Top: Michael Richards (left) and Jerry Seinfeld.
Bottom: Jason Alexander (left) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
November 18, 1992: The NBC sitcom Seinfeld airs its most famous (or infamous) episode, "The Contest."
Jerry Seinfeld (playing a fictionalized version of himself), his ex-girlfriend and still-friend Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and his across-the-hall neighbor Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) are having lunch at Monk's Café, near their apartments on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Jerry's longtime best friend, George Costanza (Jason Alexander), walks in, and confesses that, while visiting his parents in Queens, he used the bathroom, found a magazine with some pictures of beautiful women in it, and, how shall I put this... took matters into his own hands. And his mother caught him.
Why George would mention this while the others were eating, only he knew. But he said he would never do it again. The others don't believe him. Jerry says he can go longer without doing it than George. George says, "Care to make it interesting?" In other words, bet money on it. All four of them get in on it, although George, taking note that it's different for a woman, tells Elaine, "You gotta give us odds!" She offers to put up $150, to the $100 for the guys. ($100 then would be about $210 in 2022 money.)
Jerry had told Kramer, "You'll be out before we get the check!" Sure enough, Kramer is the first to plunk his money down on Jerry's kitchen counter, having seen a naked woman walking around in an apartment across the street from Jerry's. For Jerry, the situation is complicated by this, and also by the fact that he's dating a woman named Marla (played by a pre-Frasier Jane Leeves) who claims to be a virgin. It's never stated whether actually having sex violates the term of the agreement.
In George's case, the situation is complicated by the fact that, after she saw him doing it, his mother was so shocked that she fell, hurt her back, had to be hospitalized, and was given a room alongside a younger woman, who received a daily sponge-bath from a nice-looking nurse. George could only see the silhouettes through a curtain, but he couldn't take his eyes off them.
(This would be lampooned 3 months later, in "The Outing," when a reporter mistakenly believed that Jerry and George were a gay couple, George's mother saw the story in the newspaper, threw her back out again, and, this time, in the bed next-door, there was a buff young man getting a sponge-bath from a buff young male nurse. Again, George could only see the silhouettes through a curtain, but it was bad enough.)
In Elaine's case, the situation is complicated by the fact that John F. Kennedy Jr. is working out at the same gym she goes to. And complicated further by the fact that they start dating, and that JFK Jr. had a reputation for womanizing similar to that of his father. (The actor playing him is not credited, and his face is not shown.)
But, other than Kramer, they all claim that they haven't "caved." The expression "Master of Your Domain" was entered into the American pop-culture lexicon. At Monk's, George claims, "I am King of the County," Jerry claims, "Lord of the Manor," and Elaine claims, "I'm Queen of the Castle."
Well, Elaine caves next, and Jerry says, "Oh, my God, the Queen is dead! I thought you'd make it at least into the Spring!" And one thing leads to another, and, as the show so often did, the strings of the plots run together. Marla is about to let Jerry have sex with her, and he tells her she has no idea of what a relief this is, and that proves to be a mistake, because he has to tell her why. She leaves him, and as she walks out of the building, she runs into JFK Jr., who has gotten tired of waiting for Elaine (who had told him that was her building, which it wasn't), and they end up in bed.
Oddly, the episode ends without revealing whether Jerry or George won. The implication is that, after watching the naked woman across the street together, George went home, and he and Jerry "caved" at the same time. Ten months later, the episode "The Puffy Shirt" aired, and George claimed to have won The Contest. But in the show's finale, when everybody thinks the plane is going to crash, George doesn't want it on his conscience anymore, and confesses to Jerry: "I cheated in The Contest!"
It should be noted that this episode and the 1996 episode "The Abstinence" can't both be canon. In the latter episode, George says, "I can do six weeks while standing on my head. I'm like a sexual camel." Furthermore, in that episode, not getting any action, even on his own, made George stop thinking about sex, and allowed his true brainpower to flourish, and made him smarter almost immediately. In "The Contest," George was just as dumb, and just as obsessed with sex, in the first couple of days. Unless, of course, he had already "cheated."
"The Contest" is one of several "Seinfeld" episodes that’s hard to watch now -- but not, in this case, because of the subject matter. Rather, it's because John F. Kennedy Jr. is a character in it, and he died young, a little more than a year after the show's finale.
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November 18, 1992 was a Wednesday. This was also the day that DC Comics released Superman #75, featuring the story "The Death of Superman." I have a separate entry for this event. The fact that Jerry Seinfeld is a major Superman fan, with a Superman magnet visible on his refrigerator and other memorabilia in his apartment, makes it even weirder.
Baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. But there were 3 games played in the NBA. The Orlando Magic beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 120-110 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. The Utah Jazz beat the Boston Celtics, 92-91 at the Boston Garden. The Phoenix Suns beat the Sacramento Kings, 127-111 at the new AmericaWest Arena. (It's now named the Mortgage Matchup Center.)
There were 4 games played in the NHL. The New Jersey Devils beat the Buffalo Sabres, 3-2 at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands. Valeri Zelepukin, Tom Chorske and Alexander Semak scored the goals for New Jersey.
The Minnesota North Stars beat the Washington Capitals, 5-4 at the Capital Centre in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland. The Hartford Whalers beat the St. Louis Blues, 5-2 at the Hartford Civic Center. (It's now named the PeoplesBank Arena.) The Edmonton Oilers beat the Vancouver Canucks, 4-2 at the Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton.
None of these games held a moment of silence in memory of Superman before they started.
