George Costanza’s 5 Best Seinfeld Jobs, Ranked

Does a sitcom understand the universal human urge to be a slacker as well as “Seinfeld”? The classic NBC show has played with the careers of its four main characters throughout its wildly popular run, portraying them as a bunch of half-assed, silent throwers and lazy opportunists while making their job-dodging look delightful. The Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld Shows have understood a universal truth that has seemed pretty bold since the Reagan 80s: Work is really annoying and we don’t need to do it.

No character embodied George’s eye-rolling careerism better than Jason Alexander’s. George started the show with a fairly stable job in real estate (albeit he was originally going to be a comedian), and later landed a great gig arranging trips for the New York Yankees. However, between those two jobs, the writers seemed to realize that Alexander was never better than when he played George as a vengeful, overconfident (yet misanthropic), self-absorbed loser. His series of quickly shot down career opportunities in some of the show’s middle seasons is pure comedy gold, and they often intertwine with the lives of the people in his life — including Seinfeld’s Elaine Julia Louis Dreyfuss and Michael Richards’ Kramer — in weird, outrageously funny ways. ways. Here are five of the funniest jobs George has tackled in all nine seasons of Seinfeld.

Seinfeld spends much of its fourth season abandoning 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. This may not be the series’ most comedically sealed season (although at least one of my /film colleagues seems to disagree, as seen in our ranking of each season of “Seinfeld”.), but Season 4 takes the meta-storyline to its fullest, including several scenes in which George and Jerry struggle to write anything even close to being as funny as their own “real” life.

George is surprisingly bad at all things Hollywood and has nearly shot down the pilot half a dozen times. He argues with executives, demands a raise, looks at the daughter of a big NBC cheerleader, gives Cramer the cigars he accidentally burned down the house withdfires his new performer girlfriend, tries to cheat on her using his TV writing credit, and argues with the actor playing Kramer over a box of raisins. In the end, the duo’s show didn’t make it past the pilot for reasons unrelated to George’s incompetence, but his impressive ability to screw things up at every turn remains one of the best parts of Season 4. That’s when viewers—and the show—realized just how low he can drop down while remaining extremely likable.

George gets a job as a computer salesman in the village of Rare season 9 season “The Serenity Now”, the episode that popularized his father Frank Costanza’s (Jerry Stiller) catchphrase about serenity. George ends up working for Frank when his father buys a ton of computers to sell over the phone, but even as the new millennium approaches, it seems that no one is looking for a new computer – at least when George is selling it. His rival, Lloyd Brown (Matt McCoy), meanwhile, is a brilliant computer salesman who has earned the love of George’s parents while he juggles work.

“The Serenity Now” is best remembered for Frank repeatedly yelling “SERENITY NOW,” a phrase he’s been told helps him stay calm in situations where his blood pressure rises. However, it has many other funny moments, such as when George uses the porn download capabilities as the number one selling point for the new desktop PCs. “There is porn!” he insists when Elaine says she’s not interested, after which she takes a long look at the purchase. In the end, George’s computer sales job is as short-lived as most of his other gigs: he plays the system by buying computers himself with the plan to return them later, but Kramer ends up destroying two dozen of them in a fit of fury Funnily enough, it turns out that Lloyd’s sales were also bogus – his phone wasn’t even connected.

Then again, the famous Seinfeld episode, which entered the lexicon for a completely different reason, is also home to one of the best B-plots about George’s failed career change. Season 5’s “Puffy Shirt” is notable both for its hideous shirt of the same name and for introducing the phrase “low-key chatterbox,” which Jerry attributes to Kramer’s (Wendell Meldrum) new, mumble-prone girlfriend. Leslie’s low-key words lead to Jerry wearing a bright pirate shirt on “The Today Show,” and his disrespect for a charity event ends George’s booming career as a hand model when Leslie accidentally pushes him over a hot iron.

Modeling hands, George said earlier in the episode, is the rare gig he can be good at. A chance encounter with a woman at a restaurant leads to him booking a gig, and Kramer naturally declares that George has “smooth, creamy, delicate but masculine” hands. On a lesser show, George’s subsequent obsession with the appearance of his hands (he gets a manicure, starts wearing mittens, and acts like he’s been shot when Kramer shoves him with a hand noise) would be the subject of jokes about masculinity or queerness, but “Seinfeld” lets Alexander make it all about obsessing over grabbing just one slice of success. George’s career as a hand model ends before it can begin, and his pride is extinguished after a fatal accident with a hot iron. years later Ben Stiller’s Zoolander would make his model gagwhere David Duchovny’s character went so far as to encase his hand in glass to keep it pristine.

Most of George’s best jobs are the ones he was never hired for. The master of twisting and stretching the truth ended up being involved in several misunderstandings or outright lies related to his work over the show’s nine seasons, but few were as memorable as his time working on the “Pensky File.” Viewers are never told what the Barber Season 5 file is for, or even what the company George works for does, but the lack of clarity is intentional: George assumes he was hired after the man interviewed him, Mr. Tuttle (Jack Shearer) is interrupted mid-sentence when it looks like he’s about to hire George.

Never one to let a chance sit idle, George shows up for work the following week despite not actually being hired. Tuttle is on vacation, so he spends the week napping in an empty office and storing the file he’s been asked to manage in an accordion file organizer. At first, the strategy seems to pay off, with Pensky himself (Michael Fairman) ambiguously headhunting him, and he leaves in a moment of triumph just as Tuttle returns to find that he’s been weakening. However, after trying to get a job at Pensky, he finds out that the entire board of the company is accused of official crimes. “The Barber,” like many of Seinfeld’s best episodes, works well because it gives the audience a language for a strange situation that’s actually happening, all the while turning the dial toward the absurd. Did the interviewer ghost you when they were about to send the offer letter? Hey, you can always pull George out and see what happens.

“Seinfeld” set the bar for complex A, B, and C plot overlaps, a standard that virtually no sitcom has matched since (though “Arrested Development” has come close a few times). Over the years, the series has built its reputation for funny, laugh-out-loud crossover storylines, and by season 5, it had mastered its signature writing technique. Case in point: “The Marine Biologist,” a masterclass 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 lied to his date, former college sweetheart Diane (Rosalinda Allen). When their old classmate hints that George is probably a loser now, Jerry tries to protect him by pretending that his pal has an impressive job as a marine biologist.

The ruse works too well, and as a result, George and Diane go on a romantic walk on the beach. For a plot twist, the normally amoral George is against the lie and hopes it doesn’t float away, but of course the whale washes up and dies in front of them. Everything about the next scene is hilarious, from the shot of George decisively removing his hat and stepping into the ocean with his trousers rolled up as the crowd looks on, to his remark in the diner that “the sea was furious 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 later admits he’s a faker), and his dramatic story reaches a laugh-out-loud climax when viewers (and a super-invested studio audience) realize the whale almost died because Kramer hit a golf ball in the hole. George may never have actually been a marine biologist, but somehow he was better at this fake job than any of his real ones.