The Joke/Non-Joke Boundaries Within My Own Life

Jerry, “I'm not happy.”

George, “Me neither.  I've never been happy.”

Jerry, “I mean I'm happy sometimes, but not now.”

George, “In college, maybe.  Those were fun times.”

Jerry, “Yeah, college was fun.”

 

—“The Note,” when asked

if they were “happy” that their friend was under investigation for insurance fraud.

 

That Seinfeld is an anarchistic, iconoclastic rebellion against contemporary society is a considerably reductionist view that arose from a later phase of my Seinfeld scholarship that occurred after my brother suggested we pass the evening by smoking weed and watching the show.  When I told him I had never combined the two he reacted in disbelief, though he did not shove me or yell “get out!” and we consulted the TV Guide and called some friends of mine.  However, because I was still blind to the brilliance of the show’s layers, it was not as profound as purported.  Rather, at this point, I looked to Larry David’s HBO improvised Curb Your Enthusiasm as the more important deconstruction of show and reality, and also began to focus away from established comedy and towards the joke/non-joke boundaries within my own life. 

            This era revolved around Brendan, a fellow first-year undergraduate I met in the bathroom of my hall the day that I moved into my dormitory.  He had just finished washing his hands, and as we were meeting people for the first time with whom we were to live, it only made sense to introduce ourselves, and so we did.  His sense of humor was also heavily informed by the Seinfeld aesthetic, and I think we both tested the other’s bathroom introduction enthusiasm. We each passed the test.  The year culminated with a joke going somewhat awry when, under the influence of a lot of LSD we ended up among friends underneath a small tree late at night some four hours into the experience, though that’s not to say that every moment leading up to that point wasn’t as essential as the anecdote that begins underneath the small tree, as that most certainly is the case, though we must on occasion take parts to stand as wholes, though we understand the limitations of doing such a thing.

            A naïve idiot from Alaska that I recognized from one of my classes approached us with a friend of his, and crawled underneath the umbrella-like threshold.  They complimented our setting and then asked if anybody “had any pot,” which the pleasant girl next to me did, though not very much, so it was agreed that they would buy five dollars worth. They were concerned that they were being swindled, so Brendan OK’d the five-dollar nugget as an unbiased third party.  Once that was decided they had no idea what to do with this small green clump and asked for someone to roll it into something, which I did in the lid of a mason jar from which someone was drinking some sort of whiskey and juice concoction.  Once I gave it to him they still did not leave but instead asked for a light.  Brendan told the Alaskan fellow that he had it backwards in his lips, which he did.  It was passed around, and things, of course, got even stranger.  The Alaskan and his friend eventually left and I rolled the remaining bits left in the mason jar lid into a cigarette, and passed it to the pleasant girl on the other side of me who was startled by the presence of weed in it, thinking it was just a cigarette, like a vegetarian finding a hunk of beef in his salad.   She then suggested that everyone join her in swimming in the reflecting pool, and so everyone left the area underneath the little tree leaving Brendan and me, knowing that it was a pool for reflecting. 

            Shortly after a flashlight was shown into our little refuge illuminating the branches around me and I heard a grown-up say “something smells good.” As I was holding the lit object that was emitting this illegal smell, I gathered that the comment from the campus security was directed at me, and without hesitation I decided that complete and utter honesty was the way to go: “OK, Sir.  Earlier there was someone here who had marijuana and they rolled it into a joint in this lid and then they left and I simply added the rest into this cigarette which by now is only tobacco.”  I had ripped open the remainder of the cigarette to illustrate this point, as though truth lay within that rolling paper.   If I could see his eyes on the other side of the threshold I am sure that they would have rolled.  As it were, all I heard was a request that I dump the remaining contents of the mason jar next to me and that we all move along.  I collected the things of the pleasant girls that were sitting next to me and put them in the tote bag I had been carrying with me, Brendan and I got out from beneath the tree and beckoned the girls in the pool to join us in leaving the site as Brendan discussed his embarrassment concerning the socio-economic implications of what just occurred. 

            When we had walked back to our building, we stopped outside to redistribute the things in my bag to their appropriate owners.  I gave it to the pleasant girl who was earlier sitting to my left saying that most of it was hers, and stood to talk to Brendan about something.  What seemed like a very long time later she approached me and said, “OK, Andrew.  I took out all of my things from the bag, but all there was left was this pen.”  This caused me to go into hysterical laughter because I remembered that before I put all of her things in there all I had was a pen, for a reason that was, given a sufficient amount of time and patience, perfectly explicable.  “Were you walking around with a big green bag that only had a pen in it?”

            The collision between the joke/non-joke boundary of myself with that of Curb Your Enthusiasm occurred after we went upstairs and began to watch an episode in which Larry David tries to get a job as a car salesman.   In hindsight I opine this to be the best episode of the series for the juxtaposition of his indifference to working with Jason Alexander on a new series with his enthusiasm for selling cars.   In the potential series Larry suggests that Jason play an actor who was in a popular series and, since the end of this series, cannot escape the outlandish role in which everyone now exclusively sees him.  Jason goes on to agree that it is terrible to be forever associated with the loser that George Costanza was, that he was “the schmuck, the yutz, the idiot,” and “the jackass role.”  Larry argues that he was not a loser.  Jason cites his participation in a contest, eating an éclair from the trash.  Larry says he did those things, and that that does make him a shmuck.  The episode really terrified me at that moment, infinitely more so than the campus security officer, and it continues to freak me out, to a lesser extent, each time I watch it.  In the middle of a scene—in which Larry loses the car salesman job because Richard Lewis sees him at the dealership and gets him fired through the insistence that Larry is not a car salesman (“What are you? Fucking Willy Loman?” in Lewis’ words)—I asked that the episode be paused because I could not handle it and greatly desired that we discuss it.  I could not formulate what I wanted to say, or rather, heard myself say it, and then realized it had nothing to do with how deeply I agreed with the frightening sentiment of the episode, and I grew infinitely frustrated.  I knew never to combine hallucinogenic drugs with Larry David again.