Were the Early Seinfeld Episodes Funny
The Chinese Restaurant
Jeremiah Bosgang and his boss Rick Ludwin found themselves in a real bind after a table-read for a Seinfeld episode in 1991. The script they'd just heard had Elaine, George and Jerry doing nothing except waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant. There was no action beyond a pay phone call and an attempt to bribe the maître d'. The pair had championed many of the show's stranger moments, but now they were considering shutting it down.
They'd been worried about the script from the get-go. Was this thing missing pages or something? There was no story! What would the other NBC executives say? To Bosgang, it confirmed the network's worst fears about Larry David and Seinfeld – that they couldn't hack it making a sitcom long-term. They didn't think they could sell a concept this flimsy. They'd gone to the table-read in hopes of seeing progress – but there'd been no change. Now they sat in Bosgang's car and agreed that killing the script was too provocative. David, especially, would not take this lightly. But they also knew how precarious Seinfeld's future was. They had to say something.
Indeed, David balked even when Ludwin said – gingerly – "If you feel passionate about this, which you obviously do, go do it, and we'll hope for the best." He took David for a walk around the lot and allowed him to vent. David was adamant it was a funny half-hour of television about life's little frustrations. It was Seinfeld. If the network didn't like this, they didn't like the show.
In fact, the script baffled even the man who played the Chinese restaurant host. Actor James Hong expressed his confusion. The director Tom Cherones saw it as similar to his own early feelings about the show. "That doesn't matter," he told Hong. "Just go with it."
The episode did not go down well with Ludwin and Bosgang's colleagues, but no one stopped it from airing. And when it ran, critics understood what NBC did not. "Like real life, but with better dialogue," wrote Kit Boss in the Seattle Times. "Seinfeld doesn't feel like sitcom television," New York magazine's Chris Smith said. "It feels more like a conversation with your funniest friends." Over time, the episode would stand as a turning point for the series and a groundbreaking bit of television.
Everyone won: the producers made the show they wanted, and the network looked good for airing it. In fact, the Chinese Restaurant showed that a sitcom could tackle more highfalutin qualities than had ever been attempted before: this was TV's version of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
The Junior Mint
Andy Robin got his first Seinfeld script assignment in the fourth season, when he was already a fan. He felt a kinship with David and Seinfeld. Although he was in his 20s, he loved stuff from the 50s and 60s, smooth crooners like Johnny Mathis and Petula Clark. He knew he could throw some Burl Ives into a Seinfeld script and Larry and Jerry would get it.
He had been editor of the Harvard Lampoon and worked as a writer at Saturday Night Live. When he got the call from the Seinfeld office, he knew he'd stumbled on something big and felt a huge responsibility to keep the show great. How would he maintain that quality? Or would he be the one to ruin it?
Now he couldn't write a thing without ripping it apart. His desperation led to some bizarre pitches, none more than the one that became his first episode, The Junior Mint.
He had some reasonable plots lined up: Jerry dates a woman whose name he can't remember; Elaine visits an old artist boyfriend in hospital to rekindle their romance when she sees he's lost a lot of weight; George buys a piece of art by Elaine's paramour in case he dies in surgery and the value shoots up. Tying them all together was the tough part, out of which came one of the show's first memorably absurd moments: when Jerry and Kramer observe the artist's surgery from the gallery above while they snack on Junior Mints, only to drop one into the open body cavity below.
Robin was happier at Seinfeld than he'd been at Saturday Night Live. SNL was a surprisingly corporate environment; all anyone talked about were ratings. Everything felt overly cautious and full of fiefdoms. People who had been there for decades were protective of their power.
He was happy to have escaped. But now he'd wrecked his career, and possibly the whole show, with this dumb Junior Mint plotline. Robin couldn't believe David approved it; this was crazy. People would say, "They let some amateur in and he came up with this stupid, unsterile-hospital-environment story."
He called David mid-draft and said, "This can't happen."
David's reply: "Just write it."
When Robin finished, he was proud of one part: the storyline in which Jerry forgets the name of the woman he was dating. He tries to find out his girlfriend's name through acts of subterfuge, like digging in her purse. She mentions that her name rhymes with a female body part. Exasperated, he guesses: is it Mulva? Bovary? No, but she realises: "You don't know my name, do you?"
Jerry finally figures it out when she leaves in a huff, and he shouts his final guess after her: Dolores. Could this have been the first network-television acknowledgment of the clitoris? It seems likely. Cloris was the scripted choice for her real name, but when the warm-up comedian asked the studio audience to guess her name, someone said Dolores. David and Seinfeld decided it was better and subbed it in at the last minute.
Director Tom Cherones liked Robin's Junior Mint script more than its author did. He always enjoyed Seinfeld's weirder challenges, like the climactic fall of a piece of candy into a body mid-surgery. The small chocolate disk wouldn't show up on camera in flight, so he shot a York Peppermint Pattie – about four times the size – instead. Viewers wouldn't be able to tell the difference without other objects in the shot for comparison.
Robin was shocked no one complained. The audience at the taping laughed, but when he saw the edit he still hated it. Finally, it aired. The public revolt he expected did not happen, but he was still convinced he'd ruined the show. It wasn't up to his expectations of himself or Seinfeld.
In fact, Seinfeld himself cited the episode as a milestone: if it could pull this off, it could do no wrong. Anything was game. Even Jerry's character reached a new level of darkness in this particular script. As Kramer begs Jerry to join him in the surgical gallery, Jerry sighs, "All right, all right. Just let me finish my coffee, then we'll go watch them slice this fat bastard up." Seinfeld's face can barely contain the glee at getting away with this line.
After the episode, Robin could barely function, so cowed was he by the pressure of working on Seinfeld. He often started a script, then scrapped it two-thirds of the way through when it didn't click. And the acclaim for The Junior Mint only made matters worse – there was so much pressure to top his first try.
The Contest
After each raucous table-read, David held court in the office he shared with Seinfeld. The two would sit at their facing desks, surrounded by writers. The network reps had no place to sit – perhaps by design. A rep might offer a small suggestion: "Jerry's too harsh in this scene." David would fidget with the golf club he kept in the corner, then answer: "Nah, I don't think he's that harsh." David and Seinfeld were in charge now they were on their way to their vaunted Thursday-night time slot and No 1 ratings ranking.
But all the writers braced themselves for a confrontation over The Contest, David's masturbation episode in the fourth season. The trick, in a broadcast sitcom, was to launch this as a plotline without offending standards and practices. George explains it to his friends this way: "My mother caught me." Doing what, asks Jerry. "You know. I was alone. I stopped by the house to drop the car off … My mother had a glamour magazine … So one thing led to another …" George explains that his shocked mother screamed, fell, threw her back out, and ended up in hospital.
But the real action begins when George says to his friends, "I'll tell you one thing. I am never doing that again."
"What, in your mother's house?" asks Elaine. "Or altogether?"
"Altogether." George's certainty elicits groans all around. "What, you don't think I could do it?"
"Well," Jerry says, "I know I could hold out longer than you." George smirks. "Care to make it interesting?" George, Jerry, and Kramer wager $100 each on who can hold out the longest. Elaine wants in, too, but the guys balk. "It's easier for a woman not to do it than a man," Jerry protests. "We have to do it. It's part of our lifestyle." But they relent, as long as she gives them odds; she'll put up $150.
To keep this up as the main thrust of a primetime show, the writers had to come up with a euphemism for masturbation. They went one better: they came up with a new term. To abstain from masturbation was to be "master of your domain". This allows the characters free and easy discussion of their sexual thoughts and exploits without one dirty word. The humour came from the script's abstinence from even the word "masturbation," much less anything more graphic. An early draft had George using the word "tugging," but even that was cut. Kramer caves because of the woman walking around her apartment naked with her shades open, and later sleeps with her. Elaine caves when she stands behind John F Kennedy Jr in a workout class. Sly scenes depicting each character in bed at night clarify the status of each contestant: those who are still "masters" toss and turn, while those who have been satisfied sleep well.
As with most Seinfeld plotlines, it came from a real-life bet David was involved in. (He claims to have won.) The table-read went well, with even more laughs than usual. Still, the subject matter left the writers sure that the network would protest. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, meanwhile, kept waiting for the executives to object specifically to Elaine's participation. A woman talking about masturbation in primetime seemed an obvious place to draw the line.
Instead, a shock. "It's perfect," the network said. "Don't touch it." They had come a long way since the showdown over The Chinese Restaurant. The episode helped Seinfeld win its first Emmy, and "master of my domain" became the show's first catchphrase.
This is an edited extract from Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything. The book is available in the US and Australia now and in the UK on 28 July.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jul/11/how-seinfelds-funniest-moments-came-to-life-the-junior-mint-the-chinese-restaurant-the-contest
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