“I never heard of this Joe Mayo. And frankly, it sounds made up.”
—Kramer, “the Reverse Peephole”
In the secondary plot of “Archie and the Bowling Team” Gloria buys Michael the Meathead a bag that resembles a purse to carry his things and Archie blurts out, “Holy cow, a purse!” a condemnation of the effeminate accessory that cannot be misinterpreted. From here we can begin to see how Seinfeld blurs the stable meaning of the classic sitcom as seen in All in the Family: Jerry is the man of the apartment and thus master of the domain of the show, as Archie conceives of himself of his show. However, in “the Jacket” Jerry cowers next to Elaine’s dad, a man from Archie’s generation and of his sensibilities. As Matthew Bond writes,
Elaine’s father shows not only how immature George and Jerry are, but also how easily a man can emasculate them. They are completely intimidated by this man who drinks Scotch and looks scornful when Jerry and George order club soda and cranberry juice respectively. At the episode’s opening, Jerry buys the titular jacket: a beautiful, very expensive, very soft suede one, with a lining, however, of a loud candy stripe. When Alton Benes insists that Jerry not wear candy stripes out when they must walk through the falling snow. It is thus ruined by the “real man’s” prohibition. (A delightful pun in the title: Jerry is straightjacketed by this interaction with a “man’s man.”) In the same episode, George has a song from Les Miserables stuck in his head (“Master of the House). Benes eventually says, “Pipe down, chorus boy,” (informing George who is “master of the house.”) a remark that is driven home in the next scene, after the dinner, when Elaine announces, “Dad thinks George is gay. When Jerry surmises, “Because of all that singing,” Elaine replies, “No, he pretty much thinks everyone is gay.” (Thus, Benes’s forbidding the candy stripe).[1]
[1] Bond, Matthew. “‘Do you think they’re having babies just so people will visit them?’ Parents and Children on Seinfeld.” Seinfeld, Master of its Domain. Continuum, New York: 2006. Page 111.
Bond sees Seinfeld’s characters as rejecting the progression into maturity and an ugly position of authority, like that of Archie. Joanna L. Di Mattia in another essay considers, more specifically than the trepidation for becoming an adult, the “male fear and anxiety” that is “central to the show” and Jerry and George’s “struggle to attain the elusive standards of American manhood” when “what these standards currently are remains unclear to them.” Compared to Archie’s straightforward conception of himself as a man, developed in the age that the show’s theme song describes (“And you knew who you were then / Girls were girls and men were men”), Jerry and George constantly need to present a manliness that it seems they don’t actually possess in “an unstable dramatization of masculinity, performed over and over again.” She cites Jerry’s falsified enthusiasm for mutton in “The Wink”—an effort to prove himself in front of his date after he initially had “just a salad” for dinner; and Jerry’s supposed emasculation in “The Wig Master” when two people, first Elaine then the homosexual “Wig Master” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, are asked out by men in front of Jerry who could conceivably be on a date with each of them.
Archie’s “Holy cow, a purse!” mindset becomes one of the subjects of a later episode that concerns itself with reversals of traditional thinking, “the Reverse Peephole.” And if a transcendental treatment of male purse-wearing could exist in the form of a situation comedy, it would look like this episode: one that reverses the meaning of the peephole—“so you can see in…to prevent an ambush”—calling into question its former and reversed purposes (more so the reversed), and begins with a painful inquiry on the part of Elaine into what the waitress’s “idea of ‘hot’ is,” burning herself after the waitress told her “this plate is extremely hot.” Jerry calls into question his wallet, which Kramer says, “went out of style with powdered wigs,” and decides to try life without it, starting with Joe Mayo’s party:
Jerry, “George, I am loving this no wallet thing.”
George, “A man carries a wallet.”
Jerry, “You know, the very fact that you oppose this makes me think I'm onto something.”
George occupies Archie’s traditional “a man carries a wallet” perspective, or at least feigns it in his performance of masculinity, which is rendered absurd by the heft in his back pocket—“a filing cabinet under half of his ass”—that forces him to “sit on a slant” and causes him back problems, while Kramer fills out the role of the comically progressive eccentric whose hyperbole puts wallet-carriers in the 18th century.
However, complications arise when the girl-that-goes-out-with-Jerry-because-his-pants-look-better-without-the-wallet-weight asks him to carry all of her things when they go out. Luckily, Elaine has the solution: “It's a small men's carryall.” Jerry refuses “wearing a purse” and Elaine gives it what seems to be the all-important qualifier: “it’s European.”—“it’s not a purse: it’s European.” This single deft use of semantics transforms a feminine object to a masculine one. The episode from here goes on to portray Jerry as a parody of a woman searching through her purse when he looks for his girlfriend’s lipstick, declaring, “I can never find anything in here,” and, while wearing a fur coat, having it grabbed off his shoulder by a thief on the street, while the semantics of the show—the plot and dialogue—maintain Jerry’s position as a man, the purse actually facilitating the presence of a woman which Jerry and George treat as “an object in the competition between men to prove their manhood to each other.” However when Jerry yells to the cop across the street: “Officer—someone took my European carryall!” he only evokes confusion, so he describes it, as a “black, leather thing with a strap,” which evokes the image of a purse, forcing Jerry to admit, “yes, a purse—I carry a purse,” and the semantic/visual separation collapses. And in the end the reverse peephole is justified when Joe Mayo is ambushed in his apartment: a man made a cuckold by Newman waited there thinking Joe Mayo was the man to blame.
Male purse-wearing is not advocated as an attack on masculine anachronisms, nor are those anachronisms advocated, just as whether a peephole should be reversed to prevent an ambush or stay as it is to see outside your door is left undecided. In the Seinfeld universe everything, including the idea of debunking, is bunk and debunked, and, also, bunk and debunked—
Jerry, “I thought the whole dream of dating a doctor was debunked.”
Elaine, “No, it's not debunked, it's totally bunk.”
Jerry, “Isn't bunk bad? Like, that's a lot of bunk.”
George, “No something is bunk and then you debunk it.”
Jerry, “What?”
Elaine, “Huh?”
George, “I think.”
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