George buys Elaine a big salad, only for his girlfriend to unintentionally take credit for it, setting off his neurosis. Elaine buys a pen for her new boss and the guy calls her repeatedly – or rather, calls Jerry. Kramer thinks he drove a friend to murder someone due to arguing over golf rules. Jerry contemplates the embarrassing nature of dating in his late thirties, then becomes horrified to discover his girlfriend dated Newman.

Written by: Larry David
Directed by: Andy Ackerman

George’s preoccupation with losing the credit for buying a friend a big salad might be one of the purest Larry David plots. This is something I may have said before, but I delight in how David’s plots are very easy to recognise and very difficult to replicate; it’s such a ludicrously simple thing that only an already-deranged mind can come up with. Larry David only ever found any real success in his forties with Seinfeld, and all stories before then make him sound like a tempestuous loon. It’s a fascinating, even inspiring thing; it’s almost like those first forty years were just him collecting stories that he could then use in Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. You try and come up with something simple and stupid for a character to overreact to, you’ll struggle to come up with something as elegant and funny as “his girlfriend took credit for buying a big salad”. I often look at slightly crazy older people now, wondering what Seinfeld-like work has been hiding under them. I have a friend who works in theater, and sadly, he reports most older people who’ve never written a work generally make stuff about how annoying young people are now.

It’s really interesting when you compare it to the Kramer, where I strongly suspect the creative impulse was “what would be the funniest consequence of something I do?”. It’s extraordinarily simple; what if a golf argument led a guy to murder someone? With Kramer in particular, the comedy is mainly in his quirky way of reacting; his thought process, his guilt, and his ultimate conclusion. Jerry’s reaction to Newman having dated his current girlfriend is similar; on a conceptual level, it’s not that she’s dated other men, it’s that she dated Newman specifically. In that, it’s almost the mystery of why someone would date Newman at all, and the bizarreness of the rules of Seinfeld being turned upside down. There’s an amusing note of Jerry egging on George’s neurotic thinking because it seems to amuse him; I can easily picture Seinfeld (comedian) being like that over writing a banal supervillain and his own persona fighting it.

TOPICS O’ THE WEEK

• Jerry’s pondering over dating being embarrassing feels more like him playing with a thought than anything else; it’s very reminiscent of Seinfeld‘s descendent Always Sunny.
• Obviously, the whole Gundason plot is a parody of the OJ Simpsons chase.
• Great moments in blocking: Kramer demonstrating how he argued with Gundason. George’s gesturing when pretending to be dismissive. Jerry is ltieraslly thrown out of the car by his girlfriend at the end.
• Kramer’s shocked reaction when he realises Gundason may have killed a man has become a meme; I mostly associate it with the “when I’m entering a [whatever] competition and my opponent walks in” format. “I need a really pretty face,” is also a popular format.
• “Perhaps there’s more to Newman than meets the eye.” / “No. There’s less.”
• Alexander’s gleeful, almost supervillainesque delivery of his explanation of explaining the big salad situation to Elaine is incredible, including the elaborate ‘haha’s he ends with.
• Elaine’s acceptance of a date with the annoying guy has to be the funniest pity date in television.
• “All I could think of when looking at her face was ‘Newman found this unacceptable’!”

Biggest Laugh: This joke is great in so many ways. The offhand writing and delivery; staging it so that Elaine is offscreen when she speaks; Jerry’s exasperated self-interruption, a very Simpsons gag.

Next Week: “The Pledge Drive”.