By the end of the episode, he’s got the woman in bed with him. He’s out $100, but he’s asleep, and he’s satisfied. In the first montage of everyone’s sleepless night, I always think Kramer has the right idea. But when he spots a naked woman across the street from Jerry’s building, he walks out of the apartment, is gone for a little more than 50 seconds (I counted), and is back with his $100, slamming it on the kitchen counter and declaring, “I’M OUT!” It’s one of the show’s best-remembered laugh-lines for good reason: You’re snickering slightly at the rapidity of Kramer’s exit from the bet, but also celebrating his liberated attitude about it. He gets in on the bet because there’s rarely action he doesn’t want to be a part of. Kramer, on the other hand, is happy to just dive right in. George is happiest stewing miserably, desiring what he can never have (witness his flip-flopping on Susan in “The Pick,” a couple episodes later). For George, most sex is usually ungettable, but to deny even sex with himself while continuing to drink in the porn-y fantasy situation at the hospital … well, it’s just delightfully sick.Īnd it works really well in contrast to Kramer, not just in the two’s attitudes toward sex but, really, all of life. God knows he wants to win that $450, and he can barely stand his mother screaming at him, but he just can’t help torturing himself anyway. That George chooses to go back and back just exemplifies what’s so twisted about his character. But George keeps coming back to see her, not out of guilt but because in the next curtain over, a beautiful nurse is sponge-bathing an even more beautiful patient and he can’t get enough of it. In her first episode, Estelle is in traction in the hospital, berating George and demanding he see a psychiatrist. “I said, ‘Because it’s there!’” More truthful a line has never been uttered, certainly not by the pathological liar George Costanza. “All she said on the way over in the car was ‘Why, George, why?’” George recounts miserably. She (and husband, Frank, who enters later this year) had been hinted at for years as the root of many of George’s personality flaws, so it was best to publicly debut her with a storyline that has the biggest humiliation factor for George. I had forgotten that “The Contest” was our first introduction to Estelle, but it makes perfect sense. The show correctly acknowledges here that she isn’t one of the boys–she has to pony up an extra $50 for entry–but she’s not horrified or squirmy about discussing the topic with the boys either.įor some balance, we have Marla the virgin (Jane Leeves), returning from last week’s episode, who is upset by the cavalier attitude Jerry and his friends have toward sex, and, of course, George’s mother herself, the great Estelle Costanza (Estelle Harris), who sustains injuries after collapsing in shock at the sight of her son. Even more daringly, Elaine gets to take part and washes out pretty quickly. It’s mature in that it accepts and presents fairly starkly the fact that these guys are masturbating pretty regularly, and then gets a lot of laughs out of their mounting frustration as that’s withheld from them. The episode’s genius lies in the fact that it is simultaneously mature and immature. Other reviews I’ve read make a lot of fuss about how clean and inoffensive “The Contest” is, but that’s not really the right way to talk about it. Jerry is most mystified by that detail, but it makes sense in that Glamour is the kind of publication your mother might have around that still obviously has just the slight bit of eroticism George needs to fuel his fantasies. He stopped by his mother’s house, no one was there, and he spotted a Glamour magazine. But his actual lines are almost a work of art, and Jason Alexander’s delivery can’t be underestimated. If George had come into the diner saying, “My mom caught me whacking off,” sure, it’d still be kinda funny, because the very idea of George’s mother catching him in the act is appropriately humiliating for Mr. There is, of course, “Master of my domain,” and every other variation on that line.
It makes every gag feel that much cleverer and more original. Along with that, “The Contest” is just a very well-written Larry David script with great camaraderie between the actors and a plot that escalates rather perfectly, very cleverly never getting coarse or even using any words referring to the act.
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