thing that fascinates me about the real Seinfeld is that he seems fairly pragmatic about the reaction his work gets; he isn’t particularly concerned with being overly clever or long-lasting, so long as it makes the audience in front of him laugh (which I imagine is why his actual standup strikes us as quite bland).
Jerry in this episode, on the other hand, finds himself neurotically focused on fixing a joke that apparently succeeded quite well at making his audience laugh, with the autograph he leaves, which is very funny to me. Seinfeld has varied success out of Seinfeld or his standup career, with Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee doing quite well (I haven’t seen it) but Bee Movie (haven’t seen) and Unfrosted (saw it, thought it was dumb) have mostly been critically savaged, mainly because of how weird yet bland they were. I wonder how much of that comes down to him wanting to get those three good things right (and also CICGC being fairly casual anyway), with the pedantry he puts into his character here.
TOPICS O’ THE WEEK
- Everything Jerry says about answering machines in his opening act here ends up translating really well to social media in the modern age (“It’s very important that we are popular and well-liked amongst large groups of people that we don’t care for.”).
- One of the funny things about this show is that it focuses so hard on getting the language right and the jokes funny that it can throw a joke that deliberately does not work (Jerry’s fishmongers observation) and it’s still pretty funny.
- It’s funny how much Seinfeld depends on its structure. There are so many little moments hooked together here, with that great moment of Jerry mentioning George getting from one place to another in 25 minutes, and then George claiming it was fifteen.
- Susan is weirdly into PDA here.
- Rare moment of Kramer not answering a phone, but waiting for it.
Biggest Laugh: Always a fan of characters being dicks to each other for little-to-no reason. It’s even better when she ends up enjoying it later (speaking of moments that pay off later).
Next week: “The Cheever Letters”.