Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David Share Favorite Seinfeld Episodes and the Backstories Behind Shows Most Iconic Moments
Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David shared their favorite Seinfeld episodes and the backstories behind some of the show’s most iconic moments during a live taping ofAri Emanuel and Ben Persky’s The Rushmore Podcast on Monday night. The event, which was part of the Netflix Is a Joke Festival, took place in front of a packed…
Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David shared their favorite Seinfeld episodes and the backstories behind some of the show’s most iconic moments during a live taping ofAri Emanuel and Ben Persky’s The Rushmore Podcast on Monday night.
The event, which was part of the Netflix Is a Joke Festival, took place in front of a packed audience at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills that included Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos as well as Alan Horn, former head of Seinfeld producer Castle Rock Entertainment, and Warren Littlefield, former president of entertainment at NBC.
The evening began with Emanuel running through a brief history of the show, which famously struggled in its beginning. The idea for the series came about after David and Seinfeld met as stand-up comics. They’d have conversations and began thinking, “if we put this in a show, it’d be hilarious,” Seinfeld said.
David shared that the show’s first episode order beyond the pilot — a meager four episodes — was the “smallest order in the history of television.” The money for the series came out of the same budget that NBC used for variety specials. When Seinfeld received the four-episode order, it became someone’s responsibility to tell Bob Hope he wouldn’t be able to do a Christmas special that year, Seinfeld shared.
The Playbill for the event featured a “research report” that detailed audience’s reaction of the pilot. Persky read aloud some notes from the memo, which noted that “no segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again,” while viewers called Jerry’s life “boring” and George a “loser” and said Jerry “needed a better backup ensemble.”
Early on, David and Seinfeld were told that the show wouldn’t be getting picked up — “and I was thrilled,” David said, noting that he felt like he had “no more stories left to tell,” a feeling he also had “after every season of Seinfeld and every season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
Emanuel also reminded the crowd that the show kept shifting time slots before ultimately landing in the prime 9 p.m. Thursday period. “Can we just say we had a rocky beginning and move on?” Seinfeld quipped as Emanuel kept going through the show’s early challenges.
The duo also talked about the backstory of the character of Elaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Elaine was not in the pilot, which did feature a waitress at the restaurant that the characters frequented. However, it was decided that they needed a different female character. “We were single guys,” Seinfeld said. “We couldn’t write relationships. We didn’t know anything about it.” David shared that he had dated Monica Yates, daughter of author Richard Yates, and they remained friends. So they based the character on her. “If it was an ex, it [eliminated the element of] ‘will they or won’t they?’” Seinfeld noted.
From left: Ben Persky, Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld and Ariel Emanuel at the Netflix Is a Joke Festival Presents: ‘Rushmore Podcast Live’ on May 4 at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills.
Andrew Levy/Netflix
Emanuel and Persky also asked about the origins of some of the show’s biggest moments and catchprases that became part of the pop culture lexicon, including:
- Close talker: “There are thousands of them; there are 200 in this audience right now,” David joked.
- Double dip: “You dip once, and you eat it,” David deadpanned.
- Soup Nazi: This idea came from writer Spike Feresten, who shared a story about a “hostile” man selling soup in New York, and that became the basis of one of the series’ most beloved episodes. “People [around us] would just be talking and not realize they had a [storyline] for a show,” David said.
- In the vault: Seinfeld said his greatest regret is David not allowing him to work the phrase “Oy, the vault!” (a play on “Oy, gevalt!”) into an episode.
Meanwhile, each episode of The Rushmore Podcast sees Emanuel and Persky hosting various guests from the worlds of sports, entertainment and culture to debate the “Mount Rushmore” (top four) of those categories. To that end, the quartet shared their picks for the top four episodes of Seinfeld, culled from 180 total episodes across nine seasons. Their choices, in no particular order:
- Seinfeld: “The Contest,” “The Soup Nazi,” “The Merv Griffin Show,” “The Marine Biologist”
- David: “The Contest,” “The Opposite,” “The Puffy Shirt,” “The Pen”
- Emanuel: “The Puffy Shirt,” “The Boyfriend,” “The Contest,” “The Note”
- Persky: “The Contest,” “The Opposite,” “The Boyfriend” and “The Pitch”/”The Ticket”
David and Seinfeld shared some behind-the-scenes stories from some of those episodes.
- “The Contest”: David had carried around this idea in a notebook for two years before pitching it, convinced no one would want to touch the storyline. He was “shocked” when Seinfeld told him he loved the idea. Later, David was so convinced that NBC wouldn’t let them film this script that he was ready to quit on the spot once he got word. But that directive never came. However, “after the table read, the ad sales [team] went nuts,” Littlefield shared from the audience. Still, the episode was filmed and aired and is widely considered one of the best of the entire series.
- “The Opposite”: Seinfeld said this features one of his favorite lines from the show, when Jerry tells George (Jason Alexander): “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.” Quipped Seinfeld from the stage: “It’s pure absurdity, and George was stupid enough to believe it.”
- “The Puffy Shirt”: David said he was out to dinner with a woman whom he couldn’t hear well. Later, he started thinking: “What if I had agreed to do something crazy?” The shirt itself was inspired by a “billowy white shirt” that David actually owned — and “loved” — at the time.
- “The Boyfriend”: Jerry’s dialogue about the spit that MLB star Keith Hernandez (playing himself) may or may not have lobbed at Kramer (Michael Richards) — featuring a parody of the Zapruder film and the conspiracy theory that there was a second shooter in John F. Kennedy’s assassination — was “one of the biggest thrills of the series,” Seinfeld said. “It was a long speech, and I knew it would get a lot of laughs if I got it right.”
In the end, the quartet decided that the four best episodes are “The Contest,” “The Opposite,” “The Puffy Shirt” and “The Marine Biologist.”
The night wrapped with an appearance by some super-fans who won a trivia contest and got to ask their own questions of David and Seinfeld. When one of the fans got a little too comfortable with the microphone and tried to crack a joke, David admonished him, with his characteristic yet charming brand of bluntness: “You’re letting this go to your head a little bit.”
