I loved watching Seinfeld, and the Jackie Chiles character was part of my enjoyment. In fact, in retrospect that character is one of my favourite famous fictional people of comedy. If you ever watched the later Seinfeld series 7 to 9, you will have seen, and laughed at this character. He was played by the American actor Phil Morris, in the NBC sitcom.
Read on, to find out more about the secrets to the popularity of Jackie Chiles, and WATCH THE CLASSIC SHORT VIDEOS BELOW, especially if you have not yet seen the Seinfeld series
Find out WHAT YOU MISSED, or enjoy this classic comedy again, by watching the videos below, in which the character appears, and find out about Seinfeld's Jackie Chiles.
I understand that the character was based around the famous US attorney Johnnie Cochran, and naturally he becomes Cosmo Kramer's lawyer, as parody of real-life events.
Jackie Chiles has looks which have many similarities with the famous attorney Johnnie Cochran. Both wear spectacles, and can only be described as “moustachioed”. Furthermore, both are black lawyers, but not only that, their names have the same ring to them. It is also notable that they often use some very high-sounding words! So many attorneys delight in the sound of their own voices just like this character does, and it must help them when in court to command respect. However, it is so funny to hear Morris imitating Cochran's immediately recognizable pronunciation and even the way he delivers his speech in his comedy Seinfeld sketches.
It would be unfair to comment on whether Cochran has ever used the catchphrase that Morris puts to such good effect in his characterization, but he uses the character's " I am outraged!", catchphrase, to great effect.
You could say that the real world persona of Attorney Cochran has in real-life been, every bit as flamboyant as the character that Morris plays, but I could not personally comment! Maybe, all that Morris has needed to do, to create such a real and amusing character, has been to simply impersonate that great Attorney.
In the series, the Attorney (Chiles), has acted on behalf of Kramer in three different episodes and story lines. In the first ("The Maestro," season 7, episode 113), Kramer is seen entering a movie theatre while secreting a cafe-latte in his hands. As he attempts to clamber, with it, over the legs of another attendee he burns himself. The story progresses, and with Jackie Chiles in charge, a settlement with the coffee company results in a lifetime of free coffee for the plaintive. That's free coffee at all of their stores throughout North America and Europe, plus $50,000 in cash. Well, it would have included the cash, but the only problem is that Kramer speaks out ahead of time, and accepts the free coffee, before the coffee company mentions the cash. The usual hand wringing ensues!
Chiles is very much in evidence again, in the next of his episodes. That's when Chiles ("The Caddy," Season 7, Episode 122) takes legal action against the candy-bar heiress sue Ellen Mischke. He sues her for allegedly doing Kramer a personal injury in an accident with a car. You would think that Mischke must have been driving the vehicle, but - oh no, Kramer claims he was distracted by seeing her walking the New York streets, wearing only a bra. Chiles describes her accident-causing antics as, and I quote: "lewd, lascivious, salacious, and outrageous!". A hilarious denouement is the result, as the case collapses when Kramer insists that she must "try on the bra to prove it is hers".
Of course, it does not fit because, when in court she has to put it on over a leotard. Naturally to demonstrably show it to be hers the bra's cup must be shown to "fit like a glove and right against a person's skin". Well, at that point in time most Americans will remember the O.J. Simpson trial, and immediately chuckle, at the obvious reference to that.
Watch the Bra Incident here:
In the third, and final episode, of the original block of series ("The Abstinence," Season 8, Episode 143) Chiles features as his lawyer once more, after a scene of pure comic delight, when Kramer's face ages before our eyes as as he sees his apartment deteriorating into a smoking lounge. We are then treated to a meeting in which Jackie and Kramer go a long way "over the top" on the damage done by smoking, in front of the Tobacco Company's lawyer. In fact, Jackie Chiles tells this Attorney that, and I quote again: "By the time this case gets to court, he'll be nothing but a shrunken head".
For a moment everything seems to be going Kramer's way, until that is, the tobacco company's legal representative says that "she'll have an offer to settle out-of-court in the morning".
Jackie makes a drama of it by telling Kramer, "Jackie's cashing in on your wretched disfigurement." So, Kramer, in a huff settles the case in Jackie's absence for nothing more than a "Marlboro man" style billboard which is to be erected in Times Square, showing his (Kramer's) face. Chiles, then declares this to be: "the most public yet of my many humiliations".
Watch this in the Tobacco Case excerpt below:
Another subsequent, amusing venture into legal hilarity with Chiles occurs through Kramer's experiments with "Da Vinci sleep", and how it exhausts him during sex. His Italian girlfriend, not unreasonably assumes that he has died, in the truly OTT style for which the series is so well-loved, she gets some friends to throw him into the river. When he revives, quite naturally he accuses her of trying to kill him. In a remarkable twist, it is the woman who calls Chiles, maintaining it is he that is her longstanding lawyer. In the end, Chiles throws professional duty aside by declaring; "I don't want nothing to do with it!"
In later years of the Seinfeld series, Chiles makes several more appearances, culminating in his presence during the program's finale performance. It is he, who creates the legal entanglement which results in the characters been convicted of the bizarre charge of "wanton indifference"!
However, the fact that, the character of Chiles had made its mark on the collective consciousness of the American nation, has meant that the character continued to live on through new appearances in a series of television adverts. That fact has, clearly, not been lost on the TV companies ad producers, so I continue to hope that the program makers will wake-up, and make a new spin-off series based on the Jackie Chiles character.
Did you enjoy this page? Please give us your COMMENT below.
No comments:
Post a Comment