by Caitlin Filep

Most people who lived through the ’90s (or who don’t currently live under a rock) would recognize the strong cultural imprint of Seinfeld, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld’s highly acclaimed sitcom. The “show about nothing” often used biting, witty, and boundary-pushing  humor to approach taboo but incredibly relatable topics, such as restrictive social dynamics, everyday mishaps, and casual sex. The manner in which “The Contest” hilariously plays on all these topics not only makes it the best episode of Seinfeld but also demonstrates the value of transgressive comedy for challenging the gravity of social norms and helping us laugh at ourselves.

“The Contest” demonstrates the value of transgressive comedy for challenging the gravity of social norms and helping us laugh at ourselves.

The relevance of Seinfeld to American media in the 1990s, and to most subsequent comedic television, is hard to overstate. It boasts an 8.9 IMDb rating by watchers, has an 89% Rotten Tomatoes score, and holds the title of “best show ever” from TV Guide (Entertainment Weekly gave it third place, and Rolling Stone gave it fifth).  If that acclaim isn’t reason enough to examine it in detail, its series finale alone was watched by 76.5 million viewers, making it the show’s most watched episode when it aired in 1998. Going past statistics, the seemingly pointless minutiae of Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer’s cosmopolitan adventures came to permanently change our cultural landscape. Kevin L. Ferguson described the show as easily the “sitcom most remembered from the 1990s,” calling it a “mirror” which reflected Americans’ “attitudes” about their own lives. Seinfeld wasn’t just a sitcom about vague kinds of nothing that don’t matter. Rather, it was about the kinds of nothing that matter most to us because they fill up so much space in our own lives, enough that we tell stories about them to anyone who will listen, whether it’s the annoying twelve-year-old who pushes all the buttons on our morning elevator, the weird guy who runs the deli down the street, or that bad date we went on with that girl who chewed so loud. We relate so deeply to all the filler moments because the show touches on the strangeness of human existence. As a result, the oddly specific yet relatable ways in which this sitcom characterized our everyday lives with such ongoing appeal and humor reveal why it remains so funny today.

Seinfeld wasn’t just a sitcom about vague kinds of nothing that don’t matter. Rather, it was about the kinds of nothing that matter most to us because they fill up so much space in our own lives, enough that we tell stories about them to anyone who will listen.

One example of Seinfeld’s particular brand of transgressive comedy occurs in its highest rated episode, “The Contest.” Considered by many critics, scholars, and fans alike to be some of the best the show has to offer and named the best episode of television ever by TV Guide in 2009, “The Contest” is the “most celebrated episode” of the show about nothing which is ironically “obsessed with something”—namely, self-pleasure, and how long the main four can go without doing it. When George’s mother catches him alone in the act, he, Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer make a bet to see who can hold out the longest, though there is much hemming and hawing when Elaine wants in too (“because you’re a woman! It’s easier for a woman…” they say). Once the contest ensues, the episode itself is rife with innuendo, wordplay, and ingenious euphemism, like the four staying “master of [their] domain,” “king of the county,” or “queen of the castle” when they remain in control of themselves. Yet as TV Guide notes, the most genius stroke of the episode—and of the network that allowed them to air it—is the fact that the infamous word is never actually spoken in any of its forms, though it is the subject of the whole story. It expertly skirts around social taboos to create an episode that by all accounts should not have made it onto the air, yet it toes the line just enough to make viewers laugh uncomfortably and laugh at ourselves, without scandalizing most. It is certainly the best of Seinfeld, an honor well deserved for an episode which successfully pulled off such a tough concept to execute.

Another key mention for the show’s subversive societal humor is “The Opposite,” coming in at the same IMDb rating of 9.5 and tied for best. In this episode, George realizes his life’s constant downward trajectory and decides to make a change by doing the opposite of his natural instinct in every situation. Overnight, his life drastically improves while Elaine’s fortunes plummet, causing her to become the new George. Funnily enough, George half-stumbles into virtues like honesty, patience, and kindness by denying his impulses, though only the audience, never George, can see these virtues developing separately from his material rewards. Though the episode is not as funny as “The Contest,” it still reflects that willingness to examine social expectations, combined with subtle underlying assumptions rather than overt demonstration. Instead of openly tackling a very touchy concept, it looks at how ’90s America primarily defined success through external benchmarks like a good job, a fashionable apartment, or a relationship status, much like the “yuppie,” wealth-focused ’80s in which the show began. While George gains these traits, Elaine loses them, marked visually by the final frame juxtaposing Elaine’s disheveledness next to George’s newfound style. More than that, as critic Shane Gunster suggests, both “The Contest” and “The Opposite” grapple with key questions of postmodern American life: how do we get what we want? Where, if anywhere, is morality in this search? And most importantly of all, how are we to govern ourselves in society?

Though I do not intend to answer these questions fully for Seinfeld or the decade of the ’90s, they demonstrate that Seinfeld is at its core a comedy of manners. As shown through its two highest-rated episodes and as discussed by David Pierson in the Journal of Popular Culture, it utilizes the same technique and accomplishes the same goal as other comedies of manners: continued preoccupation “with discerning, following, and sometimes evading, the complexity of social manners” in an attempt to “triumph over the repressive, social structures of a society.”  Further, Paul Paolucci and Margaret Richardson point out in the journal Symbolic Interaction that the entire show is about the “trivia” of everyday existence, and yet the stories the gang gets into always involve the dramatic interplay of “consistency between… expected performance[s] and…idealized presentation[s] of self” when striving after the fruits of “base drives.” The whole plot of “The Contest” ensues when George undergoes one of these struggles with his mother, who sees him in such a different light after he fails to control his desire that it literally sends her to the hospital. In terms of social mores, Elaine’s early contest loss because of JFK Jr. challenged preconceived ideas that exist even now about female sexuality, with Jerry himself stating early on that women don’t incorporate pleasure into their lifestyle the way men do (Elaine shows this idea to be false). With “The Opposite,” a single notion that the reverse of George’s impulses must be right changes everything, and George gains so many of his social wants that he calls this notion his “religion.” The small actions and mere quips of their lives expose who they are, what they want, and the restrictions in which they are forced to operate. In a wonderful irony, everything in the lives of the four main characters hinges on how they deal with each nothing, each tiny social interaction and “minor mishap,” whether botched or well-handled. Seinfeld then builds most of its humor upon these minutiae and their consequences, and as such it could not be more aptly called a comedy of manners.

This is precisely why “The Contest” is the funniest and best episode of Seinfeld: it expertly addresses some of the most uncomfortable social manners of our time in such a way that we have to laugh. The morality or immorality of the humor is not really the question at hand for us or for the characters; rather we must consider societal perceptions of what is morally acceptable, and how those can be pressed and twisted in humorous ways. “The Contest” masterfully exploits humorous tension for its audience by continually talking about something socially uncomfortable but never saying it: they keep us in a humorous state where the tension has not been fully relieved and where it will not be, making us predisposed to laugh harder in order to respond to that discomfort. That is why jokes like the sequence of Jerry, Elaine, and George remaining sleepless and unsatisfied while Kramer blissfully snores hit our funny bone so well—they simultaneously acknowledge and maintain the tension. In fact, the episode purposefully keeps us as an audience tense like the dissatisfied and restless characters, yet their continued distress gives us the relief comedically which they lack physically. All their euphemisms also hold us in a “will they, won’t they” limbo, where we’re guessing until the end of the episode if they’ll really say that on network television. This heightened state of social and comedic suspension makes the whole thing that much more hilarious and demonstrates that discomfort can cultivate some of the highest-caliber humor. 

Seinfeld provides a helpful channel through which to scrutinize our own preconceived notions and social boundaries. 

Even though the show Seinfeld has no deficit of moral shortcomings, it is very funny, and its comedy-of-manners style portrayed in “The Contest” provides a helpful channel through which to scrutinize our own preconceived notions and social boundaries. This landmark episode uses the inherent touchiness of picking at norms to craft an episode which is both uniquely funny and uniquely uncomfortable. It’s funny because it bothers us, and that is actually a good thing. Because of the follies in Seinfeld, we get to re-examine our own failures to self-govern, whether by a moral or a societal standard, and hopefully take ourselves a little less seriously in the process–and really, that’s the whole point.

It’s funny because it bothers us, and that is actually a good thing. 

Caitlin Filep is a junior studying English and Greek.