Elaine discovers an ex-boyfriend is having surgery done and asks Jerry to pretend to be her boyfriend to stave off advances. Kramer watches the surgery be performed and accidentally drops a mint in the man’s open body. George buys his art and then hopes he dies to see its value jump up. Jerry starts dating a woman but never learns her name.

Written by: Andy Robin
Directed by: Tom Cherones

I remarked that the previous episode we looked at was a case of the show firing on all cylinders. This week, I’m struck by just how reliable the show is even when inspiration isn’t striking. I’m always struck by how dense this show is with ideas, something I suspect comes from its total commitment to one goal with no digressions: being funny. Jerry not learning his new girlfriend’s name, Elaine asking him to pretend to be her boyfriend, Kramer stealing hospital supplies; a lesser sitcom would have an entire episode taken up by one, maybe two of these plots, but Seinfeld only cares about the funniest parts. If there are only three possible funny scenes from a concept then well, that’s all the scenes we get, so we need quite a few concepts in order to fill out an episode.

I think this density ends up serving to make the really big moments – like Kramer dropping a mint in a surgery patient – even more absurd, because it’s the apotheosis of a series of absurd (yet weirdly logical) events. We start with Kramer annoyed with fairly standard gloves and choosing to steal them from a hospital and somehow that ends with him saving a guy from infection by dropping a Junior Mint in him. There’s often a sense of the writers feeding off themselves, seeing ways of bringing together different ideas; these connections are fun to watch.

We do have some really inspired choices too. Not learning your date’s name and having to fumble through it is fairly banal; having your only clue being that it rhymes with a part of the female anatomy is a deranged, inspired choice. I also enjoy George trying to kill Roy the artist off in order to inflate the price of his art – it’s probably a bit too extreme, but I’m always here for George trying to rationalise his actions, and he otherwise takes a bit of a backseat in this episode.

TOPICS O’ THE WEEK

• “You make money without doing anything!” / “You know, I have some friends who base their whole lives on that.”
• There’s some good staging when Jerry watches Elaine talk to Roy with him placed inbetween them, reacting to the conversation.
• All this time, I remembered “You’re crying from Home Alone?” as being from the episode where Jerry cries a lot, but no – it’s a random scene from this episode. I enjoy George’s belief that watching a movie alone in someone else’s house is more of an activity than watching it in his own house.
• “Let’s go watch them slice this fat bastard up.”
• Last week, I described a really good scene where the writers managed to skip a lot of story by having Sidra tell a friend how Jerry broke up with her in front of Elaine, allowing them both more absurdity and advancing the plot. This week we have a scene of what they avoided in that – there’s a scene of Jerry telling George what we just saw in the hospital, which is fairly funny but doesn’t advance the story.
• Elaine drops a reference to Prognosis: Negative, the fictional movie within the Seinfeld universe.
• When Mulva/Gipple/Dolores is massaging Jerry’s shoulders, you can see he’s clearly been working on his act.
• “I really think I’m falling for you… Joseph Puglia.”
• The famous final line was actually suggested by an audience member. The producers ran a small game in which the studio audience guessed what Mulva’s name actually was, and they found ‘Dolores’ so funny that they threw it in at the end. Though who actually pronounces ‘clitoris’ that way?

Biggest Laugh:

Next Week: “The Smelly Car”