George Costanza’s Top 5 Seinfeld Jobs, Ranked

Does any sitcom understand the universal human desire to be slacker like “Seinfeld”? The classic NBC show manipulated the careers of its four main characters frequently throughout its wildly popular run, revealing them as a collection of half-hearted half-hearted losers, quiet defeatists, and lazy opportunists, all while making their avoidance of work seem admirable. The Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld Show understood the universal truth that seemed so bold in the Reagan 1980s: Work is too annoying and we shouldn’t do it.

No character embodied the show’s amazing approach to career like George Jason Alexander. George started the show with a fairly stable job in real estate (though… He was originally going to be a comedian), and later recorded a traveling concert for the New York Yankees. But between those two jobs, the writers seem to realize that Alexander has never been better than when he plays George as a vindictive, overconfident (yet misanthropic) loser. His series of career opportunities quickly shot down in some of the show’s middle seasons is pure comedic gold, often intertwining with the lives of the people in his life — including Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Elaine, and Michael Richards’ Kramer — in strange, outrageously funny ways. Here are five of the most fun jobs George stumbled upon during the nine seasons of “Seinfeld.”

“Seinfeld” spends much of its fourth season abandoning its “show about nothing” premise to focus on a spinoff about Jerry and George trying to make a pilot for a show about nothing. This may not be the most comedically cohesive season of the series (although at least one of my colleagues at /Film seems to disagree, as seen in Our rankings for every “Seinfeld” season.), but Season 4 mines its meta story for all it’s worth, including several scenes in which George and Jerry struggle to write anything that’s even close to as funny as their “real” lives.

George is astonishingly bad at all things Hollywood, and nearly ruins the pilot half a dozen times. He argues with executives, demands higher wages, looks after the daughter of an NBC bigwig, and gives Kramer the cigar with which he accidentally burns down the house.efires his new executive girlfriend, tries to cheat on her by cashing in on his TV writing credit, and clashes with the actor playing Kramer over a box of raisins. Ultimately, the duo’s show about nothing never made it past the pilot stage for reasons that had nothing to do with George’s ineptitude, but his remarkable ability to screw things up every step of the way remains one of the best parts of season four. The audience — and the show — realized how low he could go while still remaining so likable.

George got a job as a computer salesman in Rare Season 9 Sausage “The Serenity Now” is the episode that popularized the titular serenity mantra of his father, Frank Costanza (Jerry Stiller). It’s Frank that George ends up working for when his father buys a large number of computers to sell over the phone, but even with a new millennium on the horizon, there seems to be no one in the market for a new computer – at least when George is selling it. His rival, Lloyd Brown (Matt McCoy), meanwhile, is a slick computer salesman who wins the love of George’s parents while stumbling through the job.

“The Serenity Now” Frank is most remembered for Frank’s repeated cry of “SERENITY NOW”, a phrase he was told would help him stay calm in high blood pressure situations. However, it has a lot of other funny moments as well, such as when George uses the porn downloading capabilities as the first selling point for his new desktop computers. “There is porn!” He insists when Elaine says she’s not interested, and then takes a long second to consider the purchase. In the end, George’s computer sales job is as short-lived as most of his others: he game the system by purchasing computers himself with the plan to return them later, but Kramer ends up destroying twenty of them in a fit. Out of anger. Funnily enough, it turned out that Lloyd’s sales were also fake, as his phone was not plugged in.

Once again, the famous “Seinfeld” episode that entered the lexicon for a very different reason is also home to one of the best B-plots about George’s failed career changes. Season 5’s “Puffy Shirt” is notable for its hideous t-shirt bearing his name and the introduction of the “low-talking” phrase that Jerry attributes to Kramer’s mumbling-prone new girlfriend (Wendell Meldrum). Leslie’s low-key talk leads to Jerry wearing a garish pirate-like T-shirt on “The Today Show,” and his disrespect for charity promotion ends George’s thriving modeling career when Leslie accidentally pushes him into a hot iron.

Hand modeling, as George was told earlier in the episode, is the rare job he might actually be good at. A chance encounter with a woman at a restaurant leads to him booking a gig, and naturally Kramer declares that George has “soft, creamy, delicate yet masculine” hands. In a lesser show, George later turns into an obsession with the appearance of his hands (he clips his nails, starts wearing oven mitts, and acts as if he’s been shot when Kramer shakes him with a hand bell) that would be the butt of jokes. Masculinity or eccentricity, but “Seinfeld” lets Alexander revolve around the fool’s obsession with holding on to just one shred of success. George’s modeling career ends before it even begins, and his ego vanishes after an ill-fated hot iron accident. Years later, Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander” movie will make its own hand-made modelwhere David Duchovny’s character goes so far as to encase his hand in glass to keep it in good condition.

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

Never one to waste an opportunity to never do anything, George shows up to work the next week despite not actually being hired. Tuttle is on vacation, so he spends the week taking a nap in an empty office and placing the file he’s been asked to manage in an accordion file organizer. This strategy seems to be paying off at first: he’s mysteriously tracked down by Pensky himself (Michael Fairman) and quits in a moment of triumph once Tuttle returns and discovers he’s been slacking off. After trying to get a job from Pensky, he discovers that the company’s entire board of directors is accused of white-collar crimes. “The Barber,” like many of the best episodes of “Seinfeld,” works so well because it gives viewers a language for a bizarre situation that actually happens, building up the absurdity throughout. Did an interviewer ghost you when they were about to send out an offer letter? Hey, you can always drag George and see what happens.

“Seinfeld” set a standard for the complex interweaving of A, B, and C plots, a standard that no sitcom has matched since (although “Arrested Development” came close several times). The show built its reputation for delivering poignant, laugh-out-loud funny stories over several years, and by season five, it had perfected its signature writing trick. Case in point: “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 former college buddy Diane (Rosalind Allen). When their old classmate points out that George might be a loser these days, Jerry tries to defend him by pretending that his friend has an impressive job—a marine biologist.

The lie works very well, and George and Diane end up having a romantic walk on the beach. For a plot twist, the normally immoral George is against the lie and hopes it won’t come out, but of course the whale ends up beached and dies in front of them. Everything in the next scene is funny, from the shot of George insistingly taking off his hat and stepping into the ocean with his pants rolled up as the audience looks on, to his embellishment at dinner saying “The sea was angry that day.” “My friends – like an old man trying to send out soup at a deli.” In the end, George gets a rare win (although he later admits it was fake), while his backstory reaches a very funny climax when viewers (and a very invested studio audience) realize ) That the whale almost died because Kramer hit the golf ball into the blowhole George may never have been a marine biologist, but he was somehow better at that fake job than any real job.