Seinfeld: Classic or Dud

Watching the series from scratch. Great line in S1E1, he says, what do men want? They what women! It's the only thing we're completely sure of.

Otm

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/23/watch-indian-comedians-nail-s.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAiUkXjD6A8

watched an ep of this show for the first time in at least 10 years

it was the one where jerry & George make a pact to be grown ups & then George goes and proposes to susan and jerry breaks up w his gf cuz she eats peas one at a time

holds up, still funny

o and as the credits role George is in bed w/ susan totally stone faced w/ the mad abt u opening theme playing from their tv lmao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5ibSvOWAMg

watching the early episodes on hulu now. they feel so quiet and leisurely compared to the later stuff. not a bad thing -- almost feels kind of like you're watching a play sometimes. george also nowhere close to his later maniacal self.

This show is chicken soup for my soul.

http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/

Watched a half dozen or so Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee for the first time yesterday. Not bad. The Seinfeld reunion ones were nice. Michael Richards ep nostalgic/sad you can tell his big gaffe shook him up and he'll probably never be the same. Wonder if Seinfeld deliberately chose the shittiest rusty looking car he could for that one. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was really nice and that one felt more like old best friends hanging out, really sweet. The ep with "George Costanza" was really weird cos Jason Alexander was wearing some bad bad bad makeup.

The Mel Brooks one was great, he's probably the funniest guest on the whole show. Larry David was good, Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Louis C.K., all great.

Seinfeld's kind of a tool but that's just who he is and he's kind of funny when he acts that way anyways. Much like Curb and Seinfeld this show is in many ways about rich people being obnoxious in public. Which is fine because I think they are funny.

I don't know, I really enjoy the good episodes (loved the Joel Hodgson one), but sometimes I cant get over the combination of sensory-porn-for-rich-old-people (super close ups and sounds of the nice cars, coffee being brewed, other episode specific food or things similarly filmed) and the talking to each other like everything they say is some genius anecdote merely because of who's saying it (usually met with a confirmatory "that's great" spoken as if they just experienced wit and insight nobody else could have conjured).

I suspect the "Tim and Gelman" sketches were inspired to parody that show while at the same exact time create delusional hacky comedian characters that think they are as good as a Seinfeld.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80G38bxPeyI

caught the last 5 minutes of the backwards episode "the betrayal" last night and for some reason id never seen it! i can literally recite most Seinfeld episodes, had a torrent of the complete series on my computer from my late teens to late twenties that I watched like crazy, have watched it regularly in syndication for a decade, and most notably i said to my wife like a week ago "i wish somehow there were some Seinfeld episodes i hadn't seen because ive seen them all too many times". my mind is blown.

that is actually the first episode I ever saw of the show in full. and I've never seen it since.

first episode i saw was the sponge, i was 11 or 12, the idea that there was a prophylactic other than a condom and that it was a sponge confused me no end

I have already mentioned my confusion at the sponge upthread lol

^ I figured you were doing a reference to the call-back they did in the last episode, with the shirt buttons.

Betrayal is the worst post-season 1 episode imo. frogbs you picked the least funny and most confusing episode.

i highly recommend checking out The Opposite if you ever want to give it another chance.

hah - meant to say I've never seen that episode since. just weird to me that the first episode I saw was arguably the strangest, then when I actually got into the show I never saw it again.

There was also one "lost" episode for me that I only saw after I got the DVDs, the one where Elaine breaks up with Crazy Joe Davola, who later dresses up as a clown. Which makes sense cause there's another episode I'd seen a million times where he asks her on a date, but I figured it was a dropped storyline. Not a particularly funny episode

Legitimately creepy episode which among the shows general tone seems really odd. Like Elaine escapes him by pepper spraying him, he represents actual danger.

Perhaps they just don't show either of those eps so often because they're bad/not funny

xpost That's such an amazing season. I think a lot of nuance is lost when you watch the episodes in isolation because it's basically all one season-long story.

xp otm about the tone of that episode being very different. Though it was Binaca, not pepper spray, and that ref comes back later in a mildly funny way. It seems odd that networks would purposefully skip that episode since, at least on my local station, they usually show the episodes in order. I think it's just chance that I never saw it. By contrast, I've seen the damn backwards episode like ten times on tv

The only one that I think was officially removed was the one about the Puerto Rican Day parade:

The episode aired one week before the two-part clip show and the two-part series finale aired. Because of controversy surrounding a scene in which Cosmo Kramer accidentally burns and then stomps on the Puerto Rican flag, NBC was forced to apologize and had it banned from airing on the network again. Also, it was not initially part of the syndicated package. In the summer of 2002, the episode started to appear with the flag-burning sequence intact.

I don't think I've seen it.

lol when Kramer has to use a bathroom and tries posing as a prospective buyer ("wealthy industrialist H.E. Pennypacker") at an open house.

yeah that was funny, especially when Jerry and George turn up and they're all playing their alias characters

SALES WOMAN: Mr. Pennypacker, this is Mr. Vandelay, And you know Mr. Varnsen

KRAMER: Uh, Varnsen.

JERRY: Pennypacker.

KRAMER: Vandelay.

GEORGE: Pennypacker. Varnsen.

first episode i saw was the sponge, i was 11 or 12, the idea that there was a prophylactic other than a condom and that it was a sponge confused me no end

I’m still confused. I’m 31.

I suppose I could Google “sponge prophylactic,” but it seems too late for me.

I was an adult before I got why "Mulva" was funny

even though I owned an album with the title of the word it rhymed with

Laura Mvula?

What always confused me about that episode is that clitoris doesn't rhyme with Delores, unless you're some kind of freak

that always bothered me too, but "Aretha" bothers me even more

Wasn't the point of "Aretha" to show how far George was reaching in trying to figure this out? Or was that "Bovary?"

Flavia LaJorra

"the betrayal" would've been a better finale for the show than the actual finale.

i rewatched all of seinfeld on hulu recently and was really amazed by how much stronger it seems when you watch it all in order. i'd always thought of the episodes as fairly stand-alone, but there are so many little call-back jokes and continuing themes that are totally lost when you just watch random episodes in syndication. like, there's an episode where jerry's dad loses his wallet and loudly accuses his doctor of stealing it, and then like six episodes later there's a moment in the middle of an unrelated scene where jerry sits on his couch and suddenly finds the wallet. i can't imagine a lot of viewers even noticed most of this stuff back when the episodes first aired; the show at its best just feels so well-constructed, internally consistent and carefully thought out.

The running gag where Costanza would just magically show up wherever Jerry was is really something special

Wow I only just found out that the Nazi girl in the "Limo" episode is also the same girl who played Jerrys girlfriend in the "Pie" episode.

(Suzanne Snyder, also one of the girls from Weird Science)

https://i.imgur.com/TxmRph3.jpg

lol

(y)

oh my god this is so amazing and hilarious. a writer named Billy Domineau wrote a spec script for Seinfeld called "The Twin Towers." I'm losing it over here, this is so fucking funny: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B50l484pDaMobXI2Wk5CX0NMbkU/view?pref=2&pli=1

Wow, it's pretty impressive thus far. The voice is spot-on.

MALE SURVIVOR

We thought you must have died in the
collapse. How did you get out?!

GEORGE

Well you see, as the ground gave way
beneath me, I jumped at a moment JUST
SUCH that as I fell I floated between
the floors, ultimately landing softly
atop the rubble. I would have said
good bye, but by then I was quite
tired.

:D

yeah I'm a little creeped out by how spot-on it is.

KRAMER:
You know he was always talking about
how evil America was? Eventually I
told him, “Why don’t you do something
about it?” I thought he’d write to his
Congressman!

JERRY
Kramer, he just crashed a plane into
the World Trade Center! He slit the
pilots’ throats with a box-cutter!

KRAMER
Not “a” box-cutter - MY box-cutter. He
borrowed it last week!

7.

ELAINE
(even more intense)
GET - OUT! You have to do something!

KRAMER
Oh, you’d better believe it! I’m
getting that box-cutter replaced.

nearly fell out of my chair at the ending

that is incredible

the estelle/frank exchange is great

That was excellent. Actual lolz throughout.

well done everybody

http://uproxx.com/tv/seinfeld-festivus-true-story/

As for the specifics of the holiday, Frank had an aluminum pole because he appreciated the “very high strength-to-weight ratio” and found tinsel to be distracting. The O’Keefe family had something slightly more… unusual. “The reality of the holiday was too peculiar to show on television,” O’Keefe says. “The real symbol of the holiday was a clock inside a bag nailed to the wall and nearby a sign that says, ‘F*ck Fascism.’ That doesn’t fly on network TV. Either Alec or Jeff came up with the idea of the pole and the strength to weight ratio.”