A superabundance
of social phenomena is introduced and explored by the show, among them: styles of dating, tipping, walking, talking,
haggling, making restaurant reservations, rental car reservations, behavior
at parties, high school gym class hazings, capitalizing on retail return policies, new car buying,
used car buying, used car selling, and choosing a last meal before being executed
among them. Also toilet-paper in all
its forms and historical nomenclatures, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive
disorder, depression, mania, compulsive gambling, parents and our independence
of and dependence on them, get-rich-quick schemes, postal fraud, sexual taboos, friendship sex, coworker sex,
phone sex, sexual impotence, homosexuality, mutability of sexuality, friendship-sex,
hate sex, self-sex, condom packaging—in fact safe-sex in all its forms.
Faking the death of a made-up coworker, faking cancer, faking disabilities,
faking identities, faking blindness, faking deafness, faking non-fat ice cream,
mistaken identities, mistaken sexualities, mistaken names, mistaken drug tests,
mistaken blood tests, mistaken currency-conversion rates, accidental murder,
offering presents while expecting refusal, offering culturally inappropriate
gifts, low-flow shower heads, revenge, love, and war.
Then, there are relationships beginning because of a "bad-breaker-upper"
stigma, relationships ending because of excessively masculine hands, bad cooking
and eating habits, excessive nudity, baldness, wig-wearing, dancing
badly, offensive body odor, and religious zealotry. Bad comedians, comedian heckling, books on
tape and their unethical procurement, hypothetical Superman situations, nonsensical
New Yorker cartoons—et cetera—all without the temperance of sentimentality. They also make up phrases that have come to
rival Saturday Night Live as a source of the American humorous lexicon: yada yada yada, sponge-worthy, “not
that there’s anything wrong with that,” and mimbo
are all examples.
Many of the
characters’ actions are based on the real-life exploits of Seinfeld himself
and co-creator Larry David (prototype for the George Costanza character). Something beside “nothing” (on which the show
is widely held to be based) must make up a show whose final episode was
projected onto the side of a St. Louis office building.
The characters, though uniformly self-absorbed, all have defining
characteristics which actually fit exaggerated archetypes.
All are worthy of study, because they are outrageous microcosms of
real American personalities. Whether
or not they are likeable is an arbitrary judgment, but they are all unarguably
memorable. Europeans call us “ugly Americans,” and perhaps
we are, but couldn't this ugliness be celebrated?
George Costanza embodies the basest of interpersonal ethics. Well-known as a liar, cheater, miser, and loafer,
George negates the heartiness of the American dream, while keeping its final
destinations in tact. Instead of hard-working,
honest and goal-oriented, he is lazy and shallow; his dreams include being
draped in velvet eating a block of cheese while watching television.
Paradoxically, the characters are remnants of rugged individualism—all
social and economic ladder-climber-wannabes.
Often the show’s laughs revolve around creative schemes the characters
devise for achieving their ends--usually indirectly, contemptibly, ignobly,
without accountability, or a combination of two or more of these.
George is the epitome of this phenomenon.
When his fiancée dies from poisonous (and cheap) wedding invitations
he ordered, he is ecstatic rather than shattered.
His rare successes come in hordes after deciding to go with the exact
opposite of his instincts in social situations. George has enough idiosyncratic neuroses
for a psychology doctoral student’s dissertation. Jerry’s advice to George goes further:
You know
you really need some help, and a regular psychiatrist couldn’t even help
you. You need to go to like Vienna
or something…you need to get involved at a university level, like where
Freud studied and have all of those people looking at you and checking
up on you. That’s the kind of help you need, not the once-a-week
for eighty bucks. No. You need a team. A team of psychiatrist working ‘round the clock,
thinking about you, having conferences, observing you, like the way they
did with the Elephant Man. That’s
what I’m talking about you, because that’s the
only way you’re gonna get better.
(Tape 1, Episode
2)
He seems to know what he wants, but never proceeds toward these
goals with an inkling that the normal way, or the good way, might
be the best path. Rather, he opts for
the dishonest or underhanded way. It’s
not that George is a Machiavel; it is his world-view.
He believes himself to have grown up on the shallow end of the gene
pool, and that he will never succeed unless making up for detriments through
lies and cunning. His appreciation
and implementation of cheap angles make appearances in almost every episode.
His sole point of confidence is that if he is only himself, he will
fail:
As one might imagine, George rarely manages success though these
means. The shows typically end with
his complex schemes crashing down.
Julia Louis-Dreyfuss’s
character, Elaine Bennes, is one of the few female television personalities
who is simultaneously valid and sexually promiscuous, feminine and strong and likeable.
She submits a cartoon to the New Yorker and writes an episode of Murphy
Brown. Her controversially liberal views on animal
and abortion rights are refreshing in this milieu of network television, where
the rule is that “offending the least pleases the most.” Her lack of affect is worn well; in one episode
(Tape 3 Episode 5), her boyfriend is hospitalized. She gets the news at the theater from an attendant,
but instead of immediately running to the hospital she stops for candy.
Jerry Seinfeld is probably the altruist
of the group, and skeptical of the others’ unscrupulous schemes.
His anal-retentive, aloof behavior and excellent self-esteem areoften
transformed into the demeaning of other characters.
Jerry’s affable insensitivity is a recurring staple of the show's humor.
He and George’s relationship is based on it. While Jerry’s friends are often the object of
his sarcasm, he is an ideal son, even impressing his father by buying him
a Cadillac. Another time, he and his
father both want to pay for a dinner; their argument borders on the ludicrous
since his father actually has no money to pay for the dinner. This might be a hyperbolic situation, but every
one knows the discomfort of paying for dinner when there are underlying structures
at work. The show brings out these
problems' stupidity, and simultaneous ubiquity.
Jerry is complicated. When analyzing the show in light of the concepts
we have studied in class, I thought a lot of his relationship with George.
As they sit in their regular diner-booth and converse, their interaction
is dominated by Jerry taking cheap one-liner shots at George.
George usually does not respond or attempt a strategically equalizing
one-up. At the end of many of their conversations, in
fact, George is down six or seven points.
Cosmo Kramer, Jerry’s quirky, boisterous
neighbor, is an interesting paper in himself. His ignorance
of the conventions to which members of this society are supposed to adhere
makes him the eccentric sore thumb of the show.
His vintage clothes are as esoteric as his personality. In Barbera Tannen’s book, the problem of the unreciprocated “one-down”
position, when one person puts his or herself into the one-down, expecting
their conversational partner to make a similar move. Kramer has never seen sense in this logic, but
instead “leaves one hanging.” As
will be explored more intensely later, Kramer is considered the group’s
connection to the underground, buying into conspiracy theories, urban mythologies,
and giving creedance to passing thoughts which most of us would just ignore.
With his unpredictability, there is predictability, as in the episode
when Elaine wants to tell a friend that her hairstyle is outdated and garish,
but can’t bring herself to drop that bomb.
Jerry and Elaine plan to get around the unmentionable by introducing
her to Kramer, who they figure will visibly react to the hairstyle, and
tell her to change it. The plan, coincidentally, backfires. Kramer does react to her hair, but says he wishes
more people would wear that hairstyle, and urges her never to change it.
His antics could be said to negate all the theories put across in
class, he lacks the faculty for the social barometer governing the status
quo. With his vast stores of personality,
he attracts scores of other convention-ignoring individuals.
In the “Sponge”
episode, Kramer is walking for donations in an AIDS charity marathon. While all of the other walkers wear a ribbon
for those suffering and dead from the disease, Kramer refuses to wear one.
He exclaims that “Others talk the talk, but I walk the walk, baby!”
An example of the characters’ tendency to exaggerate what would normally
be passing whimsies into harsh convictions.
These types of perspectives force us as viewers to analyze aspects
of our lives which we have always taken for granted. Kramer even refuses
to wear the ribbon when accosted by other AIDS walkers, who beat him up, thus
leaving him a martyr for his “cause”:
| Volunteer: |
…Here’s your AIDS ribbon |
| Kramer: |
Uh
no thanks. |
| Volunteer: |
You
don’t want to wear an aids ribbon?! |
| Kramer: |
Uh
no, no. |
| Volunteer: |
(irritated) But you have to wear an aids ribbon. |
| Kramer: |
I
have to? |
| Volunteer: |
(mockingly) Yes! |
| Kramer: |
Yeah—see,
that’s why I don’t want to. |
(Tape 4, Episode
5)