Seinfelt

By paying for goods and services exclusively with her credit card, Elaine completely and unintentionally divorces the act spending money from earning a wage. She doesn’t even pay attention to prices, mindlessly swiping her card at the register. Worried about the oncoming helium shortage, Kramer orders balloons by the gross and sends them to Mount Sinai hospital, figuring himself to be a Robin Hood type for the MRI industry. When he learns that the balloons have all been sent to the children’s ward, he races to the hospital and rips them out of the arms of suffering children. As he grabs the last one, his feet gently lift off the ground, and a slight breeze blows him out a window. While channel surfing, George happens across the made-for-TV movie Special Bulletin, but believes it to be a true news report of a nuclear scenario. He runs to his local high school, demanding to use their fallout shelter. Others at the school overhear his paranoid ravings and believe them to be true, whipping the entire building into a frenzy. All the students and teachers file into the fallout shelter and huddle around a few containers of potable water. Soon, the broadcast of Special Bulletin is interrupted by a special bulletin reporting on the inexplicable disappearance of everyone from P.S. 166. When Elaine receives a notice that she has reached her $20,000 credit limit, she opens another credit card at a rival bank, and Jerry commends her for being a “true American.”

Kramer crunches the numbers and discovers that he has so many simultaneous projects and hobbies that he can’t possibly ever complete or master any of them, and in fact, given equal time distribution, can only devote four seconds a day to each one.

Jerry dates a woman that everyone finds much funnier than him. His attempts to outdo her wit eventually result in George pulling him aside to tell him that they all feel like he’s trying too hard. Disheartened, he gives up on comedy and takes up painting. She turns out to be better than him at that as well.

After Elaine realizes the power of withholding sex, she starts using it in her relationships to get whatever she wants. It proves so effective a weapon that she is eventually contacted by the Pentagon, who orders ten thousand units.

Newman’s ventilation system suddenly fails, leaving its rhesus monkey pilot with no other choice but to eject, horrifying passersby.

On the way home from the grocery store, Kramer spots an accordion in the window of a music shop and is compelled to learn how to play it. The introduction of a new hobby results in a total paralysis, as he now has so little time to devote to everything that he can’t begin anything.

As George stands nude in the gym after taking a shower, a towel draped over his shoulder, Pope Paul IV quickly sneaks in and chisels off his penis, replacing it with a stone fig leaf.

Elaine gets a new pair of heels that make a pleasing clicking sound when she walks. Whenever she passes Peterman’s office, he can’t help but start drumming with his fingertips on whatever objects are within reach. Others in the office are moved to similar rhythmic fits. Soon, each of Elaine’s footsteps is accompanied by a thunderous percussion ensemble.

Kramer learns to play the spoons, and starts experimenting with different sizes. Eventually, he finds what he feels is the “perfect spoon tone”. The vibrations from the sound match the resonant frequency of his bones, which become increasingly deformed and twisted as he plays.

Jerry does a show at an enormous, oddly-shaped venue. The resulting echo transforms everything he says into something entirely different every seven rows, leaving alternating sections of audience responding in wildly varying ways to his jokes — some offended, some laughing, some bored, and others moved to tears.

Elaine’s office debuts on Broadway. Their opening night is lauded by critics, but their performance is upstaged by Kramer’s mangled, deformed body in the third row, beautifully and helplessly clattering his spoons along with Elaine’s footsteps.

George dates a woman whose voice sounds exactly the same as his own.

Elaine gets a call from a man who claims to have gotten her number from a mutual friend. Despite having reservations about going on a blind date under such shady circumstances, the man sounds so charming that she decides to take her chances. When she arrives at the restaurant, however, the maître d’ informs her that her date has called to cancel. Disappointed, she returns home, finding an apologetic message on her answering machine from the man. She returns his call, and after a conversation even more charming and thrilling than their first, he asks her to a movie the following night. She agrees with only mild reluctance.

At the theater the next night, the man is nowhere to be found. Elaine watches the movie alone and returns home to find another message on her machine. Instead of listening to it, she calls their supposed mutual friend and asks her about the guy. The friend claims to never have heard of him, and that nobody she knows has ever asked for Elaine’s number.

Whenever Kramer looks out the window, he sees an old woman dressed all in black with a black veil looking back up at him from different places below. He’s so terrified by her that he’s afraid to leave the apartment building.

A half-second delay in the sound system at a comedy club leaves Jerry unable to say more than two or three words at a time before being rendered speechless by the Delayed Auditory Feedback effect. The audience finds his confusion and growing frustration far funnier than any of the jokes he would have told.

Over the next two weeks, Elaine receives seemingly endless calls from her would-be suitor, apologizing for having to cancel on their date the previous night and asking her out on another that night. She tries to decline, but he doesn’t seem to hear her, and hangs up without letting her get a word in edgewise.

George suspects that his coworkers have been going into his office without his permission when he’s not around, and has a high-security lock installed on the door. He immediately loses the key, and the locksmith refuses to make him a new one without the registration card that was included with the lock, which he had thrown carelessly away. After digging fruitlessly through the dumpster, he spends the next few weeks meandering around the building trying to hide the fact that he’s unable to get into his office.

When the food in Jerry’s kitchen runs out, Kramer orders lunch from a nearby Chinese restaurant, but when he answers the door, the woman in black is standing on the other side, holding his delivery. He slams the door and stares at her through the peephole, but she doesn’t leave, despite his pleas. Eventually, he works up his courage and opens the door to ask her who she is. She lifts her veil to reveal his own face beneath.

Frustrated and desperate, Elaine convinces a phone repairman to help her track down the man who keeps calling her. After digging around in records and logs at the phone company, the two drive out to the location listed as the origin of the calls. There they find a flock of birds pecking furiously at the phone line on an otherwise barren road in Tennessee. As Elaine steps out of the truck, the birds spot her and fly away, cackling uncontrollably.

Kramer enjoys a lovely lunch with his quirky, socially-inept grandmother.

Jerry’s housekeys disappear upon each use, and he must solve elaborate, room-sized block puzzles to earn more. Elaine gives Jerry a Jew’s harp on which he can play songs that have a mystical quality. He recoils, and tells her that she could have called it a jaw harp, Ozark harp, trump, khomus, drymba, or kubyz instead, if she were just a little more sensitive. Newman intentionally kills a small tree in front of the apartment building, then laughs at Jerry’s inability to do anything about it. Kramer becomes highly skittish whenever Jerry comes near unless he plays a particular song on the Jew’s harp, in which case he’s happy to take Jerry wherever he pleases. George keeps trying to get Jerry’s attention by shouting, “Hey! Listen!” in the most annoying voice possible.

Kramer sends himself back in time to 1860, bringing nothing but a penny. His plan is to deposit it in a bank account, bring himself back to the present, and get rich off a century and a half of compound interest. When he tries, however, the bank teller guffaws at his “hobo getup” and “funny money with that man running for president” on it. He works for a day’s wage to deposit instead, but when he realizes that another day’s wage will increase his ultimate balance significantly, he decides to stay for a little while longer. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months. He becomes a respected member of the community, eventually becoming the mayor of Poughkeepsie, New York, then retiring for a few years before deciding it’s time to return to his home era. Newman earns a promotion which confers upon him the duty to carry a gun. When Jerry expresses his shock, Newman scoffs, “Our leader is the Postmaster General, Jerry.” Elaine gets in a fierce argument with her boyfriend over whether putting ice in a fountain soda is a good idea or a complete ripoff. George reveals his most secret fantasy: He wishes for 95% of the world to be wiped out in a terrible plague, so that he be emerge as someone who is now remarkable and respectable compared to the remaining 5%. In present-day New York, Kramer attempts to withdraw his multimillion-dollar fortune, but is laughed out of the bank when he has no way to prove ownership of the fortune belonging to 19th-century “Clarence Kramer.”

George goes to take a shower, but discovers that the hot water is broken in his building. He shrugs it off and figures one of his neighbors will call the super. Later, he finds that there is also no hot water in his office’s bathroom, but writes it off as a strange coincidence, and is sure that someone else is already taking care of it. He stops at the coffee maker on his way to his desk and pours himself a cup. When he goes to take a sip, he finds it’s almost ice cold, despite the fact that he watched the pot finish brewing as he approached. Worried there might be something wrong with his sense of touch, he wanders around groping objects of varying temperatures, but they all seem to feel as he expects. The metal hood of a car is hot under his hand; an ice cube is cold. But every liquid he tries seems frigid.

Kramer pokes and prods at an ingrown hair in his belly, but has trouble pulling it out. When he finally manages to wrestle it from under his skin, the resulting strand is seemingly endless. He pulls it out for hundreds of feet before finally giving up.

Jerry suspects that his apartment has somehow expanded by an inch in every direction overnight. The others don’t notice any difference and dismiss his claim as crazy, but he sets up an elaborate system of measuring tools for verification. The next day, he checks the devices and finds that his apartment has grown four inches from the previous night. He shows his results to George, who is too concerned with his own problems to care. Another night passes, and Jerry wakes up in an enormous bedroom over twice as big as the one he remembered falling asleep in. He tries to get in touch with the others, but nobody answers his calls or returns his messages. At a loss, he decides to stay awake the following night to try to catch whatever is happening. At 2:47 AM, a soft rushing sound begins, and the walls and ceiling suddenly stretch away from him at an alarming rate. He’s left in a cavernous, dark room of indiscernible size, the doors and windows of which are so far away that he can’t make them out with the light of his flashlight. Terrified and alone, he begins the long trek in what he hopes is the direction of the front door.

A man in overalls taps George on the shoulder on his way home from work and tells him that he’s heard his hot water is broken. George nods and leads him to his apartment, bringing him into the bathroom once inside. As George bends over to turn on the tub faucet, the man yanks up the back of his shirt and feels around on his lower back. George remains still, too stunned and confused to react. After a few minutes of strange noises and sensations, the man tucks his shirt back in, taps him on the back, and tells him, “try it now.” George pokes his hand into the running water. It’s piping hot.

Kramer bursts into Jerry’s apartment to show him the hair, but is surprised to find an impossibly enormous, dark room. He grabs a flashlight from his own apartment and rushes back to hunt for his friend. Tying the end of his hair to the doorknob as a tether, he begins his expedition. After hours of searching, he finally spots Jerry in the distance.

Elaine dates a guitar virtuoso, thrilled by the potential of his “magic fingers”, but is disappointed when the man refuses to interact with her using his hands out of fear of a career-wrecking injury.

Jerry is thrilled to see Kramer approaching, his first sign of human contact in almost three hours. He hollers excitedly, waving his flashlight around and jumping up and down. Kramer jogs toward him, a relieved smile on his face, suddenly collapsing into a bloody pile of chunks.

George awakes one morning from uneasy dreams to find that his eyes do not work as usual. Rather, he sees the world just as he normally would, but with everything’s subtext explicitly revealed: When he looks at a refrigerator, the appliance is constructed of the words “food preservation”; when he looks at Jerry, he sees half-formed joke set-ups pouring out of his head. When George looks in the mirror and closes his eyes, he forms a feedback loop of self-loathing and horror that causes him to scream all his worst qualities and darkest secrets until paramedics arrive.

Kramer’s stomach starts gurgling regularly, but the gurgles slowly start to sound less organic and more digital. Without noticing, his food consumption drops to nothing, but he starts reading encyclopedias, dictionaries, and phone books ravenously.

Jerry finds an old pen in a dusty antique bookstore and finds himself irrationally attracted to it. He sneaks it out of the bookstore and starts writing the best jokes of his life in the pen’s luxurious red ink, continuing for seven hours straight. When he gets up to use the bathroom, he notices that his face has lost all its color, and he feels quite dizzy. He gulps determinedly and, deciding that these jokes are worth the price, returns to his writing desk to complete his material.

Kramer slumps slowly into Jerry’s apartment, his eyes black and jaw slack. He completely disregards Jerry’s shriveled body, but picks up the tome of freshly prepared jokes. He is enthralled, chuckling softly at the first few jokes, laughing out loud at later ones, and crying from laughter by the time he finishes the last page. His eyes appear normal once more, and he acts reinvigorated.

When he hears that George is in the hospital, Kramer thinks that the joke book will be the perfect way to cheer him up. He hands it over, and George recites: “When I was in second grade, I forgot to do my math homework one night. My teacher called me lazy and warned that I must have beans for brains, that the world didn’t care about me and never would. I was immediately terrified at the possibility, but I also felt every other student’s eyes on me. I had to respond, and quickly. I shouted in my prepubescent, nasal whine, ‘Well, who doesn’t love beans!’ The teacher was furious, but the other students laughed. They validated my existence when I was faced with universal irrelevance. I have spent every day since attempting to recapture that feeling.”

Elaine believes she’s faxing Peterman an important contract, but she’s actually feeding it into a paper shredder.

When Elaine accidentally drinks a mystical truth serum from Peterman’s office, an artifact from one of his African excursions, she finds she can only write accurate descriptions of all the clothing in the catalog, including the pieces she finds ugly or uncomfortable. Instead of demanding she rewrite them, Peterman finds her candor so refreshing that he publishes her entries as-is. Others in her life react to her honesty in a similar fashion, taking her suggestions as constructive criticism and vowing to make improvements.

Following Elaine’s advice, George begins working out in earnest, signing up for a variety of intense training sessions every day of the week. He finds it exhausting but rewarding, and the improvements to his body are fast and dramatic. He soon becomes obsessed, and works out so much that his beefed-up, overgrown muscles completely lose their range of movement. All he can do is waddle by swinging his inflexible legs forward, his arms outstretched like lumpy airplane wings.

Jerry spots an attractive woman in one of his audiences and does his entire set as if he’s speaking exclusively to her. The rest of the audience catches on, and after some initial confusion, they feel slighted by his inattention. When the house lights come up at the end of his performance, he realizes that the girl was just a mop propped against a bar stool.

When the last of the serum is finally flushed out of Elaine’s system, its effect reverses: she can only speak in lies, and everyone around her can only tell her the truth in the bluntest terms possible, all of which she takes good-naturedly to heart. Her life becomes an endless stream of derision and conflicting criticism, and her inability to say anything truthful only worsens others’ opinions of her.

After years of practice and dedicated yoga training, Kramer finally manages to sneeze with his eyes open.

Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer all take an elevator together, but the cable snaps, sending them plummeting 40 stories toward the ground. Elaine spends the entire six-second free fall trying to arrange herself to ultimately land on George’s body, as she thinks he’s doughy enough that she could still have an open casket funeral. George is brought to his own personal hell, an infinite expanse of anxiety-inducing social situations and women who refuse to have sex with him. His initial reaction is not so grim: “At least I finally belong somewhere.” Newman attends Jerry’s funeral with glee, but upon seeing Jerry’s casket, he feels a certain lack of closure. He wonders if Jerry was ever actually his enemy at all. Kramer is greeted by Death, but while making small talk, the two discover that they have a mutual friend in Bob Sacamano. Kramer is restored to life; as he walks away from the mangled elevator car, he shouts back, “I owe you one!”