Men Hunt, Women Nest

At my parents’ house Seinfeld comes on four times every weekday.  TBS plays two episodes back to back at seven and seven-thirty—which I record on the High Definition station that plays them at four and four-thirty, Eastern Standard Time—and KCBA Fox 35 plays an episode at six-thirty and then ten-thirty-five after the local news, whose sportscast, it may be noted, gave Craig Kilbourne his television debut in the early nineties.  The cable used to record from 10:35 until 11:05, but it no longer does even though the show is still broadcast at that time. So, unless I watch it live, I always have five minutes of the newscast—the quirky local interest story, a quick recap of the weather, maybe sports—and I miss the last five minutes of the episode.  All four time slots play the episodes chronologically, though at four different points in the series.    This often leads to bizarre juxtapositions in a single day’s viewing: seeing two chronologically separate episodes in a row led me to notice for the first time that Suzanne Snider plays both Eva, the neo-Nazi in “the Limo,” and Poppie’s daughter Audrey in “the Pie”; that Jerry does a bit about channel-surfing at the opening of “the Baby Shower,” and that, 69 episodes later in “the Fire,” he tries out the same bit as supposedly new material on Elaine leaving her very non-plussed, and then performs it and is heckled by Kramer’s girlfriend; that years before Susan’s death Elaine says sarcastically about Susan’s break-up with George, “since she met him she's been vomited on, her family cabin’s been burned down, she learned her father's a homosexual, and she got fired from a high paying network job,” and that the envelopes were the perfect punchline to a deranged joke 91 episodes in the making. It becomes clear that the writers and producers of the show treated verisimilitude with incredible indifference. 

            Unlike the character development and long-running storylines of the episodes themselves, Jerry’s stand-up develops absolutely no narrative aside from the evolution of his hair and outfit, and that it eventually disappears from the show.  Rather, as the show goes on, his material becomes another means for other jokes, as opposed to the ends it was initially intended to be: his life is not the comedian’s workshop it’s purported to be, for the strand of the episode relevant to the opening and closing material is absurdly thin.  And the connection must be considered ironic, especially in “the Baby Shower,” in which George’s revenge, the illegal cable installation, and Elaine’s party have little to do with Jerry’s channel-changing material that attempts to generalize about the difference between men and women by their remote control use.  “The Fire” again has George in the foreground making a fool of himself at a party, and, again, it doesn’t make sense that Jerry has made a series of observations about children’s birthday parties, when he didn’t attend the one in the episode.  It also can’t be said that it is his dialogue with George that is the comedian’s workshop because all George tells him about is how he knocked over children and his girlfriend’s mother when fleeing from a fire.  Indeed the entire episode—“The Fire”—is defined by the disruption of the children’s birthday party.  Jerry’s opening jokes are, if in any way relevant to the rest of the episodes, premises to be reacted against, in this case by the deranged and cowardly actions of George Costanza. 

            The disconnection between the content of the episodes with their respective stand-up routines isn’t the only purposeful way that the show mocks its own supposedly stable mode: the weak connection between “the Baby Shower” and its opening monologue becomes nothing compared with the logical disruption that comes when Jerry tries out the very joke in what we would rationally consider to be a series of events that occur nearly three years later, for that is how much time has passed in the real world to which we can only assume the show refers.   To further this cavalier disregard for verisimilitude—the insistence upon making a joke out of the show’s context—what was, in “the Baby Shower,” a successful bit becomes, in the increasingly destabilized, self-mocking Seinfeld universe, not very funny to Elaine, in spite of Jerry’s insistence that “it’s gold,” and a provocation for heckling by the episode’s end, in one of the few bizarre, colliding moments of the series where Jerry’s routine becomes dramaticized within the context of the show. 

            It could simply be that Jerry is unsure of his material three years after successfully performing it, and that is why he is trying it out again on Elaine.  Therefore, as the series goes on, we get a more complicated portrait of Jerry the comedian, that perhaps he is not so sure of himself: he is an insecure man terrified of hecklers.  He is no better than Bania, the hack comedian, as we can see that his words are merely re-surfacings of things Jerry has once said, “The best!” for example, and, “it’s gold,” in this episode.