George’s girlfriend draws a funny doodle of him, causing him to become concerned she’s not attracted to him. Jerry gets fleas in his apartment; his parents are forced to use Elaine’s free weekend at a hotel, Elaine loses a manuscript she needs to read to get a new job, and Jerry is forced to confront his fastidiousness at his new girlfriend’s place. Kramer gets a shipment of quality peaches, only to lose his sense of taste due to the fumigation in Jerry’s apartment.

Written by: Alec Berg & Jeff Schaffer
Directed by: Andy Ackerman

One of the things that makes Seinfeld great is the sheer range of kinds of comedy it works in, especially at this point in the show. The basic element of the show’s comedy is farce; this is what it mastered first, and forms the backbone of this episode, but the farce itself has become escalated to absurdity – notice how many plots branch off in consequence from Jerry having fleas – and the beats themselves are all sorts of comedy. Jerry’s plot is so banal as to be beneath notice; George’s story delves into his peculiar neuroticism; Elaine’s is desperate farce; Kramer and Newman are larger-than-life figures, particularly Newman.

Jerry’s plot in particular fascinates me because it’s a classic example of a Seinfeld weirdo assertively forcing a behaviour on one of the main characters – kind of the flipside to “The Pie” while hitting the same idea – with no explanation, nor one asked for, except this time it’s underplayed, playing out in one or two scenes. The main emphasis here is on Jerry’s discomfort at pushing himself into something he doesn’t want to do to make somebody else comfortable; an essential basic theme of Seinfeld.

Come to think of it, George’s plot also feels like an underplayed version of a familiar plot – we’ve seen him get neurotic over how he’s perceived a million times. The crucial element here for me is the scene where he switches gears after giving his girlfriend his usual persistence and discovered she really doesn’t care what he looks like; you can see the gears turning in his head the moment he realises he can take advantage of this (off, of course, “you could drape yourself in velvet for all I care).

Kramer and, even better, Elaine get the exaggerated plots here. Elaine’s makes me laugh because nobody on this show is better than Julia Louis-Dreyfus at going from zero to a hundred; I don’t ask ‘why doesn’t Elaine just ask the exterminator to find the manuscript’ because there’s no way someone panicking as hard as her would think of it, nor do I ask why Elaine doesn’t just tell her new boss what happened because, well – she does, and it comes out like gibberish.

TOPICS O’ THE WEEK

• George being exasperated with Jerry’s jokes is hilarious. There’s an increasing sense, especially in the last two seasons, of these people getting increasingly impatient with each other, something that will play into my second-favourite George line ever.
• “Well, I’ve done that.” / “Yeah, but with you, it’s intentional.”
• Kramer’s obsession with the peaches is a funny riff on his usual attempts to hustle at all times. The best deal, the most money, the cleverest trick, and the nicest peaches.
• Only this show would have characters descend into literal high school behaviour in exactly one scene.
• “I got my parents in town.” / “Well, unless you wanna kill ‘em, they can’t stay in here.”
• It’s so great to have Jerry’s parents go, off screen, from Puritan concern about being in too nice a place than one deserves to complete indulgence.
• “Could you get me a soda?”
• Jerry confronting Newman is such a great scene – a great actor playing off a bad one. There’s an idea that one improves a performance in an actor by playing them off a good one – John McTiernan discusses using Carl Weathers for this to help Arnold Schwarzenegger in his Predator commentary – and you can kind of see that in most Jerry/Newman scenes.
• “She’s seen you in this thing?” / “That’s right. We just had sex.”

Biggest Laugh:

Next Week: “The Fusilli Jerry”