“The Bizarro Jerry” (Season 8, Episode 3, originally aired Oct. 3, 1996)
Alright, now we’re on to something. “The Bizarro Jerry” and “The Little Kicks” are probably two of the better-known season 8 episodes and for good reason – they’re a lot of fun. “The Bizarro Jerry” just reeks of a concept that Seinfeld wanted to do forever, given his obsession with Superman, and finally got the chance to once he was fully in charge of the show. That might not be true (Larry David is perfectly prone to wackiness himself) but that’s what I’m gonna go with. The concept is simple stuff – Elaine finds that Kevin (Tim DeKay from last week) and his friends are like a weird mirror group to her friends. But it’s very effectively staged that it works, even once the joke has become totally familiar – the idea of characters having strange doubles is now one of the oldest sitcom tropes in the book.
The stagey, intentionally ridiculous way Kevin and his buddies (Gene aka George and Feldman aka Kramer) act out their scenes is why it works. When Elaine gawps at their strange behavior like them being nice to each other, Feldman buying Kevin groceries and knocking on the door, or at Kevin’s apartment, set out the same way as Jerry’s only reversed, it’s like she’s watching a pantomime. My favorite thing that the gang does is how Kevin and Gene look at each other, worried, when Feldman knocks on the door and says “It’s Feldman,” only smiling in recognition when he adds, “from across the hall.” Really, anything that George clone Gene does makes me laugh, because he does it completely silent and with an adorably puzzled look on his face.
Elaine, of course, quickly realizes that the bizarro universe is not for her, even though Feldman’s ideas make sense, and they all go to the library to read, and Kevin has a great relationship with his FedEx deliveryman neighbor Vargas. Her typical “get out!” shove injures Kevin and startles everyone else, but the whole time she’s more of an interested party than anything, examining the bizarro gang like a scientist. Sure, she’s tempted by the idea of a normal life. As she tells Jerry, “I can't spend the rest of my life coming into this stinking apartment every ten minutes to pour over the excruciating minutiae of every single daily event!” But really, how much more attractive is the world of Kevin? Looks pretty damn boring to me. Pleasant, I suppose, but boring. Kevin does show a brief sign of life in the episode’s tag though, gathering his friends to him and devolving into bizarro-speak. “Me so happy, me want to cry!”
Like many a good Seinfeld episode, there’s a B-plot nestled in here that feels like the dominant A-plot of another episode, considering what a major meme it became. I refer, of course, to Jerry’s girlfriend with the “man-hands,” and having written that out, that plot description is pretty much complete, which is probably why it’s a B-plot. Jerry dates a girl, she’s quite pretty, but her hands are unusually large (and played by actor James Rekart, according to Wikipedia). This freaks Jerry out, and so the relationship does not lead to marriage as you might have thought. That’s it! That’s the whole thing! But like many a Seinfeld meme that found its way into popular culture, writer David Mandel just hit on the key phrase – “man-hands” – and image – her tearing the bread apart – to burn the thing into your memory. Simple, but effective.
Finally, George uses a picture of Jerry’s large-handed girlfriend, coupled with his sob story about Susan, to get in with attractive ladies who party at meatpacking plants, because the idea that he was engaged to a pretty woman is apparently enough to attract their attention. Here’s my problem with this plot – Susan is way hotter than Jerry’s lame man-handed girlfriend! Would a picture of Susan NOT work? I like the story itself – George immediately shoots himself in the foot by dumping the girl who introduces him to the models, classic Costanza behavior – but the premise bugs me. Susan’s hot, you guys.
EDIT: Through some bizarre note-taking mishap I wrote down Kevin's name as "Reggie" which is, of course, the alternate diner they go to that we've seen several times before. I wrote down "Elaine meets Reggie at Kevin's" and that led to this chaos. Now corrected, sorry about that!
“The Little Kicks” (Season 8, Episode 4, originally aired Oct. 10, 1996)
So when I say this episode is well-known, it’s really for one thing – the “full-body dry-heave set to music” that is Elaine dancing. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is funny doing just about everything, but her manic kicking and finger-pointing and hair-flipping is something to behold. It feels almost like they could have done the episode with her dancing never shown on screen, just left to the viewers’ imagination, and you wouldn’t have imagined something as bad as this.