Who would have thought that the funny bone of a generation would be electrified by the absurd adventures of a cereal-eating New York City stand-up comedian and his half-baked pals? ("Yes, the cereal is real," he admits. "I like the idea of eating and drinking at the same time without looking.") Yet not since Lucy and Ethel got a job wrapping chocolates has America laughed in quite the same way. For nine unforgettable, record-setting seasons starting in 1989, the show that brought us the Bubble Boy, muffin tops and the Soup Nazi was regularly America's most-watched sitcom. Some 30 million tuned in each week to see George (Jason Alexander) celebrate Festivus, Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) kidnap a dog, Kramer (Michael Richards) get hooked on take-out chicken and Jerry declare war on dry cleaners. We couldn't get enough (76 million-plus caught the last episode, on May 14, 1998). Seinfeldisms—"yada yada yada," "master of my domain," "sponge-worthy"—became the common coin of watercooler conversations.
What made Seinfeld a smash? The show "really changed the form into something that people hadn't seen before," says comic Carol Leifer, a onetime real-Jerry love interest who worked on the show as a producer and writer. "The synergy of Jerry and Larry David [Seinfeld co-creator and a friend of Jerry's] made sitcoms more real and less focused on outside events. They made the characters more introspective and reflective with the whole moniker of 'the show about nothing.' That's the essence of it."
The star, who grew up in suburban Massapequa, N.Y., watching Howdy Doody and Batman, is most proud, he says, of "changing the scope of the sitcom. We took it off the soundstage and brought it onto location. We'd use 15, 20 sets in a half hour. We were making little half-hour movies." As a result, Seinfeld found Seinfeld a seven-days-a-week pressure cooker. Neither that, nor success, led to tantrums. "New writers would come on the show, and pretty soon they'd be asking, 'When does he get. weird? When does he get like a star?'" says Leifer. "And I'd say, 'It's not going to happen.' I can't think of the last time I saw him lose his temper. He really takes things as they come."
A successful stand-up performer in 1988, Seinfeld pitched NBC a show about—what else—a stand-up comic. "It's hilarious to look back on," he says, "because today the last thing anybody wants to see on TV is a stand-up comic." Nor did he have high hopes for Seinfeld. "Even [a setting like] Cheers was beyond our capabilities," he says. "Any show where you had all these grown-up, mature people with jobs and lives. We didn't know anything about that stuff. We just knew our little world of New York, of comedians having these very indulgent, selfish existences." But as Seinfeld became a must-see, he realized that "people don't need to relate as much as they need to laugh. Humor's more important than demographics."
What Seinfeld finds funny is the idea of marriage. "I really can't see it," he says. Real-life Jerry's love life can be as unusual as his alter ego's. In 1993 he began a March-July romance with then-17-year-old coed Shoshanna Lon-stein. They parted in 1997. At his gym last summer he met Jessica Sklar, 27. Trouble was, she had just returned from her honeymoon with Broadway heir Eric Nederlander. Since the show's end, Seinfeld, who has a fortune estimated to be more than $200 million, has plunked down $4.35 million for a very un-Jerry New York City luxury apartment and swears that he has kicked his sitcom jones. "I'd never do another series," he says. "I can't believe I did that one." So what does he want to do? That answer is, perhaps, no surprise. Says Seinfeld: "Nothing."
J.D. Reed
Todd Gold and Monica Rizzo in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- Todd Gold,
- Monica Rizzo.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
