By recreating classic film and TV moments that look so cathartic onscreen, Eliza Janssen hopes to improve her own life. This month, she attempts a stunt from Seinfeld’s fifth season: Kramer’s comic smokin’-and-drinkin’ stunt.
Seinfeld: Season 5
I pour out the beer—watery Budweiser, not my drink of choice. I put on a grey jumper and sunglasses. Finally, I pull one cigarette from a packet that’s been dwelling forgotten at the bottom of a backpack for ages, before being startled by the text on its packaging. SMOKING CAUSES CANCER—these things are bad for your health? Wtf, why isn’t anyone talking about this?!
This moment is contrived, neatly choreographed to mimic an awesome scene from the best sitcom of all time. Thing is, in Seinfeld‘s 68th episode ‘The Sniffing Accountant’, Michael Richards totally improved the unscripted stunt of Cosmo Kramer downing a beer and puffing away at a cigarette at the same time. There is perhaps no way of tapping into Kramer’s enigmatic frequency through careful re-enactment.
Let’s set the scene a little bit: the fifth season episode’s A-plot kicks off when Jerry becomes nervous that his accountant is a cokehead, constantly sniffing suspiciously whenever they meet. Fearful of his financial security, Jerry, George, and Kramer head out on a reconnaissance mission. They tail the accountant to a bar where Kramer tries to bait the poor, sniffy guy into chatting casually about drugz. He gets nothing, because it turns out the man is merely allergic to the grey mohair sweater Jerry and Kramer have both been wearing—but in the process of trying to appear hip and narcotic-inclined to the accountant, Kramer gives us a lightning-strike scene of exaggerated, effortless cool.
Raising a glass, he dedicates his brew to “feeling good all the time”, an ideal I immediately rejected by imitating what Kramer does next. A cigarette dangles out of the corner of his mouth as he chugs back his entire glass of beer: the studio audience giggles at first, then laughs more heartily at the silence that follows as it becomes clear Richards is really gonna finish that whole thing. Plonking down the glass and letting out a shaky, smoky exhale, he’s rewarded by the audience’s applause—the blooper take is even better, punctuated by a big Nicotine-y, yeasty burp. In short, he is a loathsome offensive brute…yet I can’t look away.
Kramer’s spontaneous, clownish vibe adds balance to Seinfeld’s comedy structure: its observational gags about the mundanity of dating, working, eating, and the neatly-scripted B-plots for Elaine and George that are always tied up with an ironic final turn. He’s a legendary wild card character—and yet it’s hard to watch Richards at work and not think about his own retirement from stand-up comedy, after that career-destroying 2006 incident at LA’s Laugh Factory. His early beginnings were in improv and a US Army theatrical troupe in West Germany, so a sense of live-wire unpredictability is the comic’s greatest strength—and, when warped into caustic bigotry, ultimately his downfall.
But back when ‘The Sniffing Accountant’ first aired in 1993, Richards was still the man, and Kramer’s hedonistic power move was perhaps his greatest moment. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has said she was “in awe” watching the display live. An estimated 19% of American households tuned in for its premiere, and those same numbers were repeated in March of the following year: before YouTube and the show’s eternal syndication, this was a hilarious circus act that truly had to be seen to be believed. Imagine asking five random Americans what they watched on TV last night, and being able to count on one of them to say, “omg Kramer did this cool-ass thing…”
So how hard could it be? I’m in need of a new party trick, and “here’s to feeling good all the time” seemed like aspirational—if unrealistic—words to live by. Kramer boasts that he loves cigarettes (“I suck ‘em down like Coca-Cola”), whereas I’m more like Grease’s Sandra Dee (“I get ill from one cigarette *cough cough cough*”). There had to be some technique to doing this right: was the cigarette merely a cancer-causing ornament while you’re mostly focusing on the beer?
Trying out The Kramer late at night by myself like a true loser, I kept the deathstick firmly in one corner of my mouth, hoping to resemble Sam Jackson’s nonchalant puffing in Jurassic Park. But that first beer immediately made the cigarette impossibly soggy. What you gotta do is squish the cig up against the side of your glass, forming as much of a water-tight seal from the sudsy beverage as possible.
Kramer’s insistence on wearing sunglasses indoors and drinking from a stein rather than a bottle also complicated things. Every drag of the cigarette would trap smoke inside the glass and behind the sunnies, which is very distracting when you’re trying to sip up a big cup of Budweiser. The smoking forced me to take too many breaks from the ideal single chug, so I gave up and went to bed smelling like an ashtray.
The following day I dressed up in the same grey jumper, feeling optimistic about a second attempt. Maybe it was the gorgeous post-lunch sunshine, maybe it helped having rewatched the full episode that morning—whatever was going on, it worked.
Rewatching the successful Kramer recreation, I wish there’d been more obnoxious clouds of smoke from the cigarette: it’s not really impressive enough to break out in the smokers area at a pub in order to win the hearts of some hip new friends. But in terms of stupid, cool-looking things I’ll never do again, it gave me a greater sense of accomplishment than other stuff I’ve done for this column. Here’s to being an idiot for fun, all the time.
