Does any sitcom understand the universal human urge to be a slacker as well as “Seinfeld”? The classic NBC show played around with the careers of its four main characters often throughout its super-popular run, revealing them to be a bunch of half-assers, quiet quitters, and lazy opportunists, all while making their avoidance of work look admirable. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld’s show understood a universal truth that felt pretty daring coming out of the Reagan-era ’80s: Work is super annoying and we shouldn’t have to do it.
No character embodied the show’s eye-rolling approach to careerism as well as Jason Alexander’s George. George started the show with a fairly stable job in the real estate business (though he was originally going to be a comedian), and later scored a plum gig organizing travel for the New York Yankees. Between those two jobs, though, writers seemed to realize that Alexander was never better than when he was playing George as a vindictive, overconfident (yet misanthropic), self-righteous failure. His string of quickly shot-down career opportunities in some of the show’s middle seasons are pure comedy gold, and they often intertwine with the lives of the people in his life — including Seinfeld, Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ Elaine, and Michael Richards’ Kramer — in bizarre, outrageously funny ways. Here are five of the most entertaining jobs George fumbled across all nine seasons of “Seinfeld.”
5. TV writer
“Seinfeld” spends a good chunk of its fourth season forsaking 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 comedically airtight season of the series (though at least one of my /Film colleagues seems to disagree, as seen in our ranking of every “Seinfeld” season), but season 4 mines its meta storyline for all it’s worth, including in several scenes in which George and Jerry struggle to write anything that’s even close to as funny as their own “real” lives.
George is astoundingly bad at all things Hollywood, and nearly wrecks the pilot a half-dozen times. He argues with executives, demands higher pay, ogles the daughter of an NBC bigwig, gives Kramer cigars with which he accidentally burns down a house, gets his new exec girlfriend fired, tries to cheat on her by leveraging his TV writing credit, and beefs with the actor playing 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 his impressive ability to screw things up every step of the way remains one of the best parts of season 4. It’s when audiences — and the show — realized just how low he can stoop while remaining extremely likable.
4. Computer salesman
George gets a job as a computer salesman in the rare season 9 banger “The Serenity Now,” an episode that popularized the titular calm-down catchphrase of his father, Frank Costanza (Jerry Stiller). It’s Frank who George ends up working for when his dad buys a ton of computers to sell by phone, but even with a new millennium on the horizon, it seems like no one’s in the market for a new computer — at least when George is selling it. His rival, Lloyd Braun (Matt McCoy), meanwhile, is an ace computer salesman who earns the love of George’s parents while he’s flailing on the job.
“The Serenity Now” is most-remembered for Frank’s repeated yell of “SERENITY NOW,” a phrase he’s been told will help him stay calm in blood-pressure-raising situations. It has plenty of other funny moments too, though, like when George uses porn-downloading capabilities as his number one selling point for the new desktop PCs. “There’s porn!” he insists when Elaine says she’s not interested, after which she takes a long second to consider the purchase. In the end, George’s computer sales job is just as short-lived as most of his other gigs: He games the system by buying the computers himself with a plan to return them later, but Kramer ends up destroying two dozen of them in a fit of rage. Funnily enough, it turns out that Lloyd’s sales were fake, too — his phone wasn’t even plugged in.
3. Hand model
Once again, a famous “Seinfeld” episode that entered the lexicon for a completely different reason is also home to 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 the introduction of the phrase “low talker,” which Jerry ascribes to Kramer’s new, mumble-prone girlfriend (Wendel Meldrum). Leslie’s low talking leads to Jerry wearing a garish, pirate-like shirt on “The Today Show,” and his disrespect for a charity promotion ends George’s burgeoning career as a hand model when Leslie accidentally pushes him onto a hot iron.
Hand modeling, George is told earlier in the episode, is the rare gig he might actually be good at. A chance encounter with a woman at a restaurant leads to his booking a gig, and Kramer naturally declares that George has “smooth, creamy, delicate yet masculine” hands. In a lesser show, George’s subsequent descent into an obsession over his hands’ looks (he gets a manicure, starts wearing oven mitts around, and acts like he’s been shot when Kramer jolts him with a hand buzzer) would be the subject of jokes about masculinity or queerness, but “Seinfeld” lets Alexander make it all about the schmuck’s obsession with grasping for just one iota of success. George’s hand model career ends before it ever gets started, and his vanity deflates after the fateful hot iron accident. Years later, Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander” would do its own hand model gag, with David Duchovny’s character going so far as to encase his hand in glass to keep it in pristine condition.
2. Manager of the Pensky file
Most of George’s best jobs are the ones he never actually got hired for. The master of slacking off and stretching the truth ended up embroiled in several misunderstandings or straight-up lies related to his work through the show’s nine-season run, but few were as memorable as his time working on “the Pensky file.” The audience is never told what the file from season 5’s “The Barber” is for, or even what the company George is working at does, but the lack of clarity is intentional: George assumes he’s been hired after the man doing his job interview, Mr. Tuttle (Jack Shearer), is interrupted mid-sentence when he seems like he’s about to hire George.
Never one to let a chance to do nothing go to waste, George shows up to work the next week despite not actually being hired. Tuttle is on vacation, so he spends the week taking naps in an empty office and putting the file he’s been asked to manage into an accordion file organizer. The strategy seems to pay off at first: He gets ambiguously headhunted by Pensky himself (Michael Fairman) and quits in a moment of triumph once Tuttle returns and figures out he’s been slacking. After trying to grab a job from Pensky, though, he finds out that the company’s entire board is being indicted in white-collar crimes. “The Barber,” like so many of the best “Seinfeld” episodes, works well because it gives viewers the language for a weird situation that actually happens, turning the dial up on the absurdity all the while. Did a job interviewer ghost you when they were about to send an offer letter? Hey, you can always pull a George and see what happens.
1. Fake marine biologist
“Seinfeld” set the bar for intricately overlapping A, B, and C plots, and it’s a standard pretty much no sitcom has matched since (though “Arrested Development” came close a few times). The show built up its reputation for delivering laugh-out-loud funny intersecting storylines 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 that sees George once again pretending to have a job he knows nothing about. This time around, it’s Jerry’s fault that George ends up lying to his date, former college crush Diane (Rosalind Allen). When their old classmate implies that George is probably a loser these days, Jerry tries to defend him by pretending that his buddy has an impressive job — marine biologist.
The fib works too well, and George and Diane end up taking a romantic stroll on the beach. For the sake of the plot turn, typically amoral George is against the lie and hopes it won’t come up, but of course a whale ends up beached 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 striding into the ocean with rolled-up pants while a crowd looks on, to his embellishment back at the diner that “the sea was angry that day, my friends — like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.” In the end, George gets a rare win (though he does later confess he’s a faker), while his dramatic story builds to a screamingly funny climax when viewers (and the super-invested studio audience) realize the whale nearly 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 fake job than any of his real ones.
