George Costanza had his fair share of ridiculous moments on Seinfeld throughout the course of the show’s nine-season run. In “The Cafe,” he had Elaine take an IQ test for him so that his girlfriend would think he was smarter than he actually was. Then, in “The Cigar Store Indian,” he tried to convince his date that his parents’ house was his and ended up having sex with her in their bed. But one of the most unforgettable things George ever did was quit his job in Season 2’s “The Revenge,” only to show up at work the following week as if nothing happened:
Funny story about that: The exact thing that George did in that episode was originally done by series creator Larry David in 1984. David was working as a writer for Saturday Night Live at the time and wasn’t having the best experience. He found the job easy enough, but he couldn’t seem to get any of the sketches he’d written on the air. Producer Dick Ebersol kept cutting them week after week, even when they did well during readthroughs.
Six weeks into his run, David finally reached his breaking point. Just as the show was about to go on the air, Ebersol cut another one of his sketches. “Ebersol had the headset on in the back near the monitor,” David explained to Vanity Fair in 2017. “I walked up to him and I went, ‘This f—–g show stinks! It’s a piece of s–t. I’m done! I quit! F–k you!’ And that was it, and then I left.”
As he was walking home that night, David started calculating how much money he’d just lost due to his outburst. He bumped into his friend Kenny Kramer, who would serve as the inspiration for Michael Richards’s Seinfeld character Cosmo Kramer years later, and Kramer gave him some simple advice: Just go in on Monday and act like he never quit. Unlike George Costanza, David pulled it off and kept his job.
He only remained on SNL for a year, though, and managed to get just one sketch on the air the whole time he was there. Take a look at David’s lone writing contribution, “Going Up,” below.
The post Larry David Quit His Job at ‘SNL’ and Pretended He Didn’t, Just Like George Costanza on ‘Seinfeld’ appeared first on VICE.
