Larry David Pretending To Quit ‘SNL’ Led to This ‘Seinfeld’ Episode

The Big Picture

• Larry David’s real-life experiences inspired iconic
  Seinfeld
  moments, like George quitting his job in a hilarious episode.
• George’s bathroom-related meltdown mirrors Larry David’s
  SNL
  experience, where he angrily quit but returned to save his career.
• Larry David’s on-screen cameos and actual life events heavily influenced
  Seinfeld
  ‘s characters and storylines.

Seinfeld may have focused on the mayhem surrounding its core cast of Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), George (Jason Alexander), Kramer (Michael Richards), and Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), but even casual fans of the series know that Larry David was the maestro behind the scenes, co-creating the series with Jerry Seinfeld himself. David was the showrunner and the writer of 62 episodes over the first seven seasons. George Costanza is even based on him, and Kramer is a version of Larry David’s one-time real-life neighbor, Kenny Kramer. Larry David also appeared on-screen a few times, as the voice of Newman in an early episode (the same one to be discussed here, actually), as Frank Costanza’s (Jerry Stiller) strange, cape-wearing lawyer in another, and most notably, as the voice of George Steinbrenner is a long arc when George worked for the New York Yankees.

So much of Seinfeld comes from the actual life of Larry David. It wasn’t just characters that were based on him and the people he knew, but actual things that had happened to him. Some of Larry David’s antics became the starting point for Seinfeld‘s most iconic moments. The best may have been based on the time David angrily quit his writing gig on Saturday Night Live, only to go back the next week and pretend that he never did. This led to the classic episode where George Costanza does the exact same thing in Seinfeld, but with a completely different result.

George Costanza Quits His Job in ‘Seinfeld’ Season 2

Over nine seasons, George Costanza constantly finds himself in a world of trouble (that he usually causes), due to either his self-centered nature or his short fuse. The Season 2 Seinfeld episode “The Revenge” is no different, as George, during one of his worst moments, messes up his life and then spends the rest of the episode trying to fix things, to disastrous and hilarious results. An early scene of “The Revenge” sees George’s boss, Rick Levitan (Fred Applegate) in his office on the phone. It’s then that a very upset George barges in, screaming. “That’s it! This is it! I’m done. Through. It’s over. I’m gone. Finished. Over. I will never work for you again. Look at you! You think you’re an important man, is that what you think? You are a laughingstock. You are a joke. These people are laughing at you. You’re nothing. You have no brains, no ability, nothing. I quit!”

George then storms out before Rick can even reply. Why did George freak out? As he tells Jerry, Rick won’t let him use his private bathroom anymore, and that he received a memo telling him to use the men’s room in the hall. Jerry shakes his head. “You and your toilets.” Jerry asks George what he’s going to do about a job. As George’s morphing expression on his face indicates, reality sets in, and he realizes he is now unemployed. George talks to Jerry about what kind of jobs he can do. The best he can come up with is being a general manager or color commentator for a baseball team, or a talk show host. “I think I’d be good at that. I talk to people all the time.”

Jerry Has a Simple and Genius Idea for George

Jerry’s idea? Maybe he can just go back on Monday morning and pretend like it never happened. “You’re an emotional person. People don’t take you seriously.” George likes the idea, so Monday morning he walks right into the office conference room. When a former co-worker confronts him about quitting, George laughs it off. When Rick walks in, George tries to hide his face, but he’s still noticed. “Am I crazy, or didn’t you quit?” George plays dumb. “Are you kidding? I didn’t quit. You took that seriously?” Rick tells George to get out, then humiliates him. “I’m a winner. I’ll always be a winner. And you’ll always be a loser.”

George Costanza might be a lot of things, including sadly relatable, but he’s not one to let someone embarrass him without retaliation. He comes up with a plan for revenge. “I’m gonna slip him a mickey,” he tells Jerry. George is going to spike his drink at a party. He’s even got Elaine to help due to Rick being a sexist who doesn’t recycle. At the party, Elaine hits on Rick, distracting him, while George drugs his drink. Rick is so thrilled by the attention that when he sees George he’s not upset anymore. He even offers him his job back. This confuses Costanza, who now doesn’t want to go through with his plot, but it’s too late. Rick stands, drink in hand, to give a toast. He also welcomes George back, calling him “our little shrimpy friend” before making fun of his failures. When Rick asks George if there’s anything he wants to add, Costanza simply says, “Drink up.” The last we see of George, he’s back at Jerry’s apartment, still thinking out loud about the types of jobs he could apply for.

Larry David Quit ‘Saturday Night Live’ in a Similar Way

“The Revenge” was written by Larry David. Not only that, it was lived by Larry David, based on a moment he had on Saturday Night Live. In recent years, Larry David’s SNL ties have been his guest hosting duties, or when he’s appeared in political sketches as Bernie Sanders. Long before that, however, back in 1984 and 1985, he was a writer for Saturday Night Live. Ironically, this was also the time period when Julia Louis-Dreyfus was a featured player on the show. David may have gone on to become a comedy icon, but this wasn’t the case in the mid-1980s. He struggled to get any of his sketches on air at all. One night he got so angry over his lack of success that he lost his temper and quit.

Larry David talked about this hilarious and infamous moment during an interview on The Late Show With David Letterman. It turned out that David only had one sketch make it to air the entire year, which might seem unbelievable considering how Seinfeld would dominate the same network years later. After another sketch was cut, Larry David snapped in true George Costanza fashion. “I decided, that’s it. They’re fooling with the wrong guy. I walked up to the producer, it was like five minutes before the show was about to begin, I walked up and I said, ‘That’s it. I’m done! I’ve had it! Take your show! Shove it.'” When Larry David got home he told his neighbor, Kenny Kramer, what had happened. It was he of all the people who gave David the advice that would save his career. He told David, “‘Why don’t you just go back on Monday and pretend it never happened.’… So I walked in on Monday and it worked.” Seinfeld might not have happened if not for his simple advice.

In 2017, Larry David told Vanity Fair that it wasn’t just any producer that he cussed out. It was Dick Ebersol, who ran SNL for the brief period Lorne Michaels had stepped away. Ebersol confirmed the story on Late Night With Seth Meyers, telling the host that he was the one who wasn’t putting David’s sketches on the air. Ebersol said he didn’t witness David’s tirade against him but learned about it at the following writers’ meeting and knew he had to have a conversation. “I realized that he needed to find some way out of this even though he had yet to come to my office and try to have a conversation. But what had happened was, he had quit the show.” Ebersol later smiled and said, “I like to think it proves that I’m a forgiving human being.”

Larry David was pretty much a nobody at that time. Ebersol, with his power, could have kicked David out and no one would have blamed him, but Ebersol still saw something in the man whose sketches he always cut. Long before David was having meltdowns on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he was having meltdowns in real life. One just so happened to result in one of Seinfeld‘s best episodes, and it was pretty, pretty, pretty good.

Seinfeld is available to watch on Netflix in the U.S.

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