Seinfeld was created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David and stars Jerry Seinfeld as “himself,” with no character so directly analogous to David’s real-life self. How then is the presence of the co-creator to be perceived within the show? We first hear Larry David as Jerry’s neighbor Newman in “The Revenge.” This episode is interesting for a variety of reasons: it is the first episode not to be bookended by Jerry’s monologue (it has stand-up neither at the beginning nor the end of the episode); it is the first episode to include Newman, the show’s most-frequently appearing secondary character, which provides us with the first time that David appears as an uncredited voice (Wayne Knight, the actor who would play Newman, revoiced the line for syndication); it is the first episode David wrote without Seinfeld (which is how he would ultimately write the some of the show’s best episodes); and, most importantly, it’s principle storyline—George quitting his job, returning to work as though he didn’t, and then scheming revenge against his boss—is directly based in David’s experience (he famously quit Saturday Night Live, realized his mistake, and similarly returned. Although he did not attempt to “slip [Lorne Michaels] a mickey,” it could be said that creating this very episode follows Jerry’s hokey and ironically invoked advice, that “the best revenge is living well.”).
The very next episode, “The Heart Attack,” David appears on TV in a B movie wearing a shiny metal suit and goggles, screaming something that Jerry finds hilarious, leading him to write it down on a piece of paper, which he can’t read the next day, bothering him for the rest of the episode up until its end when he sees the same clip again, and realizes what it was that he wrote down and that it was not that funny. This may seem like nothing, but, like the best jokes in the show, it is also a bizarre reproduction of the essence of the show, which is itself nothing and a bizarre reproduction of itself: one of the seminal moments for the show’s conception was a birthday party attended by both creators. David, too cheap or broke, or both, wrote his friend material for her birthday present. At this point in her birth-celebrated revelry reading jokes scrawled on a piece of paper to her guests was not going to happen, so the task fell upon the notoriously even-keeled Jerry who busted everybody up with his performance of David’s birthday present. To dramaticize this with David cast as a mad scientist in the B movie on in the middle of the night and Jerry in that moment thinking it’s comic genius, and later realizing it’s not funny at all is a twisted parody of this motif; and it is just the beginning of David’s interactions with the characters that his narrative mayhem puts into motion.
In “The Alternate Side” the character David voices plays a less subtle role in the episode: he is not separate from Jerry’s universe bound on the other side of a TV, he is on this side, and he steals Jerry’s car. This is the 28th episode and arguably the best to appear up to that point in the series for the very reason that it so utterly subverts the idea that David is outside of the show. And, of course, it is George, who has already proven as the loosely autobiographical character, who gives us access to the fact that David plays the car thief—when Jerry learns the car is stolen he picks up the phone to cancel his car phone, but George stops him and urges him instead to call the car phone:
Jerry: “Hello? Is this 555-8383?”
“I have no idea.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Did you steal my car?”
“Yes, I did.
”
“You did?!”
“I did.”
“That's my car!”
“I didn't know it was yours.
”
“What are you gonna do with it?”
“I dunno. Drive around.”
“Then can I have it back?”
“Mmmm, nah, I'm gonna keep it.”
Kramer then beckons for the phone and continues this surreal interchange:
“Hello?”
“Yeah, who's this?”
“Kramer.”
“Hello, Kramer.”
“Listen, there's a pair of gloves in the glove compartment.”
“Wait, hold on... Brown ones?”
“Yeah. Listen, could you mail those to me? Or bring them by my building, it's 129 West 81st Street.”
“1-2-9, okay.”
“Thanks a lot. Here's Jerry.”
Jerry, again: “Hello?”
“Jerry?”
“Yeah, let me ask you a question. How do you cross those wires?”
“I didn't cross any wires, the keys were in it.”
“Sid left the keys in the car. Alright, I gotta go. Drive carefully.”
“Jerry, when's the last time you had a tune-up? Because I can't find
the—”
It is revealed that Sid, the fellow that moves the neighborhood’s cars from one side of the street to the other to avoid parking tickets, due to his advancing age, left Jerry’s keys in the car. From this unfolds the episode’s first complication, and from this mirrors the ensuing complications: Sid first inadvertently gave Jerry’s keys to an ill-intentioned, bald, bespectacled car-thief; next he intentionally gives the keys to Jerry’s rental car, and those to entire block’s cars, to a well-intentioned, bald, bespectacled unemployed man because he has to leave town for a week, and, of course, George crashes Jerry’s rental into an ambulance that delays the treatment of an old man’s stroke and jeopardizes Woody Allen’s future filming in New York. In both cases Jerry has compromised control over his tidy world, symbolized by the keys to his car, to versions of Larry David, and from here progresses the plot of the show. Without these assaults on his control we would have nothing—if George doesn’t crash the car we would just have Jerry’s smart-aleck remarks to the woman at the rental agency, and if the car wasn’t stolen in the first place Jerry would never leave the apartment.
It is not clear to what the episode’s title—“The Alternate Side”—refers. It could be simply that the cars are moved to the “alternate side” of the street, though “other side” is the phrase used; it could refer to the “alternate side” of a story, the perspective of the people who caused the uproar that bothered Woody Allen—those whose dreams lie in a single line in the movie—as opposed to that of Allen; the show also discusses the idea of “crossing the wires” in order to steal a car, as opposed to simply hot-wiring, but that didn’t turn out to be the case; or it could be the alternation between Seinfeld’s “nothing”—conversational banter critiquing the institutions of everyday life—and David’s “nothing”—the frustrations of Kramer and George in their inability to perform what are essentially nothing tasks, one line in a movie, moving cars from one side of the street to the other. The reality of the show’s production is “The Alternate Side” and this episode marks its entrance into the fabric of the show: the unveiling of its workings, the negation of its assertions, the documenting of its fiction, and the fictionalizing of its document. Kramer ultimately does get his gloves returned by the car thief because, unlike Jerry, he passes back and forth between this side and its alternate: he is both Cosmo Kramer, Jerry’s fictional neighbor and Kenny Kramer, David’s real-life neighbor; whereas Jerry is trapped in the sit com, forever subject to the car thefts conceived by the disembodied voice of Larry David and, his implied co-conspirator, Jerry Seinfeld who we can picture in the passenger seat of the stolen car with an even smugger smile than we see in the show, urging his pal to answer the phone and, as he chats with the perturbed owner, repressing his laughter.
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