Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Then he thought: What if SeinfeldToday faced competition on its own turf—from an ignorant, insane, taunting, anonymous presence? SeinfeldToday didn’t make Richards laugh anymore, but what did amuse him was the idea of countering Gondelman and Moore’s polished plot pitches with lunacy, the idea of a crazy person putting himself in the same position as successful BuzzFeed editors and comedians. If the Internet gave everyone a voice, why shouldn’t that include a deranged person who thought he was as clever as Gondelman and Moore—and, by the transitive property, as clever as Seinfeld creators Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld?

  On a slow afternoon in January 2013 at the Toronto-based TV network where he worked, Richards sent his first tweet as Seinfeld2000, aka “Seinfeld Current Day”: “Jerry use internet and Elaine start using internet.”

  GONDELMAN AND MOORE DIDN’T EXPECT to inspire such ire—or even such a large following—with their little Twitter joke.

  Gondelman made his name as a stand-up comedian in New York City with a sort of hipster George Costanza vibe, all cool self-deprecation. While watching Seinfeld reruns one day, he noted how many of its episodes would be rendered obsolete by modern technology. A large portion of its plots would collapse if Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer could text. They’d find one another at movie theaters and pick each other up at airports without a hitch. Then again, texting would create so many more of the kinds of social problems Seinfeld specialized in: dating, etiquette, secrets, lies. Gondelman’s friend Moore had the brainstorm that brought it all together: They could start a Twitter feed to pontificate on how Seinfeld would be different if it were set in “modern” times.

  The approach played well because it was so simple. As the account’s Twitter tagline explained: “What if Seinfeld were still on the air?” Because Seinfeld’s characters were so well-defined, they could transport to any time and place and behave predictably. If the Elaine of the ’90s broke up with a guy just because he was bad at breaking up, she’d also break up with a guy circa 2013 because he didn’t punctuate his texts. If women’s smallest gestures flummoxed ’90s George, a Facebook “like” could drive him to days of obsession.

  After Gondelman and Moore set up the SeinfeldToday account in December 2012, they picked up more than 75,000 followers their first day. Within a week, they had hundreds of thousands. Seinfeld’s George Costanza himself, actor Jason Alexander, retweeted a news story about the feed. Director and actor Jon Favreau, who appeared on the show in one of his earliest roles, tweeted about them. Time magazine named them to its list of 140 best Twitter feeds of 2013.

  But Seinfeld2000 wasn’t alone in his disapproval. Slate.com’s Jeremy Stahl wrote: “In contrast to the sitcom that gave it life, SeinfeldToday is not about tedium and banality: It is merely tedious and banal. SeinfeldToday supposedly imagines what the show would be like if it were still on the air—but all it does is appropriate the show’s characters and hand them iPhones plus a knowledge of the last fifteen years of popular culture.” Sam Biddle of Valleywag told Stahl the feed was nothing more than a “lazy take on the novelty” of Seinfeld characters existing in the present. “Jerry Seinfeld . . . WITH AN IPHONE? Elaine . . . TRIES ONLINE DATING? George . . . LOSES HIS KINDLE? It’s just a combination of nouns.”

  Seinfeld2000 gained a legitimate following tapping into this sentiment of annoyance, though his fan base remained a fraction of SeinfeldToday’s. Seinfeld2000 had a definite acquired-taste quality—“an almost insurmountable barrier of entry,” as its earliest press coverage said—as a parody of a parody written in what appeared to be its own special version of broken English, full of misspellings, pop culture allusions, and clumsy constructions. Followers were awfully close to being sucked into a cultural black hole via one too many cycles of meta-joke.

  Seinfeld2000’s works included existential musings: “You need to really take a minute and be honest with youre self about how you would actualy feel if ‘senfeld’ on TV today.” And awful wordplay: “Jery in TV aisel of Best buy, 152-Inch Sony Plasma TV tip over and fall on him. Staff lift it off him. But what if TV was still on Seinfeld?”

  Richards chose the odd voice by instinct, but he soon developed a rationale for it: a mediocre 1996 movie starring Michael Keaton called Multiplicity. In it, a harried father and businessman clones himself so he can get to everything on his to-do list, only to find that once he makes too many “copies” of himself, the “quality” degrades. Richards saw Seinfeld2000 as a copy of a copy, and thought the bad diction also lent his character a bit of pathos. He tried to compete with smooth BuzzFeed guys, but couldn’t pull it off.

  Because of the character’s strangeness and because Richards had chosen to remain anonymous, devoted followers couldn’t help but feel there was a deeper point here. Was this part of a phenomenon known as “Weird Twitter,” a public art project using the form of Twitter to make a statement? A sane person, a smart person, sending up the idea of parody accounts, and even the Internet as a whole? Or was it just exactly what it seemed to be, an insane person obsessed with SeinfeldToday, no more, no less?

  Who or whatever it was, it had a considerable fan base: 7,000 people followed the account by 2013, and more than 61,000 by late 2014.

  Richards refused to reveal that he was behind the account, taking a sort of Banksy approach to Internet memedom. The anonymity fanned his fans’ ardent flames. Hints to his possible identity began circulating online: He was identified as a male by May 2013. He was around thirty, read Kafka, and listened to Daft Punk, some bloggers had discovered.

  Richards was shocked that anyone cared that much. He was surprised anyone other than his parents, friends, and girlfriend followed the crazy feed.

  The targets of Seinfeld2000’s ire, meanwhile, took his existence as flattery. Besides which, Moore had by now parlayed the account into a writing gig for a new Fox sitcom and moved to Los Angeles. Gondelman went on to a staff writing job at HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. They were doing just fine, thanks.

  While SeinfeldToday remained way ahead in the race for followers, hitting 787,000 by late 2014, Seinfeld2000 developed a cool factor, counting Girls creator and star Lena Dunham and Vampire Weekend front man Ezra Koenig among its fans. When Richards did an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A on the sharing site Reddit—which allows fans to ask celebrities questions in a real-time chat—almost all of the questioners attempted to mimic the broken, misspelled Seinfeld2000 voice, a sure form of flattery.

  FROM THERE, THINGS STARTED TO get weird. No, really this time.

  To drive traffic to the Seinfeld2000 feed, Richards launched a dizzying number of spin-off projects large and small. Small: a YouTube video of the Seinfeld theme slowed down 1,200 percent. Large: a 16,000-word e-book, The Apple Store. In this opus, fiction and reality merge more than David and Seinfeld could ever have dreamed. Seinfeld2000 calls Jerry out on his endless conquest of women under thirty: Jerry meets actress Amanda Seyfried when he’s so down on his luck that he’s hitchhiking back to New York after getting kicked off Carrot Top’s Kings of Prop Comedy Tour. But he still Googles her age to make sure she’s young enough to bed. Seinfeld2000 makes Kramer a raging racist, spewing the kind of vitriol Michael Richards uttered in his infamous YouTube moment. Seinfeld2000 also makes it very clear that George plotted Susan’s murder and must pay for it.

  After the book, Seinfeld2000 got a gig writing for Vice magazine and interviewing musicians in character. He launched a YouTube channel. He made connections, and many of them were to talented people who wanted to work with this enigmatic web presence.

  Richards’s next major project was a collaboration with Pippin Barr, a respected New Zealand game artist with a heavy résumé: He taught at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, had a PhD in video game values, and had collaborated with performance artist Marina Abramović on a series of video games.

  The resulting game, released in May 2014, reflected both of its avant-garde creators’ aesthetics. Though it provides no concrete way to “win,” it awards dollar amo
unts every time you manage to flip a mint into a moving open body cavity. You get a finite number of tries, then you’re done; your only reward is a message that however much “money” you won will be donated to the Human Fund, George’s fake charity from the show. Blocking the path between the player (either “Jerry” or “Kramer,” who we see as photo cutouts) and the body are various obstructions off of which the mint may bounce: George and Elaine glide through, the doctors and their equipment slide back and forth, and pop star Miley Cyrus—for modernity!—flies through on a wrecking ball.

  Richards never imagined his little Twitter outburst against SeinfeldToday would go this far. By this time, he figured, he would have unfollowed Seinfeld2000 if he weren’t Seinfeld2000. He revealed his identity in a New York Times piece announcing the Junior Mint game. He had gone mainstream. He was getting a little sick of himself, or at least a little worried that others were getting sick of him. But cool collaborations kept presenting themselves. In July 2014, he got sucked in again, working with a developer who was a fan of Seinfeld2000 to launch a free Seinfeld emoji app.

  He often considered shutting the Twitter feed down and going out on top, just like Seinfeld had. Someone tweeted to him that he had grown into the very sort of sellout he’d created the account to mock. That hurt. And would he want to keep doing this, only to end up a fifty-year-old man obsessed with his follower numbers?

  But for the moment, he decided to keep going, with possible collaborations on live shows in New York and Australia on the horizon; ideas included a live SeinQuest2000, a Tony Robbins–style presentation, and a “new” episode of Seinfeld written in the Seinfeld2000 voice. He was even considering moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in Hollywood.

  MEANWHILE, RICHARDS, AS SEINFELD2000, HADN’T forgotten his original mission: mocking SeinfeldToday. When he was vacationing in Los Angeles in October 2013, he caught wind of a radio interview Larry David had done in which the host asked David how he felt about SeinfeldToday. ESPN New York’s Michael Kay read David one of the tweets: “Jerry’s blind date shows up drunk and heckles the screen during 12 Years a Slave. Kramer creates an app that gives you ideas for other apps.” After a second’s pause, David said, “Nah . . . I could guarantee you that show would not get on the air. . . . That does not pass the funny test.”

  Richards couldn’t contain his glee. So he didn’t. He time-coded the snippet of the interview in which David addresses SeinfeldToday and asked his followers—since he was traveling—if someone could put it on SoundCloud, a service that makes it easy to share audio files online. Once it was there, Richards tweeted the clip. It was picked up around the blogosphere. Sure, it would have likely made it onto some writers’ radars eventually, but, as Richards said, he “produced it a little bit.”

  A few months later, during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything,” Jerry Seinfeld expounded on his and David’s dislike for the SeinfeldToday phenomenon. “Oh this is a very painful subject,” he wrote. “As you can probably imagine, over the nine years of doing the show, Larry David and I sat through hundreds of ideas that people wanted to do on the show. And most of the ideas are not good. Which I saw Larry say the other day on some show, somebody asked him the same question and he said, ‘I know you think it’s funny, but it’s really hard.’ The ideas that Larry and I would respond to, I don’t even know, they just need to be very unique. It’s just a lot harder than it seems to come up with.”

  Richards, for his part, insisted that as Seinfeld2000 gathered steam, his hatred for SeinfeldToday dissipated. He simply couldn’t resist a poke now and then when it presented itself. With this particular poke, he’d accomplished the ultimate: He had brought Seinfeldia to the feet of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, and asked them to pronounce judgment. Their disapproval only showed that Seinfeldia was a force far beyond their control by this point—even if its denizens would always welcome a visit from them, and would commence an appropriate level of freak-out if it ever happened.

  ON JANUARY 13, 2014, AT about 10:30 A.M., it happened. George Costanza and Jerry Seinfeld walked into Tom’s Restaurant. Cameras were rolling, which is why passersby who happened to catch the pair strolling into the Upper West Side diner knew it was George and Jerry, not Jason Alexander and Jerry Seinfeld. Alexander’s Costanza-esque puffy red jacket and faded jeans provided further evidence. Alexander was also once again balding, a natural trait the actor had used some Seinfeld money to reverse in the elapsed time; the removal of his toupee only further confirmed that he was acting as George. The fact that it was Tom’s Restaurant—the exterior body double for the fictional Monk’s Café—and not a Monk’s Café set indicated that something was a little . . . off. Then again, the real and fictional worlds of Seinfeld had swirled and mixed and mushed so much in the sixteen years since Seinfeld signed off that no one knew what to think anymore.

  “Just George and Jerry casually walking into their corner coffee shop,” one observer, Ali Philippides, tweeted. Online speculation ranged from mundane—maybe Alexander was shooting a second episode of Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee—to what in Seinfeldia seemed as fantastical as it could get—a Seinfeld movie, or, better yet, a return of Seinfeld to television! The intrigue thickened when the New York website Gothamist posted a blurry video of Larry David leaving the scene later that afternoon, pursued by a pack of photographers and camera operators.

  Soon, news arrived that placed the shoot right in the middle of those speculations: The two were filming a commercial set to run during the Super Bowl a few weeks later.

  The ninety-second spot, which ran during the game’s halftime break to promote Comedians in Cars, had George and Jerry trading old, Seinfeld-style banter as if they were hitting Tom’s during that very game’s halftime. “I can’t believe the Super Bowl is in New York,” George complains, referring to the city’s hosting duties that year.

  The two, it emerges, have been banished from the annual Super Bowl party of their friends, the Wassersteins, due to George’s “over-cheer” two years before. The extended version online plays like George is a guest on Jerry’s show. Jerry picks him up in a pea-green, 1976 Pacer, “a total disaster from initial concept to final execution,” as the voice-over explains, equating the car with his friend. Seinfeld goes on to describe George as “my best friend from almost every single day of the 1990s.” That famous TOM’S RESTAURANT sign gets a full camera shot, including the TOM’S.

  The Seinfeld spot was the Super Bowl’s most re-watched commercial of the game, according to statistics released by the digital video recorder company TiVo. It beat out more “modern” phenomena such as a Ford Fusion ad featuring actor James Franco and a spot for Beats headphones featuring Ellen DeGeneres dancing with anthropomorphic bears and wolves.

  Seinfeld’s stars still held the keys to Seinfeldia and could stroll in and out as they pleased, causing mass hysteria among its citizens with every appearance. But they are merely royalty: They are figureheads we will continue to celebrate long after their on-screen demise. They are not necessary to keeping the land running day-to-day. And that is the very secret to its magic; this land is of the people, by the people, and for the people, a monarchy no more.

  For inhabitants of Seinfeldia, building and rebuilding it, keeping it alive with their every new idea and keystroke, it’s not so simple to leave. Just ask Larry David, who tried to extricate himself several times and found himself pulled back in every time—to write a reviled finale episode, to write a reunion into his own show, to shoot a Super Bowl spot. Every year more young fans are learning of this place, of its strange language and customs. Who knows what they may come up with next?

  Jason Alexander, music director Jonathan Wolff, and Jerry Seinfeld pose together at Wolff’s studio after recording some early radio commercials for Seinfeld. COURTESY OF JONATHAN WOLFF

  Jerry Seinfeld on the set with writer Andy Robin’s grandmother-in-law, Helen Farr, and sister-in-law, Polly Macgregor Ford. COURTESY OF ANDY ROBIN

  Writer Andy Robin’s
sister-in-law, Polly Macgregor Ford, snaps a shot with Seinfeld’s 40th birthday cake. COURTESY OF ANDY ROBIN

  Larry David and Seinfeld prepare to shoot the show’s final episode, captured by photographer David Hume Kennerly. GETTY IMAGES

  Larry David’s notes on an outline for an unproduced episode that Stoller pitched. COURTESY OF FRED STOLLER

  An excerpt from a draft of the episode “The Soup,” with lines that were cut from the final version. COURTESY OF FRED STOLLER

  Stoller and Kenny Kramer, the real-life model for the character of Kramer. PHOTO BY ADAM ANSELL

  Writers Andy Robin, Larry Charles, and Peter Mehlman backstage. COURTESY OF ANDY ROBIN

  TV producer Joe Davola—who willingly lent his name to the character of “Crazy Joe Davola” on Seinfeld—at a TV industry event in 2012. GETTY IMAGES

  Writer Alec Berg in the Seinfeld offices. COURTESY OF ANDY ROBIN

  Writer Jeff Schaffer hamming it up for the camera next to Carol Leifer. COURTESY OF ANDY ROBIN

  Kenny Kramer hosts “Soup Nazi” actor Larry Thomas at Kramer’s “Seinfeld Reality Tour” of New York City in 2006. GETTY IMAGES

  Writer Max Pross’s expert illustrations adorn a Seinfeld script. COURTESY OF ANDY ROBIN

  Andy Robin’s grandmother-in-law, Helen Farr, in his Seinfeld office, next to the all-important white board full of story ideas for each of the four characters. COURTESY OF ANDY ROBIN

  Writer Max Pross at his Seinfeld desk. COURTESY OF ANDY ROBIN