Seinfeld Tour: Culture and Travel Context

Like Cosmo Kramer's hapless customers in "The Muffin Tops", you, too, can see with your own eyes the real-life locations in New York City, Southern California, and elsewhere that were featured on the television series Seinfeld.

Ask any American to describe the premise of Seinfeld and they'll always come back to the same four words: "a show about nothing". That phrase or variations on it popped up in reviews of the show almost from the beginning, but at the outset, that was not what Seinfeld was meant to be. Instead, it was intended as a show that demonstrated how a stand-up comedian comes up with the material that they use in their act: in Jerry's case, picking apart the little trivialities and petty annoyances of daily life and mining the comedy out of them. It was an art form that Jerry and Seinfeld co-creator Larry David were both experts in, after years spent honing their craft on the New York comedy-club circuit in the '70s and '80s, and in Larry's case, also during a brief stint as a writer for Saturday Night Live. At that time, Manhattan was still an affordable place for the less-than-rich to live, and the stand-up scene was tight-knit and insular, centered around just a scant handful of comedy clubs: The Improv, The Comic Strip, Catch a Rising Star, and so forth. Onstage lineups on a given night drew from pretty much the same small clique of performers, and in that environment comics got to know one another, became friends, watched each other onstage, bounced ideas off each other offstage. In short, it was fertile ground for the observational humorist. Over time, Jerry's affable nature and accessible act brought him increasing success, with bookings on the Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman becoming more and more frequent as the '80s wore on, and even a small recurring role on the TV series Benson. Meanwhile, Larry was considered a "comic's comic": his fellow comedians howled with laughter whenever he was onstage, but his act was by and large too outré for mass audiences, and thus he was never really able to break out of the small-time club circuit the way Jerry did. His twisted and cynical sensibilities, though, were instrumental in the creation of Seinfeld: fans who are familiar with both comedians' work agree that the tone of the show bears far more resemblance to Larry's worldview than Jerry's.

It was in late 1988 when Jerry was contacted by NBC for a meeting with several of their executives, who'd been in attendance at a recent performance of his, liked what they saw, and were interested in working with him on a project for television. He enlisted his old friend Larry to help, and together they hatched the idea of a 90-minute special to be broadcast in Saturday Night Live's timeslot during one of its off weeks, wherein the camera would follow Jerry around as he went about a typical day in his life, with a finale featuring Jerry at a club performing a stand-up set inspired by the events of that day. Though of course that plan was later scrapped in favor of a half-hour weekly sitcom, Seinfeld still retained many elements of its original conception: the plotlines center around the daily life of a comedian, and each episode is bookended by scenes of Jerry onstage at a comedy club.

Once it was decided that a sitcom was the way to go, a premise had to be devised and characters designed. Jerry played an exaggerated version of himself, a cereal-eating, Superman-obsessed neat freak who served as a sort of "straight man" anchoring the wackiness around him. Meanwhile, the character of George Costanza (played by Jason Alexander) — Jerry's childhood friend; a duplicitous, stingy, frequently unemployed neurotic with a chip on his shoulder rivaled in size only by his inferiority complex — took his name from an old classmate of Jerry's at Queens College, but the persona is acknowledged to have been a fictionalized version of Larry. Finally, Michael Richards rounded out the original cast as Cosmo Kramer, Jerry's wild-haired, mooching, "hipster doofus" neighbor across the hall (modeled after Kenny Kramer, a former across-the-hall neighbor of Larry's) whose eccentric nature and penchant for harebrained schemes brought a touch of the absurd to the proceedings. Later, after the duo submitted their pilot to NBC executives for consideration, it was suggested that a female character be added to the cast, whence Elaine Benes, Jerry's ambitious, intelligent yet superficial ex-girlfriend whose portrayal by Julia Louis-Dreyfus was heralded as a high water mark for feminism on television: she was "one of the boys", yet also a strong female voice asserting herself unabashedly in relationships with men and speaking her mind openly about hot-button issues like abortion and contraception. Of course, as the series progressed, additional characters were added to the mix: George's parents (Frank and Estelle Costanza, played by Jerry Stiller and Estelle Harris respectively) and Jerry's (Morty and Helen Seinfeld, played by Barney Martin and Liz Sheridan); Jerry's cantankerous Uncle Leo (Len Lesser); Kramer's sniveling, diabolical postman friend Newman (Wayne Knight); George's ill-fated fiancée Susan Ross (Heidi Swedberg), Elaine's on-again-off-again boyfriend David Puddy (Patrick Warburton), obnoxious hack comic Kenny Bania (Steve Hytner), and many others.

Seinfeld was by leaps and bounds the most successful sitcom of the '90s, but that barely scratches the surface of the impact it had, and continues to have, on American pop culture. The show left its mark in numerous and diverse ways, from fashion (Kramer's vintage threads presaged the "thrift store chic" look that took the hipster world by storm a few years later), to event calendars (over two decades after the Season 9 episode "The Strike" was first broadcast, Festivus is on the cusp of becoming a bona fide holiday), to the very language spoken by Americans ("regifting", "shrinkage", and "yada yada yada" are but a few of the Seinfeld-derived words and phrases that retain their place in the popular lexicon). And that's not to mention its effect on consumer trends: Seinfeld is considered a pioneer in the practice of product placement on American television, with effects on such companies as Pez, which saw such a huge surge in sales after the episode "The Pez Dispenser" that it had to expand its candy factory in Connecticut to keep up with demand, and Fisher Pens, which still to this day sees an uptick in sales of its "AG7 Space Pen" — the model that Jack Klompus gifted to Jerry in Season 3 — every time the episode is rerun in syndication.

This cultural overview is an excerpt of a community travel guide. Confirm current access, schedules and prices with the venue before planning a visit.

Source and licence

Text adapted from Seinfeld Tour by Wikivoyage contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. This adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.