My friend Riley’s favorite joke in the show is Jerry’s preoccupation with Superman, the discrepancy between the man of steel’s daily life-saving and the comedian’s vapid detail-obsessing. “The Race” puts this juxtaposition to the forefront of the episode in that he dates a woman named Lois, and delights in this fact, as highlighted in the episode’s opening dialogue:
JERRY: Ready to go, Lois?
LOIS: You really like to say my name? Don't you?
JERRY: Excuse me, Lois. Stand back, Lois. Jimmy's in trouble, Lois.
Jerry’s insinuation that he is Superman, not only stems simply from his address of a woman as “Lois” but also, as they are in a normal office in the daytime, plays with the irony that one would never assume Clark Kent to be Superman, just as they would never assume Jerry to be. The extent to which Jerry is assumed not to be super is the premise of episode: he won a race in high school by accidentally getting a head start that only George noticed, and thus his speed becomes mythical, mostly because he is assumed to be so ordinary.
The joke reaches perfection moments later when her boss—Duncan Meyer who came in second place in this race—tells her she has to stay late, and she asks Jerry, “Would you be able to come all the way downtown again in rush hour to pick me up?” and he replies, “Well, I'd have to be Superman to do that, Lois.” We accept the hyperbole as it seems an everyday figure of speech, and the rest follows logically, as we assume he will be able to come all the way back, especially considering the pride his friends and he constantly take in knowing the best routes in New York. His joke thus proves him to be Superman. He is not a super comedian, but rather by way of being a comedian, or more exactly the jokes provided him by the writers (who include Jerry Seinfeld), he is Superman, an important distinction discussed by George and Jerry in another episode: whether he would have, among all his other superpowers, a “super sense of humor.” It doesn’t matter what’s literal when she asks, “So you were the fastest kid in school?” because the myth exists, and thus he acknowledges the fact with more figurative language—“Faster than a speeding bullet, Lois,” that even in its original context we imagine to be hyperbole, or at least taken on faith. Again he proves he is Superman by having the entire discussion exist on a figurative level.
The mere presence of Duncan Meyer in the plot structure maintains this figurative role for Jerry—he provides the role of the nemesis that passes in and out the serial narrative, in the line of New men, car thieves, odor, etc. and sets up an immediate struggle between them by his role as Lois’s tyrannical boss (“He owns the means of production!”) who insists upon using this power, like a villain holding a damsel in distress, to once again challenge Jerry. But how is maintaining a false start as a true one the same as standing up for liberty and justice? After lying to Lois about the race he justified it by saying she might tell her boss in the event of a bad break up—“I want him to go to his grave never being certain I got that head start.” Jerry thus acts for the sake of ambiguity, the preservation of a beautiful lie. He is Captain Comedian, the Crusader of Not-Knowing, and nothing will stand in the way of his legacy.
To further this charade the escape from the literal takes the pragmatic shift away from linguistic redirection to outright lying thanks to a classic Costanzian scheme, continuing in the genre with the introduction of a sidekick into the motif: that Jerry, Lois, and Duncan Meyer will have lunch at Monk’s and he will come in and “pretend [he hasn't] seen [Jerry] since High School,” and “back up the story.” This is to be the ultimate proof of Jerry’s super speed to Lois, and will be accomplished by having the entire conversation, not just Jerry’s hyperbole, be ironic. The essential relationship is turned on its head: the familiarity between Jerry and George, for the benefit of Lois and Duncan Meyer, does not exist; however, for the viewer, that familiarity is only accentuated by the jokes they make to each other within this long-time-reunion context, George making fun of Jerry’s “did you ever notice” brand of humor, and Jerry retaliating with “you really went bald there, didn’t you.” It’s like seeing Batman and Robin work together to get out of a jam: a thing of beauty. Duncan Meyer still does not believe him, in spite of “impartial” George’s assurances, and they, in the end, agree to race. This is of course inevitable, any Seinfeld title must refer to two things, and this episode is no different: its drama comes from the race in high school and its resolution occurs in the race in the present moment.
But how can Jerry translate his superhuman qualities from the figurative to the actual in order to maintain his twenty-year old fiction? The show’s climactic answer reveals that there exists no distinction between the figurative and “the actual”—instead a precarious chimera of verisimilitude is constructed with this “difference” before the final joke eradicates any such commentary on “the actual.” Whether it’s George pulling out Kramer’s golf ball out of a whale at the end of “the Marine Biologist,” or, in Elaine’s concurrent plotline in “the Race,” accidentally getting her communist boyfriend banned, “blacklisted,” from the very restaurant where his father eat cheaply when he was blacklisted in the McCarthy era—Seinfeld warms us up with twenty minutes of could-be reality to lure us into thinking we are not in the bowling pot of nonsense that the show has become by the time we reach the last two. Whereas Jerry wields the joking capacity to align himself with Superman at the beginning, it is the joking wielded by the show’s writers and Jerry’s situation at the episode’s end that holds him there, and it feels perfectly feasible that Kramer’s car backfires a moment earlier than the starting gun, giving him the same head start and the same impossible victory, allowing the myth of his speed to live on, forcing Duncan Meyer “to go to his grave never being certain [he] got that head start.”
What is remarkable in this discussion of the mythical and the actual is that two seasons earlier in “the Implant” Jerry was broken up with by a woman played by Teri Hatcher because of his attempt to prove that her breasts were fake, that implants were the head start that create the myth of their size. At the end, she catches on to his scheme (Elaine, who insisted they weren’t real, “fell” on her in the sauna to feel them) and leaves him saying “They’re real, and they’re spectacular.” Less than seven months later her new show premiered: Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman, in which she played Lois Lane. In the week of December 11, 1994 a viewer could have watched Lois and Clark on Sunday, “the Race” that Wednesday and a rerun of last season’s “the Implant” at any point in the week and be very confused where these characters and people—Lois Lane, Clark Kent, Jerry Seinfeld, Superman, Teri Hatcher, Jerry Seinfeld, Dean Cain (Lois and Clark’s Clark)—end or begin. All we know is that Jerry cannot be with the real Lois because he is not the real Superman just as he did not really win the race, he cannot accept Teri Hatcher’s physique to be real, and is not even the real Jerry Seinfeld; everything in the Seinfeld universe is Clark Kent and Superman at once in an inseparable whole, Lois Lane and Teri Hatcher amalgamated, and whether this juxtaposition in the week of December 11, 1994 was intended we will never know, that is why Jerry is the Superman of U
It is interesting to note that Jerry is conceived of as an idealized idea of Superman when what’s at stake is his own ego and proving his speed. However, in “the Café” when it comes to actually helping another person Jerry succeeds in becoming the Superman of the joke with which he ends the episode:
It's tough to do a good deed. Just look at your professional good deed doers. Your lone rangers, your superman, your Batman, your Spiderman, your Elasticman. They are all wearing disguises, masks over their faces. Secret identities. Don't want people to know who they are. It's too much aggravation. “Superman, thanks for saving my life, but did you have to come through my wall? I'm renting here, I've got a security deposit. What am I supposed to do?”
This is a man who will break your door down to stop a thief from taking a dollar from you and think he’s doing you a great favor; and this is Jerry is “the Café.” He begins his campaign of good from his apartment looking out the window at a struggling business at street level, like a soaring crusader for good searching for a wrong to right, and proclaims to his sidekick George, “This is amazing, I haven't seen one guy going in to that restaurant since it opened. Poor guy… His family is probably in Pakistan waiting him to send back money. This is horrible.” He continues to observe, now with binoculars, with the help of his other sidekick Elaine, discussing the failures of the place before finally making his heroic, grandiose move: going in and eating something. He orders, compliments the place, is told by the restauranteur that he is “a very kind man,” and considers this idea for a moment: “Very kind. I am a kind man. Who else would do something like this? Nobody. Nobody thinks about people like I do. All right, snap out of it you stupid jerk. You're eating a turkey sandwich. What do want, a Nobel price?”
But this is only a warm-up; his omnipotent forethought is his true gift for the struggling Café: he suggests the Pakistani fellow serve Pakistani food rather than a having rigatoni, tacos, and moussaka share a menu with pork and beans, to which it is rhetorically asked, “You see everything, don’t you?” which Jerry doesn’t make great efforts to deny.
A week or so passes and Jerry returns to check in on the life he saved. However, it turns out the change did not improve business at all, rather more debt was amassed in the renovation making things even worse. Such is the occasional ugly side to doing good deeds.
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