Season 3’s “The Parking Garage” lands in the highest tier of the Seinfeld Funny Meter with more than humor.
Born in the depths of Covid-induced boredom with unbridled enthusiasm, my quest to rewatch and rank all 169 original Seinfeld episodes finally crossed the finish line this summer.
You might even say I became master of my domain.
Sure, there are plenty of “best of” attempts to chronicle Seinfeld episodes, seasons, characters, etc. to appease my fan-man appetite. Their analysis just never quite fit my reality. More urban sombrero than chocolate babka.
Giddy-up!
The Seinfeld Funny Meter
The task was exceedingly self-indulgent: devise a rating system based primarily on my laughs, sit back, sequentially watch all nine seasons of the world’s greatest sitcom, and rank them accordingly.
Fluent in Sein-language since its 1990 inaugural season, my relationship with Seinfeld had waned on the back-nine of life’s work. Yes, you could even say there was shrinkage. There were outdated premises, ebbing tastes, Kramer’s racist rants, and many cultural sea changes - #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, MAGA, LGTBQ, etc. – to color my lens. Had my perspective shifted so much that I couldn’t find humor in the irrational fears, obsessive thoughts, compulsive behavior, stereotyping, and things about humanity we are ashamed to acknowledge but which Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer magically played out for us in the pre-Blackberry 90s?
This summer’s New York Times bestselling soul-searching and repentant memoir of a tortured Michael Richards (aka Cosmo Kramer) only further warped conclusions in my mind of what Seinfeld was or what it had become to me.
Would Seinfeld, in the pantheon of American sitcoms, become a rusted signpost forever moored to a cringing past like Three’s Company or The Cosby Show? For if it did, the “nipple” on my soul could be exposed for all to see like Kramer’s errant Christmas card photo shoot of Elaine (“The Pick” S4/E12).
Only a rudimentary and unpatented Seinfeld Funny Meter, below, stood between me and answers to these questions.
As you can see, rating tiers are by half-number increments with 5.0 as the ceiling (12% of all episodes) and 1.5 as the floor. Yes, this presumes a modicum of laughing always existed. Heck, only 13% of shows sank into the “No Soup For You” or lower categories. 3.5 is considered average laughing, and only two seasons fell below that line (Seasons 4 and 9). All others, even maligned Season 1, cleared that bar, as shown below:
Season averages may come as a surprise to some, but it’s important to note that this system took into account every episode—ga-ga’s and snoozers—and is based primarily on laugh ratios.
Another small surprise…the average of all episodes (3.71) was shockingly just north of the average. Folks, this is not an average comedy.
Was I not ga-ga anymore?
(Note: If you want to see which episodes achieved “That’s Gold, Jerry! Gold!” status, my list is at the end along with favorite scenes)
The biggest aberration may be Season 4. Many point to it as one of the greatest of all seasons, sandwiched in the middle of a three-year run that cemented their place in American pop culture.
But in this system, Season 4 tanked. Its strong classics (“Did you double-dip your chip?”, Jerry getting caught in a mistaken nose-pick, Calvin Klein stealing Kramer’s beach perfume idea, “We’re not gay!...Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”) and a clever true-to-life story arc pitching a sitcom about “nothing” to NBC suits were undermined by a ton of “No Soup For You” misses as well. Let us forget “The Handicap Spot “where we hated more than just The Drake and the Los Angeles Smog Strangler trip in “The Pilot,” which only strangled my laughs.
But the most telling reveal of the Seinfeld Funny Meter came in Season 3. Just as they were coming out of their infancy, masterpiece after masterpiece propelled it past all other seasons. Eight episodes reached the pinnacle 5.0 rating almost tripling any other season.
Reflecting back, the early seasons also coincided with my release into the real-world which provided perfect coming-of-age fodder for a fledgling urban planner. In those days, young people did not exactly flock to big city centers like they would in the following decade. Seinfeld’s 1990-93 was the first real window of urban America that Hollywood TV dramatized…well…nothing. Hill Street Blues it was not.
Many of us suburban dwellers were very familiar with nothing. Except now that nothingness existed at a garage-less mid-rise apartment hub on 129 W. 81st. In a deli with soup. In wooded Central Park with joggers. All within walking distance, a cab ride, or transit to amenities like bookstores, coffee shops, bakeries, bars, eateries, laundromats, and movie theaters (even a Kenny Rogers’ Roasters would foreshadow real-world gentrification issues to come). All with your best friends and an eclectic array of side characters. I see you Maestro, Jackie Chiles, and Uncle Leo.
Jackie Chiles (Phil Morris) - a parody of celebrity attorney Johnnie Cochran
In short, I wanted that life. More, I needed that life to be who I wanted to be. And Seinfeld was the cheat code.
By the fall of 1992, Season 3 hit the air just after I arrived in Washington, DC’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood to pursue a graduate degree in urban planning. DC is where I first witnessed an underground resurgence of college graduates and gay neighbors from all over the country setting up beachheads in dicey quadrants of the district, several years before Friends in 1995 and Sex in the City in 1998 would do for millennials what Seinfeld did for Gen X: romanticize big city living. It all would serve as a precursor to 2000–2010 being the first decade in generations where more college graduates moved to downtowns than the suburbs.
“I think I want to be a city planner”
As I re-watched the magic of Season 3, no episodes were as influentially funny to my city planner local government persona as these three below; unprecedented breakthroughs that spoke to me then and even louder now for their foresight.
The Parking Garage (S3/E6): This episode is most memorable for being filmed entirely in one setting and mostly in real-time—a suburban mall parking garage on a Saturday afternoon—repeating a groundbreaking technique used in their risky but critically acclaimed “The Chinese Restaurant” (S2/E11).
The first thing you notice in this episode is the haggard and sour disposition of Jerry in a New Jersey mall on a Saturday afternoon helping Kramer find “the world’s cheapest air conditioner.” In 1992, malls still stirred the nation’s collective blood on weekends. Not this group. The humor lies in the gang selling a little of their Upper West Side soul to be interlopers trapped in an auto-dependent world of suburban convenience, cheap consumerism, penny loafers, and physiques, ultimately wasting precious weekend hours.
The biggest crux of the story—they can’t find their car because “everything looks the same. We’re like rats in some experiment!”—is a direct censure of suburban monoculture. Uses not mixed. Pedestrians blunted. Sprawled parking. Windowless conforming buildings. It’s as if Jane Jacobs wrote the script. If the storyline is not metaphorical enough, Elaine’s fish perishing in a plastic bag of water while she, Jerry, George, and Kramer perish as fish out of water is the chef’s kiss.
In the end, the real joke was that this episode’s theatrical repudiation of the modern mall, which had been emasculating downtowns like theirs for generations, foreshadowed a real decline in malls and the palpable resurgence of downtowns just a decade later. 2007 marked the first year since the 1950s that a mall had not been built in America. Other reports predict only 150 will be left by 2032, compared to a high of 2,500 in the 1980s.
Now that’s funny.
The Alternate Side (S3/E11): All of the storylines here revolve around a nuanced parking regulation utilized in many big-city neighborhoods where on-street parking is a premium. The alternate side refers to alternating which side of the street you can park on so a municipality can street sweep at a given time of the week. This not only prevents the damming of stormwater flows by road debris and promotes aesthetically pleasing streets, but it is also a best practice to improve water quality in streams and rivers by reducing pollutant run-off. A common good in a dense setting.
Scenes from “The Alternate Side”
Comparatively, the episode does not troll on suburban life like “The Parking Garage.” Instead, it picks this unremarkable underground practice of running cities I came across in DC and reacquainted with while visiting my daughters in Chicago.
My experience in local government also confirmed that parking is a close second to potholes for making people lose their shit. And nowhere is this more comedically dramatized than the unhinging of jobless George trying to fill in for the old guy who moves cars to the alternate side, but which cascades into shutting down a Woody Allen movie production, crashing Jerry’s rental car, and delaying emergency vehicles for Elaine’s chummy 66-year-old stroke victim. It’s these organic workarounds of innovation by real people, not planners or government officials, that make cities function and urban dwellers such an adaptable species. Respect it. Because when it breaks down…chaos, disorder, and madness.
The Subway(S3/E13): A variation to the single-set breakthroughs of “The Chinese Restaurant” and “The Parking Garage,” this episode tells the same-day story of each of the four cast members from the standpoint of their related subway experiences. After my experiences on DC’s Metro, I would come to appreciate this episode more than any in the series.
“The Subway”
Each cast member has their own reason for taking the subway that day—Elaine’s lesbian wedding, jobless George’s job interview, Jerry’s trip to the impound lot, and Kramer’s parking ticket restitution. Yet, all will be deviated (or deviant) in some manner. Give the writers credit—they nailed the oddities and idiosyncrasies riding light-rail. These are not caricatures. From Kramer’s opening slapstick choreograph for a seat, fighting over the left-over newspaper scraps, the busker performing for tips, Jerry falling asleep on strangers, George getting stuck in the doors, and Elaine’s profanity-laced inner monologue of a claustrophobic meltdown, there are fantastic nods to all who ride big city public transit. Sans the urine smell.
Public transit is a giant piece of smart growth infrastructure that makes a city run efficiently, reduces car dependence, enhances the walkability of neighborhoods, incentivizes compact development, induces better air quality, and equitably enables people of all incomes to live and work in a city. That’s a planner’s perspective.
Seinfeld’s perspective is funnier. It’s real.
This wouldn’t be the last time the show uses public transit as its muse. One of the greatest Kramer scenes of all-time is from aboard a transit bus as only he can re-tell in “The Fire” (S5/E19).
While Season 3 was a coming of age for me, the ultimate affirmation of inter-relatedness between my inspired path and Seinfeld came in Season 8 with these words:
“I think I want to be a city planner. Why limit myself to one building when I can design a whole city!”
Get out!!
The epiphany of a 2.0 GPA-fueled Steven Koren for a potential scholarship in “The Van Buren Boys” (S8/E14) vaulted city planners into the forefront of what was arguably the zeitgeist of 1990s America. All at the lampooned expense of our professional cousins, those “art school dropouts” known as architects—the exalted alter-ego of George since “The Stakeout” (S1/E2).
“This is Steven Koren. His G.P.A. is a solid 2.0! Right in that meaty part of the curve - not showing off, not falling behind.” - George Costanza, “The Van Buren Boys”
Finding the Spaceship
By the end of Seinfeld’s run in Season 9, a formulaic groove had set in, an era not necessarily known for greatness or risk-taking. Not unlike our own lives, the characters bathed in more cynicism, bad behavior turned mean-spiritedness, and not giving a shit as they ironically matured. The storylines and their convergence grew more contrived. Character growth, particularly for George and Elaine, unpleasantly retreated, along with my laughs. “The Nap” (S8/E18), where George undertakes a remodel underneath his Yankee’s office desk for midday naps, is a good example of a less relatable quirky predicament that leaves me smiling but not remarking and howling around the water cooler.
Overall, this trip down memory lane was mostly low-stakes fun and games, a 20-minute reunion every day. But unlike Elaine searching for humor in an ambiguous New Yorker cartoon or Mr. Pitt's search for a spaceship in 3D art, deeper meaning was less elusive.
Mr. Pitt deep into a magic eye poster in “The Gymnast” (S6/E6)
I still laughed and laughed harder than ever. But it wasn’t the easy laughter of a loyal groupthink follower along for a familiar ride with my bros; this felt more purposeful, more personal, more appreciative of humor that transcended time as the wheat separated from the chaff. There is value in revisiting the past—if only through the prism of a sitcom—not just for the sake of nostalgia or comfort, but as a way of processing where we came from and where we’re going.
In the beginning, I would have been very happy to conclude I hadn’t changed. That I laughed just the same. But by the end, I would have been very disappointed to learn I hadn’t. Or not realize the significance of a life’s inflection point.
We all possess certain biases in our lives, and therefore in our humor, amplified by changing vantage points. The things we see. The things we want to see. Like a living Rorschach test. We all see something different. We see ourselves.
Apologies to those who say Seinfeld is about nothing.
Decades later, the show is outrageously, egregiously, and preposterously about something.
Bill, I really enjoy your in depth use of Seinfeld to explain urban planning to people who do understand what “planners” really do. You came to city planning from the exact opposite perspective as myself. Typically, city planners do grow up in the suburbs and their first knowledge of the planning profession is based off that perspective after moving to a Downtown environment I came at as a city girl in a place with “no zoning” stance and official rules preventing the city from taking a stance on zoning, and moved out to the inner ‘burbs after i became a successful planner.
I hope you are doing well at Washburn. Annie Driver
Bill, I really enjoy your in depth use of Seinfeld to explain urban planning to people who do understand what “planners” really do. You came to city planning from the exact opposite perspective as myself. Typically, city planners do grow up in the suburbs and their first knowledge of the planning profession is based off that perspective after moving to a Downtown environment I came at as a city girl in a place with “no zoning” stance and official rules preventing the city from taking a stance on zoning, and moved out to the inner ‘burbs after i became a successful planner.
I hope you are doing well at Washburn. Annie Driver