George Costanza’s 5 Best Seinfeld Jobs, Ranked

Does any comedy understand the universal human impulse to be a slacker as well as “Seinfeld”? The classic NBC show toyed with the careers of its four main characters often throughout its uber-popular run, revealing them to be a group of half-hearted people, quiet quitters, and lazy opportunists, all while making their avoidance of work seem admirable. . The Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld show understood a universal truth that seemed pretty daring in the Reagan era of the ’80s: Work is very annoying and we shouldn’t have to do it.

No character embodied the show’s striking focus on careerism as well as Jason Alexander’s George. George started the show with a fairly steady job in the real estate business (although he was originally going to be a comedian) and then landed a great job organizing trips for the New York Yankees. However, between those two works, the writers seemed to realize that Alexander was never better than when he played George as a vengeful, overconfident (if misanthropic), and self-righteous loser. His series of quickly shot down career opportunities in some of the show’s middle seasons are pure comedy gold and often intertwine with the lives of the people in his life, including Seinfeld, Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ Elaine, and Michael Richards’ Kramer. . in strange and outrageously funny ways. Here are five of the most entertaining jobs George pursued throughout the nine seasons of “Seinfeld.”

“Seinfeld” spends a good portion of its fourth season abandoning its “show about nothing” premise to focus on a serialized arc about Jerry and George trying to make a pilot for, well, a show about nothing. It may not be the most comically secretive season of the series (although at least one of my /Film colleagues seems to disagree, as seen in our ranking of each season of “Seinfeld”), but season 4 exploits its meta story to the max. , including in several scenes where George and Jerry struggle to write something that’s as funny as their own “real” lives.

George is surprisingly bad at all things Hollywood and nearly destroys the pilot half a dozen times. He argues with executives, demands higher salaries, ogles the daughter of an NBC bigwig, gives Kramer cigarettes with which he accidentally burns down a house.myHe gets his new executive girlfriend fired, tries to cheat on her using his TV writing credit, and gets into a fight with the actor who plays Kramer over a box of raisins. In the end, the duo’s show about nothing doesn’t make it past the pilot stage for reasons unrelated to George’s incompetence, but their impressive ability to screw things up every step of the way remains one of the best parts of Season 4. It’s when the audience, and the show, realized how low it can go while still being extremely enjoyable.

George lands a job as a computer salesman in Season 9’s rare hit “The Serenity Now,” an episode that popularized his father, Frank Costanza’s (Jerry Stiller), titular calm catchphrase. It’s Frank that George ends up working for when his father buys a ton of computers to sell over the phone, but even with a new millennium on the horizon, it seems like no one is interested in a new computer, at least when George is selling. he. Meanwhile, his rival, Lloyd Braun (Matt McCoy), is a hotshot computer salesman who wins the love of George’s parents while he bustles at work.

“The Serenity Now” is best remembered for Frank’s repeated shout of “SERENITY NOW”, a phrase he has been told will help him stay calm in blood pressure-raising situations. However, it also has plenty of other funny moments, such as when George uses the porn downloading capabilities as his number one selling point for new desktop PCs. “There’s porn!” he insists when Elaine says she’s not interested, after which he takes a long second to consider the purchase. In the end, George’s computer sales job is as short-lived as most of his other jobs: he game the system by purchasing the computers himself with the plan to return them later, but Kramer ends up destroying two dozen of them in an attack. . of rage. Interestingly, it turns out that Lloyd’s sales were fake too: his phone wasn’t even plugged in.

Once again, a famous “Seinfeld” episode that entered the lexicon for an entirely different reason also houses one of the best B-plots about George’s failed career changes. Season 5’s “The Puffy Shirt” is known for both its hideous eponymous shirt and its introduction of the phrase “low talker,” which Jerry attributes to Kramer’s mutter-prone new girlfriend (Wendel Meldrum). Leslie’s low talk leads Jerry to wear a flashy pirate-style shirt on “The Today Show,” and his disrespect for a charity promotion puts an end to George’s burgeoning career as a hand model when Leslie accidentally pushes him on a hot iron.

Hand modeling, George is told at the beginning of the episode, is the rare job he might be good at. A chance encounter with a woman at a restaurant leads him to book a concert, and Kramer naturally declares that George has “soft, creamy, delicate but masculine” hands. On a lesser show, George’s subsequent descent into an obsession with the appearance of his hands (he gets a manicure, starts wearing oven mitts, and acts like he’s been shot when Kramer shakes him with a doorbell) would be the subject of jokes. about masculinity or queerness, but “Seinfeld” allows Alexander to focus on the idiot’s obsession with achieving just a sliver of success. George’s career as a hand model ends before it begins, and his vanity is deflated after the fateful accident with the hot iron. Years later, Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander” would make his own hand model, with David Duchovny’s character even going so far as to encase his hand in glass to keep it in perfect condition.

Most of George’s best jobs are the ones he was never hired for. The master of loosening and stretching the truth ended up involved in several misunderstandings or outright lies related to his work during the show’s nine seasons, but few were as memorable as his time working on “the Pensky File.” The audience is never told what Season 5’s “The Barber” file is for, or even what the company George works for does, but the lack of clarity is intentional: George assumes he’s been hired after of the man conducting his job interview. Mr. Tuttle (Jack Shearer) is interrupted mid-sentence when it appears he is about to hire George.

George, never one to waste an opportunity to do nothing, shows up for work the following week despite not having been hired. Tuttle is on vacation, so he spends the week napping in an empty office and storing the file he’s been asked to manage in an accordion-shaped file organizer. The strategy seems to pay off at first: Pensky himself (Michael Fairman) ambiguously seeks him out and quits in a moment of triumph once Tuttle returns and realizes he’s been slacking. However, after trying to get Pensky a job, he discovers that the company’s entire board of directors is being accused of white collar crimes. “The Barber,” like many of the best “Seinfeld” episodes, works well because it gives viewers the language for a strange situation that actually happens, turning up the ante on the absurd all the while. Did a job interviewer trick you when he was about to send you an offer letter? Hey, you can always do a George and see what happens.

“Seinfeld” set the standard for intricately overlapping A, B and C plots, and it’s a standard that virtually no comedy has matched since (although “Arrested Development” came close several times). The show built its reputation for delivering fun crossover stories over several years, and by Season 5, it had mastered its signature writing trick. Case in point: “The Marine Biologist,” a master class in comedy writing in which George once again pretends to have a job he knows nothing about. This time, it’s Jerry’s fault that George ends up lying to his date, former college crush Diane (Rosalind Allen). When his old classmate hints that George is probably a loser these days, Jerry tries to defend him by pretending that his friend has an awesome job: marine biologist.

The lie works too well and George and Diane end up taking a romantic walk on the beach. For the sake of the plot twist, the typically amoral George is against the lie and hopes it doesn’t come to light, but of course a whale ends up stranded and dying in front of them. Everything about the scene that follows is hilarious, from the shot of George determinedly taking off his hat and wading into the ocean with his pants rolled up as a crowd looks on, to his restaurant flourish that “the sea was angry.” that day.” , my friends, like an old man trying to return soup at a delicatessen.” In the end, George wins a rare victory (although he later confesses that he is a fraud), while his dramatic story reaches a wildly funny climax when the Viewers (and the super-interested studio audience) realize that the whale almost died because Kramer hit a golf ball into its blowhole. George may have never really been a marine biologist, but he was somehow better at that job. false that any of the real ones.