Michael Richards, Phone Books, Travel Agents, and Other Things Horribly Outdated

Yeah, yeah, I know it's been nearly a month since my last post (in which I vowed to make one post a week). If you don't like the infrequency of my posts, you're more than welcome to go find someone else on the Internet who was lame enough to watch every single episode of Cheers and then blog about the experience.

In all seriousness, I am going to make the effort to blog more regularly. And it should be easier now that things have really started to pick up on this show.

Today, I want to talk about sitcom plot devices and the rapid change they encountered thanks to advancements in technology. Also, I want to talk about the HOLY SHIT! moment I witnessed in episode 62 of the series when Cosmo Kramer himself, Michael Richards, walked into the bar.

As you can see to your left, Richards looks, well, normal playing a customer sitting in a Boston tavern in 1985. Throughout the episode, he shows no signs of eccentricity or physical hilarity from the Seinfeld days. That said, Richards plays a character named Eddie who has all the makings of the asshole we all saw on stage at the LA Laugh Factory in the fall of 2007.

You see, the premise of the episode is this: Some years ago, back when Sam Malone was still a raging alcoholic and on his way out of the majors, he made a bet with Eddie that he could marry the actress Jacqueline Bisset by a set date. If Mayday fails in this goal, the bar belongs to Eddie. By this point, in the here and now of 1985, Sam has forgotten both the bet and Eddie himself. In typical a-hole fashion, however, Eddie has with him the signed paper from that drunken night and threatens legal action against Sam if he doesn't hold up to his end of the deal.

Typical sitcom fodder, no? Of course it is. And, also in typical sitcom fashion, it's foul-mouthed Carla (who, it should be noted, is at this point in the series preggerz with her SIXTH child!) who suggests to Mayday that the terms of the contract dictate he most marry a woman named Jackie Bisset, not necessarily the Jackie Bisset.

With this epiphany, Mayday, Norm and Cliff set off to find a woman named Jackie Bisset by -- wait for it -- combing over Cliff's extensive collection of phone books from every metropolitan area in the United States. Granted, I was only a 2-year-old at the time, but I had no idea how tough life was in 1985. It's amazing how so many dilemmas in movies and TV shows from the 70's, 80's, and even 90's would easily be solved with either Google or a cell phone. A quick search on Facebook would have easily gotten Sam a list of a hundred Jackie Bissets.

(This, by the way, raises the question: What would a Facebook profile of Mayday Malone look like, anyway? Would he be a celebrity athlete that people could "like" on Facebook? Or would Mayday have an actual regular person profile with upwards of 2,000 "friends," half of whom would have been former lovers and the other half of whom would be girls he'd actively be trying to nail? I think I'm on to something here...)

While on the topic of technology, it should also be noted that Sam could easily take the paper contract he signed with Eddie Google legal counsel who charge reasonably so that he can determine if the contract even has a leg to stand on. Hell, he could even look up Massachusetts law precedents himself to check the validity of the drunken contract signing.

Though I will get into this in a post in the very near future, the show goes on to date itself several more times in Season 3 with Sam struggling to hook up an answering machine for his office phone and later on needing Cliff to help him find a travel agent who can look into the possibility of there being any flights going from Boston to Italy that night. (Spoiler alert: A certain someone has run off to Italy with a certain Frasier Crane and a certain Mayday has mixed feelings about this certain someone...)

Eventually Cliff finds a Jackie B living in West Virginia who is willing to come up to Boston (based on the lie that she's won a free vacay from a radio station contest). She doesn't want to marry Mayday but eventually falls for him. Eddie comes back to the bar, ready to collect his prize, only to find Mayday has stumped him. Showing that he's not quite the a-hole he's been made out to be, Eddie calls off the bet. Diane talks Jackie B out of wanting to marry Sam and Mayday keeps the bar. Everyone wins and nothing changes.

Again, is this the stuff of typical sitcom narrative? Absolutely. And was the whole story wholly outdated by watching it in 2011? Of course. And I was obviously taken out of the episode so much that I wrote two legal pad pages worth of notes and paused Netflix to snap a photo of pre-Kramer, pre-racist ranter Michael Richards. But I did laugh a number of times. And I did enjoy myself. And more than being entertained by this show, I've come to learn that the 1980's were really tough in Reagan's America...