George dates a woman who tends to skip over parts of a story with the phrase ‘yada yada’. Jerry becomes convinced Tim Whately converted to Judaism purely to make offensive jokes. Elaine accidentally messes up his friend’s chance to adopt a baby. Kramer and Mickey are dating the same two women, but aren’t sure who is dating whom.

Written by: Peter Mehlman and Jill Franklyn
Directed by: Andy Ackerman

Past a certain point, there are very few bad Seinfeld episodes; the process (not formula) that they use to develop an episode is so honed that they can simply generate comedy. So it amazes me that every now and again, they do actually find a premise that pushes the show from Great and into something cosmic – it’s comparable to “Roswell That Ends Well”, where the basic ideas of the show end up pulling something that leaves you in awe as much as laughing – and here we have two separate reasons for it! It speaks to the tone and themes of the show that, in this case, it’s both a piece of language everyone runs away with and an action that’s Technically Not Illegal. We’ll start with the latter first – Tim Whately converting to Judaism just for the jokes. Apparently, this was based on the experience of writer Peter Mehlman, whose friend only worked up the courage to tell Jewish jokes twenty years after converting (and still offended Mehlman until he remembered).

This already starts funny; it’s a fairly basic idea in the Seinfeld universe to have no rule against something that makes everyone uncomfortable. The first pushing of this is when Jerry remarks, quite famously, that Tim’s jokes don’t offend him as a Jewish man, they offend him as a comedian. This is one of the most iconic lines in the show, I find, and it expresses something many of us feel. In fact, it might hit at why Seinfeld has managed to stay so relevant and age so well despite diving into edgy topics; people have an intuitive sense of the motivations of others, and one can usually tell when a joke has been made to put someone down, when it was made to puff the teller up, when it was to lecture the listener, when it was made to sound smart, to sound like what a funny person sounds like, to fit in, and even when it was made purely to make people laugh. Whatever Seinfeld‘s faults, its sole motivation was to make viewers laugh, and that tends to hold up and push it through edgy topics like a fish swimming through razor blades. In this specific case, it’s not so much that Jerry genuinely believes Tim is antisemetic, it’s that the timing is completely off.

And then it pushes further! Jerry being ‘revealed’ as an anti-dentite feels like a logical bit of absurdism in the moment – as in, wouldn’t it be funny if Jerry’s anxieties were turned back on him, using the one other piece of Tim’s identity that we know about? It’s precisely one step out of reality, giving us my biggest Laugh as Jerry reaches full exasperation with the situation. Meanwhile, the ‘yada yada’ plot feels like one of the purest expressions of Seinfeld language; it was already an every-day expression before the show (apparently Lenny Bruce said it a lot, and it can be traced back to “Yakety Sax”), but it officially became a Seinfeldism with this plot. It amuses me that Mehlman thought ‘anti-dentite’ would be the phrase to catch on, given we see the applicability of ‘yada yada’ even within the show – as if it were infecting them and taking over their thought.

TOPICS O’ THE WEEK

• “You’re on a desert island, you can take five books, what do you take?” / “I gotta read five books?!”
• “I gotta get on that internet, I’m late on everything!”
• “Oh god, a baby adds two years to a marriage.”
• “They gave birth to me, and.. yada yada.” / “Yada what?” / “Yada… yada yada.” Imagine George learning about ‘no contact’ and ‘low contact’.
• “Don’t play with that! That’s going in my mouth.”
• “It’s a sense of humour that has sustained us for three thousand years.” / “Five thousand.” / “Five thousand, even better!”
• Jason Alexander keeps his face perfectly still after hearing about the boyfriend’s yadda yadda yadda. It reminds me of what Tony Zhou of Every Frame A Painting said about Looney Tunes characters; how the crew learned it was funnier to hold one expression for a time instead of cycling through them.
• “If he ever gets Polish citizenship, there’ll be no stopping him!”
• “But you yada yada’d over the best part.” / “No, I mentioned the bisque.” Apparently Julia Louis-Dreyfus kept making Seinfeld (comedian) corpse with her delivery here.
• Bryan Cranston absolute sincerity all through the episode is fantastic.
• “You know, we have the highest suicide rate of any profession?” / “Is that why it’s so hard to get an appointment?”
• I forgot Jill St Jon and Robert Wagner were in this as Mickey’s parents.

Biggest Laugh:

Next Week: “The Millenium”