“The Baby Shower”

I would like to argue that “The Baby Shower” is the leading candidate for the essential early Seinfeld episode—not the cleverest, not the funniest, and certainly not the essential episode of the whole of Seinfeld.  But of that era of the series, before Kramer went to L.A. and before Jerry was offered a deal with NBC, “The Baby Shower” represents everything that was at work in an episode of Seinfeld: Jerry, simply trying to further his stand-up career, becomes the center at which converge the problems of his best friend George, his ex-girlfriend Elaine, and his neighbor Kramer, with each situation perfectly indicative of their characters and each situation utterly frustrated by the episode’s end. 

            Kramer is the anti-authoritarian unorthodox pull on Jerry’s uptight tidy world.  The episode dramaticizes this relationship by having Kramer convince Jerry to get an illegal cable installation from a Russian immigrant who “escaped the Gulag.”  Jerry finally agrees once Kramer mentions how many Mets games are on cable in a season, and thus Jerry’s need for baseball compromises his neat approach to the world and allows the potential entrance of anarchy.

            Elaine is the woman who gives the other characters access to a population they otherwise only know through dating.  And the episode provides a microcosm of this: she provides them access to a baby shower, an exaggeratedly feminine congregation, which has to be in Jerry’s apartment because of her roommate, a fact that causes Elaine grief throughout the first three seasons.  She assented to hosting her friend Leslie’s shower because “for some reason [she] can’t say ‘no’ to her.”  The reason turns out to be that Leslie has a connection to the Kennedys, with whom Elaine is infatuated, a theme to be expanded upon in later episodes.   From this we have the title of the episode and the scenario in which its climax occurs. 

            George is the bi-polar loser obsessed with winning from which the show receives its comedic and emotional high points.  George has already been slighted in the context of this episode having had the “unequivocally the worst date of [his] life” with Leslie in which she took him to one of her performances pieces, a fairly self-indulgent gesture which Jerry has been known to commit:

Jerry: “Oh, and she cooks dinner onstage for some celebrity?”

George: “God! She's cooking dinner for God! She's yelling and screaming, and the next thing I know, she throws a big can of chocolate syrup all over my new red shirt.”

Elaine: “It was an accident!”

George: “Oh, yeah, sure, accident, right. She was aiming right at me like she was putting out a fire! Then, for the rest of the show, I'm sitting there with chocolate all over my shirt. Flies are landing on me. I'm boiling—I'm fantasizing all the things I'm gonna say when I see her. And later, finally, backstage when I talk to her, I'm a groveling worm. ‘What kind of chocolate was that? Do you throw any other foods?’”

Jerry, to Elaine: “He thought he still had a shot.”

George: “And then, then, THEN she leaves with somebody else! Never even, never even said goodbye! Never called me back. Never apologized. Nothing. Like I was dirt.” 

 

As Leslie re-enters their lives, because of the baby shower, George sees an opportunity for revenge, an omnipotent theme in the show that has already backfired once against George in “the Revenge” in which he tried to give his former boss a drink mixed with a drug—“slip’m a Mickey”—in the moment he offers George his job back.  The ironic conclusion of George’s revenge schemes is perhaps the most common plotline of the series, and “the Baby Shower” provides a perfect example of this motif.

            It comes together like this: Jerry agrees to have the illegal cable installed on the day he goes to Buffalo to perform, which is the same day he agrees to let Elaine host the baby shower.  These are fairly straightforward situation comedy hijinks: the wacky neighbor impedes upon the manifestation of normal society.  However, things degenerate entirely because a blizzard forces Jerry’s plane to make an immediate landing and George goes to pick him up and bring him back to the city—frustration number one.  Jerry suspects George’s generosity in picking him up—“the airport pick-up” is a very loaded phrase in the Seinfeld universe implying a very intimate and meaningful gesture—then notices that he is wearing the red shirt under his sweater which was soiled by Bosco chocolate syrup, and finally realizes that George wants access to the baby shower for his revenge against Leslie:

Jerry, “What are you gonna do? Badger a pregnant woman at her own baby shower?! What are you, gonna take it off and make her rinse it in club soda?”

George: “No, I'm gonna hold it under her nose so she can smell the scent of stale Bosco that I had to live with for three years, and I'm gonna say, ‘Remember this shirt, baby?! Well, now, it's payback time!’”

 

He goes on to recite his speech to Jerry that has obviously been festering in his mind for years:

What did you go out with me for?! Just to dump chocolate on my shirt and then just dump me altogether?! I don't deserve that kind of treatment! What, you don't have the common courtesy to return my calls?! To apologize! You think I'm some sort of a loser, that likes to be abused and ignored?! Who's shirt can be ruined without financial restitution?! Some sort of a masochist who enjoys being humiliated? You think you can avoid me like I have some sort of disease?! You have the disease! You have the disease! You may be beautiful and rich and physically, just, unbelievable— but you sicken me! You disgust me! You and everyone like you!

 

Jerry insists that “[he]’ll never say that,” George disagrees and it cuts back to Jerry’s apartment where the party is failing due to the interruption by Soviet cable guys—frustration number two: Leslie is a jerk to Elaine and mocks her fawning curiosity about the Kennedys, entirely unappreciative of the party prepared for her.  This is a key difference from the fourth season on: Elaine and George are entirely decent people being walked over by this condescending self-important woman.  The viewer can clearly see that she is insane, and George and Elaine simply wish to be accepted, a arrangement reversed later in the series: Jerry represents success and its indifference to those who are trying; Kramer represents the indifference to success and the embrace of those who are trying; George and Elaine represent those who are trying and failing to achieve success because it, like Leslie, is cold, unfunny and uninteresting.

            Jerry is indeed put in the role of Leslie when a livid woman at the shower—who he apparently also once took to “one of his shows” and never called again— approaches him when he arrives and gives him what essentially is the same speech George rehearsed to him in the car.  George of course is unable to perform his tirade—perhaps because his questions were more rhetorical than he would like to admit (why would he keep “Bosco” as his secret ATM code if this symbol of his suffering at the hands of female injustice didn’t appeal to him?)—and instead cowers beneath her glare and, as his successful doppelganger storms out and bumps into Leslie, her chocolate cake ends up on the same red shirt that he wore to illustrate the chocolate-covered wrong she did him, and he follows her out of the apartment comically trying to carry all of her gifts—frustration number three.

            The final frustration is a kind of afterthought: that ultimately Jerry decides he doesn’t want the cable, refuses to pay 400 dollars—250 more than Kramer told him a successful installation would cost—and has his television is kicked in.  The show ends with George, Jerry, and Elaine watching the cracked screen muttering about their situations, each summing themselves up with one line of dialogue:

George: “Every woman on the face of the earth has complete control of my life. And yet, I want them all.  Is that irony?”

Elaine: “Why can't I meet a Kennedy?  I saw John Junior once downtown. I was on a bus. I hit the ding, but it didn't stop.”

Jerry: “Alright, I said I had a good time and I'd call, but who takes that literally?”

 

Kramer stops in at this moment and announces, “come on over, Dr. Zhivago’s on cable in five minutes—I'm making popcorn!” 

            George’s life is an ironic, unfair hell, and he can’t even confidently define its irony; Elaine’s concerns are more superficial, but her sincerity, and the image of her unable to get off the bus and meet John F. Kennedy, Jr. is, while hilarious, heartbreaking; Jerry’s “problem” is his own dishonesty in rejecting women, which is a callous thing to mention in front of George, who is destroyed by his own rejection by women; Kramer is undyingly optimistic: why should the quadruple frustration that occurred in Jerry’s apartment, culminating in a cracked television screen, stop the four of them from enjoying Kramer’s successfully installed illegal cable?  And who is to say he’s wrong?  The end of the episode for one seals his optimism as the final punchline: non sequitur vivacity, life when the episode has declared its own death, a clear picture when they insist on a broken image to mirror their own fractured view of the world. 

            But Jerry gets the final word in his stand-up, because, after all, it is his show, and we end with the callousness of the successful performer discussing what one does after a bad date and they never want to see the person again.  “ ‘Take care.’ What does this mean? ‘Take off’ Isn’t that what you really want to say? ‘Take off now.’”