Susan gets annoyed when George won’t tell her his ATM code. J Peterman invites Elaine out to dinner; she invites Jerry and George, only to ditch them because she becomes obsessed with an unpleasant man who never remembers her. Jerry books a commercial with a local business, only to accidentally offend the owner. Kramer becomes preoccupied with the local firefighter routes.
Written by: Alec Berg & Jeff Schaffer
Directed by: Andy Ackerman
Seinfeld is a show about the worst case scenario happening. I feel like the essential scene of this whole farce – well-orchestrated, even by Seinfeld standards – is the one of Jerry giving George an absurd hypothetical situation in which he would have to give up his code. This is a thing people do; the most common one to my knowledge is white Americans looking for a reason to justify saying the N word under the most absurdly specific scenarios, but I tend to find that anytime someone puts a rule of any kind before a group, someone somewhere will try and talk their way around it on general principle. The beauty of Seinfeld is that it genuinely constructs these kind of absurd hypotheticals as a matter of course; not often with the intentionality of this particular plot, built to get George to the absolute most humiliating reason to reveal his secret code to someone, but that is what essentially drives the plotting.
Meanwhile, Elaine’s plot is incredible; it’s been a while since we’ve had the focus of a Seinfeld Weirdo so central to the episode. One thing I like about film and television written by an auteur is that actors then often find their own way of delivering dialogue written basically the same as any other character – for example, on the From Dusk Till Dawn commentary, Robert Rodriguez notes that most actors deliver Tarantino dialogue as fast as possible, whereas Michael Parks delivers it incredibly slowly, with huge gaps. With this, we have Fred Stoller as Fred; Seinfeld writing is snappy and bouncy, and he manages to deliver it at the steady, monotonous pace of a funeral dirge (while still being very watchable).
And obviously, it’s incredibly funny that Elaine is drawn to him out of sheer outrage. There’s two moral principles that drive the main quartet, both of which play out in this episode: do not cause conflict (which is mainly what drives Jerry, trying to avoid offending his new, uh, client) and treat the person in front of you like they’re the most important person in the entire world. George plays that out as he can’t talk his way out of following J Peterman all night, even to his mother’s deathbed; Elaine plays that out the other way, where she’s astounded that someone might forget who she is – as if she’s an unforgettable, unshakeably charming person. It’s incredibly funny to me that the characters aren’t really hypocrites – they do treat others how they’d prefer to be treated. Of course, the world doesn’t always work like that.
TOPICS O’ THE WEEK
- “George, you’re gonna marry this woman! Most likely.”
- “My leg fell asleep.” / “You’re lucky, at least you got something to do.” Fred’s unrelenting bleakness is so funny to me.
- Julia Louis-Dreyfus pulls an all-time expression when she describes Peterman’s stories.
- “Amazing thing is you never have any place to go.”
- The image of Jerry fistpumping as he watches sports is an iconic image used for reaction gifs.
- I love that we don’t even have to see George drop his excuse. The basic element of craft is knowing what to make up, but the true artists, I often find, know exactly what to leave out.
- Fred Stoller also wrote “The Soup” and “The Face Painter”. He wrote an ebook about his experiences called My Seinfeld Year.
Biggest Laugh:
Next Week: “The Pool Guy”