Over the course of its 180 episodes, Seinfeld sometimes went to some pretty weird places for comedy. Some of its darkest episodes, like “The Limo,” in which George (Jason Alexander) unwittingly poses as a famous white supremacist, and “The Opera,” which sees the return of “Crazy” Joe Davola, were written by the same man, Larry Charles. Charles also penned the Season 5 episode, “The Bris,” which covers everything from suicide, the ethics of circumcision, and one of Seinfeld’s most bizarre plot lines, Kramer’s (Michael Richards) discovery of the so-called pig-man. While visiting friends who recently had a baby, Kramer accidentally barges into the wrong hospital room and is horrified to find what he refers to as a “pig man.” As recently revealed by Charles in his memoir Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts and Laughter, the pig-man was actually inspired by the 1973 British satirical drama O Lucky Man! starring Malcolm McDowell.
Larry Charles Was Responsible for Some of ‘Seinfeld’s Weirdest Episodes
Described as “a show about nothing,” much of Seinfeld’s comedy revolves around mundane situations and petty relationship conflict, but will sometimes venture into dark and absurd territory. Though the series had a talented team of writers, including Larry David himself, Charles was the man behind some of the show’s most memorable episodes. Along with the groundbreaking Season 4 episode, “The Outing,” Charles also brought the show to some of its darkest places, comedically. In the Season 2 episode, “The Baby Shower,” Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld) is shot and killed during a dream sequence. In his Season 5 episode, “The Fire,” George reaches a new low when he pushes children and an old woman out of the way to escape a house fire during a child’s birthday party. “The Opera” from Season 4 feels like a mini-horror movie when “Crazy” Joe Davola (Peter B. Crombie) stalks Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) dressed as Pagliacci the clown.
Seinfeld is also known for incorporating references to movies and other television series – both real and fictional – into its episodes and plot lines. There are references to and parodies of movies like Midnight Cowboy, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, JFK, and more. Charles did so in a couple of episodes as well, creating a Dragnet-style plot line in the Season 3 episode, “The Library,” featuring Philip Baker Hall in one of the show’s best guest roles. And for one of Seinfeld’s darkest and most bizarre episodes, Season 5’s “The Bris,” Charles made reference to Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! when Kramer discovers what he believes to be a pig-man at the hospital.
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The Pig-Man in “The Bris” Was Inspired by a Scene From ‘O Lucky Man!’
All three plot lines of “The Bris” cover some pretty dark territory. The episode revolves around Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer’s friends Stan (Tom Alan Robbins) and Myra (Jeannie Elias), who have just had their first baby. While visiting them in the hospital after the birth, George gloats about his perfect parking spot right in front of the hospital doors, but things quickly take a dark turn when a patient takes his own life by jumping off the hospital roof and landing on George’s car. On his way up to see the baby, Kramer misremembers the room number and walks into the wrong room, where he finds a pig-man (half pig, half man). He soon launches into a conspiracy about the government performing genetic mutation experiments on humans to create pig-men armies.
Later, Stan and Myra ask Jerry and Elaine to be their son’s godparents, leaving it up to Elaine to arrange the bris and hire a mohel, and tasking Jerry with holding the baby during the circumcision. This episode pushed the envelope in multiple ways. Though it wasn’t the first episode to make light of suicide, Jason Alexander took issue with the way the mohel was portrayed, threatening to boycott the episode if Larry David didn’t tone down the character, which he found to be anti-Semitic, and David ultimately acquiesced.
Charles took some big swings for this episode, and by far one of the weirdest plot lines in the history of the series surrounds Kramer’s pig-man conspiracy. In a recent interview with NPR, Charles discusses how he was the writer who further developed Kramer’s character and gave him his conspiratorial tendencies, so it makes sense that he would be the one to write Kramer as a believer in the existence of human-animal hybrids developed by the government. Kramer “frees” the pig-man in the end, giving him a piggyback ride out of the hospital, though Seinfeld never fully shows us what the pig-man looks like. But if you were imagining something like the doctors from the “Eye of the Beholder” episode of The Twilight Zone, the reality of what this character is based on is a lot more disturbing.
The pig-man is actually based on a scene from the 1973 surreal comedy drama O Lucky Man!, the second film in the Mick Travis Trilogy. O Lucky Man! features a series of outlandish vignettes in the picaresque adventures of Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), including one in which he signs up to undergo mysterious medical experiments. While exploring the medical research facility, he comes across another man in a hospital bed and asks him how much they’re paying him. When he doesn’t answer, Mick pulls the sheets back to discover, well, a pig-man. Only his head is human, while his body is that of a large pig.
It’s a disturbing image to be sure, but, like the pig-man in Seinfeld, it’s played for laughs. Horrified, Mick screams bloody murder, runs through the halls of the hospital, and smashes through a second-story window to escape. It’s safe to say that wouldn’t fly on NBC.
Of course, there was never actually a pig-man in Seinfeld, with Kramer ultimately admitting he was just a “fat little mental patient.” Nevertheless, this unhinged scene from O Lucky Man! helped turn “The Bris” into an iconic episode, for better or for worse, inspiring one of those bizarre plot lines that makes Seinfeld stand out as such a unique show.
All episodes of Seinfeld can be streamed on Netflix in the U.S.
Seinfeld
- Release Date
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1989 – 1998-00-00
- Network
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NBC
