Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David were brainstorming stories for the second season of Seinfeld one day in 1991 when Julia Louis-Dreyfus came into the room and started to cry.
As Seinfeld writer Larry Charles, who was also in the room that day, tells it on this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Louis-Dreyfus was telling them why she felt she wasn’t “being utilized to her full potential” when she started “weeping.”
“We were guys,” Charles says. “Seeing a woman crying had a massive impact on us.” The men behind the show that took as its mantra “no hugging, no learning” were “suddenly exposed to all this emotion.”
“That itself was a liberating moment for us, like, wow, there are feelings here, whether we like it or not,” Charles adds. The three men had to admit that the “super-talented” Louis-Dreyfus had a point: “We just didn’t know, as guys who mostly wrote about guys, how to write a truly great female character.”
The solution they came up with seems obvious now, but as Charles also writes about in his new memoir, Comedy Samurai, it took being confronted by those tears to make them pay attention to her concerns.
Until that point, the real stories that came from David’s life would be applied to his avatar, George Costanza, on the show. But the team decided to see what would happen if they took one of the storylines intended for George and gave it to Elaine.
“There was a story floating around that was based on Larry’s life about him having a girlfriend from out of town coming to stay with him and being really excited about that,” Charles recalls. “But by the end of the weekend, wanting to get rid of her and her deciding that actually she’d like to stay longer, and then he’s got to kind of cajole her into leaving. And so we thought, why don’t we give that story to Julia and see how it works out?”
Ultimately, Louis-Dreyfus’ concerns impacted the whole “style” of the show. They started putting the names of all four main characters—Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer—on a whiteboard in the office to make sure each one had a distinct story that would overlap for each episode.
When Louis-Dreyfus was on The Last Laugh in 2023, she too spoke about the moment she asked the Seinfeld creators to give Elaine “more” to do on the show.
“I’m not going to lie. In the beginning, I didn’t always have a lot to do in certain episodes,” she said at the time. “And I would go to Larry and Jerry multiple times and say, ‘Hey, you guys, write me more, I need to be in this show more.’ That’s what I just kept doing. And they did.”
From her perspective, things started to change when they stopped writing Elaine “as a woman” and “just wrote for me, for this character, as opposed to this gender, which I think is instructive in a lot of ways from a writing point of view.”
The episode, called “The Busboy,” that served as a turning point for Elaine, came at the very end of the show’s second season in 1991. Just as David had experienced, Elaine has a boyfriend visiting from out of town that she can’t wait to get out of her hair by the end of the weekend. When he oversleeps and is on the verge of missing his plane, Elaine jumps into action and goes to ridiculous lengths to get him to the airport on time.
“That was the big scene, her having to try to get him out of the house because he’s going to miss the plane,” Charles recalls fondly. “And it got Julia into a comic level that was the equivalent of what the guys had been doing.”
That turned out to be the “seminal change that led to the character of Elaine, as we know it now, who could be selfish and petty and small-minded and dark in the same way that the guys could,” Charles adds, something that was “unusual for a female character at that time.”
“You did not see characters who were amoral, who made bad choices and lived with them, and who didn’t really get some sort of redemption,” he says. “That made Seinfeld very different from what else was on at that time.”
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