Seinfeld Reference – Page 7 – A website about nothing

The Soup Nazi

Jerry, George and Elaine go out to a new soup stand Kramer has been raving about; its owner is referred to as the “Soup Nazi,” due to his temperament and insistence on a strict manner of behavior while ordering. Jerry explains the procedure for ordering, which George accepts, but Elaine rejects. En route, Elaine notices a sidewalk furniture dealer with an armoire for sale and decides to stop and buy it. However, when she returns to her building with it, the building superintendent tells her there is no moving allowed on Sundays.

When Jerry and George get to the soup stand, George follows the procedure but notices that he did not get the free bread with his soup order. Jerry tells him to let it go, but George asks for some and is told he will have to pay $2 for it. When George objects, claiming that everybody in front of him got free bread, he is told that the price for bread is now $3. When George continues to protest, he quickly has his money returned and his soup is brusquely taken back, with the catchphrase “No soup for you!”

Over the past weeks, Jerry has been annoying George and Elaine with his open affection and baby talk (calling each other “Schmoopie”) with his new girlfriend Sheila (Alexandra Wentworth). During another visit to the soup stand, when Sheila will not stop kissing Jerry in the line of customers, the Soup Nazi orders her out of the line, and Jerry is forced to pretend he does not know her. When George finds out, he admits his annoyance with their “baby talk” romantic behavior to Jerry. Jerry later tells Sheila he was just joking at the soup stand and makes up with her. When George finds out, he begins to act similarly with Susan to make a point. Susan misinterprets George’s intentions and thinks that George is finally enjoying showing his feelings in public, continuing to act that way after Jerry again breaks up with Sheila.

Elaine, still awaiting the chance to move her new armoire upstairs, asks Kramer to guard the piece of furniture on the street overnight. When he arrives, she goes to the soup stand to get him soup. While she is gone, some “street toughs” intimidate Kramer and steal the armoire. At the soup stand, Elaine ignores everyone’s prior advice and annoys the Soup Nazi with her behavior. He refuses her soup and bans her from coming to his restaurant for one year. She returns to her building to find Kramer without the armoire.

Later, Kramer, who has become friends with the Soup Nazi, tells him the story of the stolen armoire in passing. The Soup Nazi offers Kramer an antique armoire he has in storage in his basement. Kramer gives the armoire to Elaine as a replacement for her stolen one.

Elaine goes to thank the Soup Nazi for the armoire, but the Soup Nazi angrily declares that he never would have given it to Kramer if he had known it was for her – instead, he would have smashed it to pieces with a hatchet. Offended, Elaine returns home, where she and Jerry subsequently discover the Soup Nazi’s secret soup recipes, which have been left behind in a drawer of the old armoire.

She returns to his shop, recipes in hand, and declares that she is going to destroy him and his business by exposing the recipes. Her glee matches his in the way that he brushed her off earlier. Feeling ruined, the Soup Nazi decides to close the business and move to Argentina and starts giving away his remaining soup, which Newman and Jerry hurriedly try to take advantage of.

The Hot Tub

George picks up the habit of swearing from some visiting Houston Astros representatives, specifically “bastard” and “son of a bitch.” During the time of the New York City Marathon, Elaine has a Trinidad & Tobago or Trinbagonian runner named Jean-Paul as her house guest. Jean-Paul had overslept and missed the big race at the last Olympic Games, and Jerry obsesses with ensuring that it doesn’t happen again. Jean-Paul hears George swearing, and he thinks that’s how all Americans talk, also noticing that Elaine has difficulty setting clocks.

Afterwards, Jean-Paul calls a baby in Elaine’s building a bastard, and the baby turns out to actually be illegitimate. He follows suit with her superintendent, addressing to him as a “son of a bitch,” being thrown out of the building, and eventually staying with Jerry Seinfeld, who gets him a hotel room.

In the hotel, Jerry fears that he has offended the wake-up call guy, and he brings Jean-Paul to his apartment. Kramer installs a hot tub in his apartment, but its heater breaks while Kramer is asleep in it, causing the temperature to plummet. To fix it, Kramer gets an industrial strength heater, which shorts out the electricity in the building, shutting off the alarm clocks and causing Jean-Paul and Jerry to oversleep. Jean-Paul manages to get into the race but is burned when he grabs Kramer’s cup of hot tea (which he mistakes for a cup of water) at the finish line; this was not intentional: Kramer was struggling to reheat his core temperature and Jean-Paul took his hot tea by mistake.

The Wink

Elaine dates the man from her wake-up service. A bit of grapefruit pulp, from Jerry’s breakfast, gets into George’s eye and causes problems for him when his winks keep getting misinterpreted. Jerry’s healthy diet conflicts with his dating of Elaine’s cousin, Holly (Stacey Travis), who expects him to eat mutton. Kramer promises a sick boy that the New York Yankees’ Paul O’Neill will hit two home runs for him, so he can get back a birthday card that he sold based on George’s wink.

The Maestro

George decides that he should help a security guard who works at Susan’s uncle’s store and must stand all day. Elaine begins dating Bob Cobb (Mark Metcalf), a.k.a. the “Maestro”, after meeting him through Kramer, and immerses herself in classical music. Kramer gets an out-of-court settlement in his lawsuit that nets him free coffee at any of the chain’s locations around the world instead of money, much to Jackie’s dismay, as he and Kramer could have been very rich if Kramer had declined the first offer. The Maestro’s unsolicited declaration that there are no houses to rent anywhere in Tuscany prompts Jerry to ask Poppy about the matter, and he is referred to Poppy’s cousin, who makes him an offer he can’t refuse.

George delivers a rocking chair to the security guard, who falls asleep in it; the store gets robbed as a result. At the credits, we see Elaine and the Maestro in his house in Tuscany when they see Jerry and Kramer arrive in a taxi across the street.

The Postponement

Elaine’s dog problem is solved by a rabbi in her apartment complex with a cable show. Elaine later confides in the rabbi about her insecurity about George getting engaged. The rabbi later tells several people, including Jerry, about Elaine’s insecurity towards George’s wedding.

Kramer’s involvement in the dognapping worries him. George decides he wants to postpone the engagement until March 21 (Spring Equinox). His first attempt to postpone the wedding leads to Susan becoming hysterical and bursting into tears. Later George gets the idea to be nonchalant about the whole thing after watching a man break up with his girlfriend at Monk’s. Intending to try a similar approach, he breaks down in tears and begs Susan to postpone the wedding; touched by his show of emotions, Susan agrees to postpone the wedding.

Kramer and Jerry go to see Plan 9 from Outer Space at the cinema. (Look carefully in the background as they wait in line; you can see posters for “The Long, Long Trailer” among others.) Kramer sneaks in gourmet coffee, spills it, and scalds himself; he says he has a case for a lawsuit (an obvious allusion to the well-known McDonald’s coffee case).

The episode ends with Susan and George watching the rabbi’s TV show and the rabbi recounting the story Elaine told him including a part about George (the rabbi references both Elaine and George by name) wanting to know if it was still cheating if he paid for a prostitute while engaged.

The Engagement

George breaks up with a woman after she beats him in a game of chess. When he tells Jerry about it, they both realize that they have done nothing with their lives and decide they are going to make some changes. However, being told about the consequences of marriage by Kramer, Jerry backs out, unknown to George. Elaine comes in and tells Jerry and Kramer that a barking dog is keeping her from getting a good night’s sleep. Kramer says he knows someone who can “fix her problem”.

They go to see Newman. After seeing Newman’s clear disdain for dogs, Elaine becomes unsure if she really wants to go through with his plan. She is undecided at the moment, but later calls Newman back and says she wants to do it. Jerry takes his girlfriend Melanie out to dinner, but is bothered when she eats her peas one at a time.

George, after contemplating what to do with his life all afternoon, finally decides to visit his old girlfriend Susan Ross. When she buzzes him up and answers the door, he asks her, “Will you marry me?” The next day, George visits Jerry to tell him the news: he is getting married (after hours of convincing). All seems well until Jerry informs him that he broke up with Melanie because of the way she ate her peas. George is angry that Jerry did not keep his side of the “pact” to change, made the day before at Monk’s, but Jerry convinces him he should be happy that he is engaged.

Later that night, Elaine, Kramer and Newman rent a van and prepare to steal the dog. Jerry goes to George’s apartment and asks if he is ready to go see a movie (Firestorm with Harrison Ford), but George tells him Susan wants to see a different movie (The Muted Heart with Glenn Close and Sally Field). It is at this time that George is showing signs of regret about his decision.

This episode features Mario Joyner as a movie patron who exits a theater with Jerry talking about a great Harrison Ford movie they just saw in front of a newly engaged George and Susan. Mario Joyner will reappear in the episode The Puerto Rican Day Parade as “Maroon Golf.”

Newman returns to the van with the dog and Elaine is surprised that it is so small. They try to get it to bark to verify if it is the right dog, but to no avail. Kramer drives them far away from the city, before finally stopping near Monticello. He gets out and leaves the dog at a random doorstep, but it rips a piece of his shirt (with a tag from Rudy’s vintage shop) before he can let it go. Back home after the movie, Jerry calls George to inform him that a New York Yankees game is being rerun if he wanted to watch it, but Susan wants him to come to bed and watch an episode of Mad About You that she taped. George again voices his annoyance at Jerry that he backed out on the pact.

The dog manages to find its way back to its house and owner, carrying the piece of Kramer’s shirt it had ripped and Elaine is again woken up during the night by its barking. The next day, Jerry tells her the news of George’s engagement. With the shirt scrap as evidence, police officers visit Kramer and Newman and nab them for dognapping. Newman responds to this turn of events lightly, having ample confidence that he will not be arrested. The episode ends with Kramer, Newman and Elaine sitting in the back of a police car. Elaine decides to make some changes with her life.

The Understudy

Jerry is dating Gennice, the understudy of stage performer Bette Midler, and a crybaby who apparently cries for foolish reasons (for instance, crying when she drops her hotdog). In a parody of the 1994 Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan scandal, George accidentally injures Midler in a softball game and the understudy has to take over Midler’s part in the musical Rochelle Rochelle. Enraged New Yorkers turn against George, Jerry and Gennice, while Midler is nursed back to health by Kramer.

Meanwhile, Elaine brings Frank Costanza to her favorite beauty shop to translate the jokes being made at her expense by her Korean manicurists. Frank runs into an old flame but Elaine is thrown out of the shop and banned for spying. Despondent, she wanders the streets of New York, where she meets J. Peterman, and finds herself a new job. When Gennice finally takes the stage, she has a problem with the laces on her boot and, in an act reminiscent of Harding’s bootlace incident, tearfully asks that she be allowed to start over.

The Face Painter

Elaine’s boyfriend David Puddy (who’s a big New Jersey Devils fan) paints his face when he goes to the game against the New York Rangers. After the game his rowdy behavior makes a priest believe that he has seen the devil. A chimpanzee throws a banana peel at Kramer. George tries to tell his girlfriend Siena (Katy Selverstone) that he loves her. Jerry refuses to give the “necessary” follow-up courtesy thank you for the hockey tickets. Elaine is upset that Puddy is a face-painter, and demands he stops or she breaks up with him. He agrees, and instead of going to the next game with his face painted, he goes with his chest painted. At the end of the episode, Elaine visits the priest who is recovering from “seeing the devil.” She is wearing white and a light shines right behind her, leading the priest to believe he has now seen the Virgin Mary.

The Diplomat’s Club

Jerry plans to meet a supermodel girlfriend at an airport lounge (the “Diplomat’s Club” of the title) after returning from a quick air roundtrip to a “gig” in Ithaca, but his assistant makes the trip a nightmare. Elaine is planning to tell Mr. Pitt she is quitting, but reconsiders when he tells her that she’s going to be in his will. George tries to prove to his boss, Morgan, that he is not a racist, as Morgan has been offended when George tells him that he looks like Sugar Ray Leonard (“I suppose we all look alike to you”). Mr. Pitt goes to the pharmacy and mistakes Jerry for a pharmacist, as he is re-stocking a display that Kramer had knocked over. Jerry then proceeds to give Mr. Pitt some medications. Kramer, loitering in the Diplomat’s Club waiting for Jerry to return from Ithaca, meets a rich Texan, Earl Haffler, with whom he starts making bets on aircraft arrival times. In Ithaca, Jerry’s assistant invites the pilot to his comedy routine, then warns Jerry not to be nervous about it, which makes Jerry extremely nervous, causing him to “bomb”, leading the officious assistant to harangue the pilot. When Jerry tries to fly back to New York, the same pilot, flying the return flight, throws him off the plane, delaying the flight. The ditzy assistant rents a car and tries to drive Jerry back, but gets lost and drives into a swimming pool, which leads to TV news coverage. Meanwhile, George is so desperate to find an African-American to pose as his friend, that he asks the African-American man whose house he invaded in “The Couch”. When he refuses, George tries to befriend Karl, the exterminator who fumigated Jerry’s apartment for fleas in “The Doodle”.

After Mr. Pitt nearly dies due to taking a cold medication which interacted badly with his heart medication, he suspects Elaine is trying to kill him after he sees Jerry on the news, and recognizes him as the “pharmacist” who gave him the medications. His attorney remembers that Jerry called for Elaine, earlier in the show, and assumes that they are in a plot to kill him, now that she is in his will, leading Pitt to fire Elaine. Kramer loses his betting winnings after Elaine drops by the Club looking for the model and informs him that Jerry caused a disturbance on the flight from Ithaca (Kramer’s big final bet), delaying the flight by an hour. When the Texan hears this, he thinks that the betting was rigged, and tears up his check to Kramer. George & Karl go to a posh restaurant where Morgan is eating. George asks Karl to pose as his friend. When Karl introduces himself as the exterminator, George covers up with a phony story. The plot backfires when Karl admits to Morgan that he is actually an exterminator. Morgan then tells George that he has sunk to a new low and leaves in disgust. When George calls for the check, the black waiter sees Morgan leave and says “Sugar Ray Leonard can eat here on the house”, which proves George was right and sends him sprinting after Morgan. In the final scene, Jerry and the model meet at last in the Club, just before her plane leaves, and start to “make out”, but the sudden reappearance of the pilot, as his plane pulls up next to the club window, again unnerves Jerry.

The Fusilli Jerry

On the street Elaine tells Jerry she is dating David Puddy, Jerry’s mechanic; Elaine thinks of him as similar to a Stanley Kowalski. George is having lunch with his mother, Estelle Costanza, at Monk’s. She says she is going for an eye job now that she is separated from Frank (“The Chinese Woman”). Kramer, who has plenty of free time, can pick her up after the operation, just as soon as he gets his new license plates.

At the Department of Motor Vehicles office, Kramer receives someone else’s vanity plates which read “ASSMAN”. Elaine is then shown in bed with David Puddy.

At Monk’s, Elaine discusses with Jerry how David Puddy used Jerry’s “move” on her while they were having sex. While Jerry says he will prohibit Puddy from doing it anymore, Elaine rectifies saying she liked it and that it was not even the same one, as Jerry ended with a “swirl” and David with a “pinch”.

On the street, George tells Jerry he needs a move to perform with his new girlfriend, Nancy. Back at the apartment, Jerry finishes explaining the ending of his move which is ad libitum: it can be a pinch but Jerry prefers the clockwise swirl. Kramer enters presenting Jerry with a small statue of him made with fusilli pasta, a “Fusilli Jerry”. When Jerry questions Kramer as to why he chose Fusilli, Kramer replies, “Because you’re silly!” Kramer says he is also working on a “Ravioli George”. About his ASSMAN plates, Kramer believes that the real owner is a proctologist. He tells Jerry and George that if they ever meet a proctologist at a party, they should stand nearby to be assured of hearing a funny story that will inevitably end with someone claiming “It was a million-to-one shot, Doc”.

Jerry confronts Puddy at his workshop, calling him a “hack”, about “the move”. They have a falling out, and Jerry is prompted to take his car to another mechanic.

George upsets his girlfriend when trying to perform “the move” in bed (“it feels like aliens poking at my body”). Elaine describes it as a “big-budget motion picture that goes nowhere”. Puddy cannot continue doing his move with Elaine because of uncomfortable feelings brought on by his earlier confrontation with Jerry. George’s mother, Estelle, goes to the doctor and is told she must not cry for the next 10 days or she will have complications with her eye surgery. When going to pick her up, Kramer makes the best of the situation, using the plates to convince a parking lot security guard that he is a proctologist entitled to use a doctors-only parking space. While driving home, the plates elicit cheers and catcalls from passing drivers. Estelle, assuming that the catcalls were made at her is unaware that the gestures were made at Kramer’s plates. When they hit a pothole Kramer reaches across Estelle’s chest to brace her, making Estelle think that Kramer is making a pass at her by “stopping short”.

At the apartment Jerry says George probably screwed the progression of “the move”, which would explain George’s girlfriend’s poor reception of it. Jerry receives a phone call from his new mechanic about an estimate, and he thinks they are overcharging him. Elaine comes with the news that, thanks to Jerry, Puddy will not use “the move” again; since, Puddy has settled on a poor move that involves a “knuckle”. George, in turn, recognizes this as his own move. Jerry begs Elaine to covertly find out from Puddy how much it would be to fix his car so Jerry can determine if he is being ripped off by his new mechanic. Kramer, the “Assman”, arrives with Sally, his new bottom-heavy girlfriend.

Estelle and Frank start fighting when she recounts Kramer’s “stopping short” with her on the drive home from the Doctor’s office earlier in the day. Frank recognizes the “stop short and grab” as his move; he sets out to find Kramer. Elaine, in bed with Puddy, asks him questions about gaskets and prices for auto repair. Meanwhile, George has just performed great in bed with Nancy; however, she inquires about the ball point pen writing on his palm and discovers he had crib notes and runs off; he argues it was a complicated move and that he should be allowed to cheat as it was not like it was the SAT exam.

Jerry tells Elaine he is going back to Puddy as a mechanic, and that Puddy can now use any move he wants since the value of a good mechanic is better than sex. Frank arrives looking for Kramer, and they briefly begin arguing, in the course of which the Bro or Manssière disagreement from a previous episode (“The Doorman”) is brought up. George arrives just in time to see his father lose his balance and fall backwards onto the Fusilli Jerry statue, which had been knocked onto the floor.

At the doctor’s office Jerry, George and Elaine shift uncomfortably in their seats at the thought of “corkscrew pasta.” Kramer spots a picture on the wall of the doctor’s office portraying the doctor’s boat with the name “ASSMAN” on it. Kramer asks the proctologist if his recently renewed license plates had perhaps been mixed up with someone else’s and whether he is the “assman”; the doctor winks back. From off-screen, Frank is heard saying, “It was a million-to-one shot, Doc.”

In the last scene, George takes his father back to his mother’s home. She cannot hold back her tears at seeing him after his ordeal with the statue and starts crying thereby ruining her surgery.