“The Contest”

Why seek to scale Mount Everest, 

Queen of the Air,

Why strive to crown that cruel crest 

And deathward dare?

Said Mallory of dauntless quest

‘Because it's there.’

            —Robert William Service

This episode is touted as a classic for its masterful ability to discuss the taboo on Prime Time network television, and the language it uses to circumvent explicitly describing these taboos.  What makes it particularly important, however, is the way it highlights George’s contribution to the show, and, through analogy, the contribution of Larry David, who won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series for this episode, and how it does this with the exact manner of brilliant circumvention.   The episode begins in what may almost be considered a parody of a Seinfeld scene: Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer sit at Monk’s coffee shop.  Jerry brings up an absurd premise to begin a joke that would not be an unusual bit for his stand-up.   Elaine and Kramer provide additional riffs.

Jerry: Let me ask you a question.  You're a hostage, captured by terrorists—

Elaine: Who, me?

Jerry: You, anybody—whatever. You're in the little room, you're chained to the floor, you're there for a long time … do you think they would ever consider doing the laundry?

Elaine: They have to: it's in the Geneva Convention.

Kramer: You! Take off your socks, your pants, your underwear. We're doing the wash.  C'mon! Take it off, take it off!

This is the show purified: Jerry Seinfeld is a stand-up comedian who comes up with his material in the real world, in the company of his friends.  Elaine makes a smart aleck remark to Jerry’s use of the hypothetical “you,” and brings in her more politically-aware sense by whimsically invoking international law.  And Kramer translates this premise into the middle-eastern terrorist persona that Jerry himself wouldn’t be able to pull off.   By turning a stand-up bit into a short interchange in a situation comedy, this joke in the same amount of time accomplishes three punchlines in three different styles: it is funny that Jerry thinks about laundry in this situation—because he is so notoriously “neat,” and so hopefully disconnected from the suffering of humanity—and the joke works, in this sense, because it makes fun of Jerry; Elaine in turn validates the joke and implicates herself with the premise that doing laundry is in the Geneva conventions, while furthering the absurdity by invoking a rule of law that terrorists would not acknowledge to begin with, further making fun of Jerry, and now herself as well, by the means he has opened up; and Kramer tops it off with a bit of dialogue that plays with the irony that to demand violently  that a hostage strip is the humane thing to do.  The characters thus all laugh at this joke that they have created as a transition that seals off this beginning from the rest of the episode, as though it were the stand-up routine that used to begin and end each episode of the earlier seasons.

It makes sense that this opening was intended for the pilot episode of the show, as the “Notes About Nothing” of the Season 4 DVD tell us, when the premise was to give the audience a view of a comedian going through his day.  Larry David has deftly appropriated this simplified notion of what the show supposedly is so as to dramaticize how unsettled this simplicity really is, and how his very contributions—the real life “contest” in which he participated, his decision to write an episode about it, and the askewly autobiographical character George, which, at this moment have all yet to enter the episode—unsettle the show and thus make it what it is.  That the show insists upon getting weirder is apparent in this appropriation: once the show began with Jerry’s stand-up to demonstrate how the show itself was interesting, and now it in turn begins with what the show is at its most basic, to demonstrate how it is more interesting than that.

George enters Monk’s as Kramer gives his terrorist-on-laundry-day impression and sits down as the self-congratulatory laughter dies out and he receives greetings from his three co-stars.  He is silent, initiating a “What’s the matter” from Jerry, which receives more discomfort and silence and a total of 12 seconds after his entrance, which is, in Seinfeld, an eternity, until the usually verbose George says anything.  And with his first line the episode effectually begins, as it would have in an earlier episode after a transition from the stand-up performance to an audience to the dramaticized dialogue of the show itself.  And, thematically, the transition is the same: it goes from Jerry discussing what is beyond his life—his rarely autobiographical observations on the universally everyday foibles—to all of the characters commenting on their own personal problems, in this case the fact that George “was caught” by his mother and now “she’s in traction.”  Elaine, in particular, bursts into laughter at this fact—although the entire studio audience and table is laughing at George—inciting George to reply in one of the funniest lines of the scene, “It's not funny, Elaine.”

We now have a juxtaposition of conversations: the first in which a potentially serious question—do terrorists wash the clothes of their hostages?—is meant as a joke and not very funny; and the second in which an intentionally serious anecdote—that George’s mother “caught him,” fell down, and injured herself forcing George to take her to the hospital—is hilarious.   Of course it is not clear-cut irony, that Jerry’s attempt at a joke is not at all funny and that George’s attempt at confiding in is friends is not at all serious—there is an ambiguity dependent upon one’s sense of humor.   However, it may be said that what George did is put on a parallel with the conversation, or with what Jerry did before the conversation, that is, think about terrorism and laundry—simply put: it is all masturbation.  Jerry could follow through, if he were serious, and do some research and find out that the very act of holding a hostage goes against the Geneva Conventions; or he could study past kidnapping stories to read all of the accounts of the day-to-day treatment of the hostages, which would reveal the laundering practices, or lack thereof, of the captors; but no, like Onan he pulls out before he accomplishes what he supposedly set out to do, spilling the seed of his thoughts on to the table at Monk’s coffee shop, along with Elaine and Kramer who further the nonsense into the public circle jerk that it is.  At this point George enters, catching them in the exact act in which his mother caught him committing.   

His explanation to his mother—“Because it’s there!”—could merely be an absurd appropriation of George Leigh Mallory’s explanation of why he wanted to climb mount Everest.  However, this question lies in the ambiguity of the fate of Mallory’s final attempt at Everest: it remains ridiculous to compare the activity of George (Costanza, not Mallory) to scaling to the highest point of the world, if indeed Mallory did that before falling and freezing to death; however, as there is no certainty concerning his success, it is feasible to akin coitus interuptus to working vigorously toward a climax, yet ultimately not to continue and instead depositing one’s DNA to the ground to the effect of nothing.   That it is not known for certain only makes the joke that much more dynamic, and, in the spirit of the show, smugly negates the difference between reaching the peak and dying on the way back, and simply dying in the process. 

It is important to note the parallel between the act discussed in this episode and the idea of writing, producing and broadcasting Seinfeld, which becomes quite ironic when George’s mother sarcastically ridicules George with what seems a ludicrous image of him masturbating in front of a gigantic audience: “Too bad you can't do that for a living. You'd be very successful at it. You could sell out Madison Square Garden. Thousands of people could watch you! You could be a big star!”  What then is the difference between what Larry David “do[es] for a living” and jerking off to a packed audience at Madison Square Garden?  The answer lies in the difference between the two pitches made to NBC and how that juxtaposition mirrors that of Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer’s torture joke with the remainder of the episode: the first is a show with no storyline, just its characters joking at the coffeeshop, and the second concedes storylines because, as George notes in the second conciliatory meeting, “otherwise it’s just masturbation.”  

George enters the coffeeshop and, by inciting the abandonment of literal masturbation in his friends, again inspired by money in the form of a bet, incites the episode’s abandonment of masturbation, that is for as long the writers can maintain sovereignty over their baser impulses.   “The Contest” puts this tension into allegory: the characters want to be able to spend their time making off-kilter remarks about ponies, impersonate the hypothetical voice of a girlfriend’s stomach, feign homosexuality without being taken seriously, in short, make jokes to their hearts content without any real world consequence; but they live in “the real world” and must keep these desires in check; much as the writers live in a world where they must produce a situation comedy, something to which everyday people must be to identify, with a storyline and consequences for an anarchistic sensibility that conceives of the world as a joke.  In the end everyone loses this perverse contest and wins in the exquisiteness of the process, or, as George reveals he did in the final episode, cheats.

 In her essay “They Laughed Unhappily Ever After” Barbara Ching notes that the frequent reference to masturbation unveils not only a perpetual adolescence in the characters but also, as seen in “The Gymnast”’s disappointment in Jerry’s virility—“the laughter he provokes leads to nothing but a one-night stand,” as one may describe an un-picked-up pilot episode—the show should never have been produced: “In theory, he is incapable of forming a series; in practice, of course, we watched it.”