George must compete for an apartment with a man who was on the Andrea Doria when it sank. Jerry helps Newman with his mail route to help him get a cushy job in Hawaii. Elaine dates a bad breaker-upper. Kramer has a bad cough he tries curing with a veterinarian.
Written by: Spike Feresten
Directed by: Andy Ackerman
The fascinating thing about Newman is how he expands the personality of the show very very slightly. You may be familiar with the writer/director David Mamet, who had a principle he held his actors to across all mediums: invent nothing, deny nothing. That is to say, you neither make up emotions nor hide your actual emotional reaction. I think, in a roundabout way, you can describe this as the Seinfeld writing ethos – they put down the most immediately funny idea that comes to mind, and they follow that up with the funniest idea that comes to mind next, and so on and so on until the episode ends. By contrast, you can look to The Simpsons, which really beat the crap out of ideas until they were both funny and elegant. The most Seinfeld ever does this is in Jerry Seinfeld (comedian) editing the crap out of individual pieces of dialogue to make them as funny as possible, but the actual action and plotting is much more instinctive. Like, you can see this with jokes like Jerry feeding Kramer pills like a dog, which is something most sitcoms would do because the thought of them wrestling like that is immediately funny.
Newman is a little different in that his ambitions are titanic. Even the way he speaks is a little more fancy and elaborate than most Seinfeld characters. He reminds me of Philip K Dick’s description of the thought process of a Nazi in The Man In The High Castle – identifying with the cosmic dust that makes up the universe as opposed to flesh-and-blood human beings, seeing the concept of Honour and not honourable men. You can directly compare him with George – George has the same impulses we all get from time-to-time and, unlike us, chooses to act upon them. Newman isn’t just doing the wrong thing, he’s pulling his action from another universe. And of course, that reveals the limitations of his writers; their imagination is relatively limited, so Newman’s thought process is simultaneously bizarre and banal. Which, luckily, is funny as hell.
TOPICS O’ THE WEEK
- “Is it better than mine?” / “Oh yeah.” / “So it’s a two bedroom, one bath, make your friends hate you?”
- “You ate more bread?” / “That’s not the point!”
- “Yeah, too bad he didn’t get shot, he could have been the one.”
- “They botched my vasectomy!” / “They botched it?!” / “I’m even more potent now!”
- George’s outrage at how small the tragedy of the Andrea Doria was is so funny. “That’s no tragedy!” I feel like that does hit a basic feeling people can have when tragedy interferes with their personal convenience – what Mel Brooks described with “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall in an open manhole and die.”
- “You know when you break up with someone, you say mean things you don’t mean? He means them.” / “I follow.”
- “So, if I may jump ahead: you wanna take dog medicine?” This is a very Jason Alexander take on the kind of line they usually give to Jerry, and it shows the differences in their acting styles. Jerry would say it with utter glee that he gets to, whilst George is sincerely curious, confused, and even alarmed.
- “Well, all vacations must come to an end.”
- “It eased into the water like an old man into a nice warm bath, no offence.”
- Another absolutely incredible moment of seeing George react to a good idea when Jerry observes he should sell his own life as a tragedy.
- “Blast! There’s no way I can handle eight in addition to my usual load of ‘one’!” It occurs to me how much Newman reminds me of the Dog from Foottrot Flats in his elaborate, even Biblical language.
- “You’re giving up that easily?” / “I usually do.”
- “My home! Where I come to play with my toys.” That’s another Godfather reference.
- Great moments in blocking: Kramer nearly coughing in Elaine’s face and she ducks around him.
- “Now George, why do you want to know about your childhood?” / “Actually I think I’m pretty clear on it.”
- “What happened?” / “Kramer bit me.”
- George’s description of his life to the board is a classic example of what I call a Tastes Like Piss monologue. I took this from a scene in The Shield, in which the character Jon Kavanaugh lays out the things protagonist Vic Mackey has done in the last twenty-four hours, awed and horrified that nobody sees how absurd it is, and I like to describe this kind of gag with that; where a character simply lays out the bare facts of what we’ve already seen so rapidly as to make you realise how weird it’s all been. This scene from LOST is another classic in the genre (“… Well, I was never really clear on that!”), and of course The Shield has a much more serious one at the end of its penultimate episode. But it is another really easy way to get a laugh out of a long-running story.
- “Simply the story of my life as a short, stocky, dimwitted, bald man.”
- “Oh, and also: my fiancee died from licking toxic envelopes that I picked out.”
- “They knew it wasn’t me. Too many people got their mail!”
- “Please help! There’s a crazy big-headed woman beating up some guy!”
Biggest Laugh:
Next Week: “The Little Jerry”