Jerry Seinfeld

By Tom Kirvan

The NBC sitcom “Seinfeld,” which aired 1989-98, ranks as a cultural phenomenon that starred the show’s namesake himself, Jerry Seinfeld, universally ranked as one of the top comedians of all time.

Born April 29, 1954 in Brooklyn, Seinfeld was the son of a sign painter who collected jokes during his military service in World War II. It didn’t take long for the son to develop an interest in telling jokes for a living, as he appeared in a host of improv and stand-up comedy routines during his days as a student at Queens College, from which he graduated in 1976 with a degree in communications and theater.

His big break came five years later in 1981 when he made an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” a golden opportunity that led to multiple return engagements, as well as dates on “Late Night with David Letterman.”

In 1988, he teamed with Larry David to create “Seinfeld.” By its third season, the show had become the most watched sitcom on television, drawing huge ratings that made the comedian and his castmates – Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michael Richards, and Jason Alexander – household names. After nine seasons, Seinfeld decided to pull the plug on the show despite being offered a reported $5 million an episode for a 22-episode 10th season.

Jerry Seinfeld*

Ostensibly a “show about nothing,” the hit comedy was anything but, thanks to the brilliance of Seinfeld, whose one-liners and catchphrases became embedded in American culture. It was a reservoir for such treasures as “Soup Nazi,” “yada yada yada,” “serenity now,” and “How long do you have to wait for a guy to come out of a coma before you ask his ex-girlfriend out?”

After ending his sitcom, Seinfeld returned to New York and stand-up comedy, starting a web series titled, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” a show in which he would pick up a fellow comedian in a different car every episode and take them out for coffee and conversation. Season seven featured his most high-profile guest, then-President Barack Obama. The experience of tapping on the Oval Office window to summon the Commander in Chief was momentous, Seinfeld admitted.

“That probably was the peak of my entire existence.”

A lifelong fan of the New York Mets, Seinfeld is a car collector, owning more than 150 autos, nearly a third of which are of the Porsche variety, a fact that prompted him to once muse, “If I want a long boring story with no point to it, I have my life.”

He may have topped that with this observation: “According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

*Encyclopædia Britannica. (2019). Jerry Seinfeld. In Britannica.com. Retrieved April 17, 2025, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jerry-Seinfeld#/media/1/532877/241481