‘Seinfeld’ Writer Finally Explains the Origin of the Show’s Most Disturbing Storyline
Most of the time, Seinfeld was a pretty grounded comedy about four New Yorkers who love drinking coffee, chatting about relationships and placing wagers on their own self-gratification. But one episode featured a plot line that was surprisingly disturbing for the “show about nothing.”
Season Five’s “The Bris” found Elaine being tasked with hiring a mohel to circumcise her friend’s baby, as well as George’s efforts to force a hospital to pay for the damages to his car caused by an escaped patient’s suicide attempt — and somehow that isn’t the disturbing premise we’re talking about.
While the gang is at the hospital, Kramer inadvertently walks in on an unusual-looking patient that he comes to believe is really a mutant “Pig Man” whose DNA has been Dr. Moreau-ed as part of a top secret genetic test. Kramer argues that both the hospital and the U.S. military are working together to create “a whole army of pig warriors.”
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In the end, Kramer ends up liberating the oinking stranger from the hospital, only to discover that the Pig Man wasn’t really a pig man at all.
The bizarre storyline has prompted some fans to wonder why exactly Seinfeld felt the need to incorporate pig man conspiracy theories into the show. Well, now we know.
The writer of that particular episode, Larry Charles, recently revealed the origins of the Pig Man in his new memoir Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts and Laughter. According to Charles, he often tried to include references to his favorite films and TV shows in Seinfeld scripts. For example, in his first-produced episode, Season Two’s “The Baby Shower,” Jerry is brutally shot by the FBI “in slow motion like a Sam Peckinpah movie.” Sure it was a bad dream, but Charles still bragged that he “killed Jerry” in his very “first episode!”
And Charles created the “no-nonsense” library detective, Lt. Bookman, as an homage to Dragnet’s Sgt. Joe Friday.
On the subject of the Pig Man, Charles notes that the idea began as a reference to “one of my favorite surreal epics of the ’70s, Lindsay Anderson’s insane picaresque, O Lucky Man!, starring Malcolm McDowell.”
The follow-up to the acclaimed British film If… features a number of unhinged vignettes, the freakiest of which involves the protagonist Mick, signing up for a mysterious scientific experiment in a local hospital. But he soon discovers that one of the other test subjects has been turned into a grotesque pig man. Of course, it arguably worked better in an experimental ‘70s comedy than a ‘90s sitcom.
Come to think of it, since Seinfeld began as a show about how a comedian gets their material, is it possible that Jerry ever put together a tight-five about the time his neighbor abducted a mutant pig man from the hospital?
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