Jerry Seinfeld Wanted to Guest Star on ‘South Park’ Until They Told Him What Part He Would Play

Jerry Seinfeld thinks he’s too good to voice a turkey in a South Park Thanksgiving special, but he’ll make us watch an entire movie about Pop-Tarts.

Unless your name is Brian Boitano, if you’re a celebrity who dreams of being on South Park, you’d better have a sense of humility that’s much higher than most A-listers. No comedy series currently on television has less patience for celebrity worship than Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s magnificently iconoclastic masterpiece, and even when they do get a VIP voice actor to crack a couple jokes in an episode, it’s never in a part that most movie stars are dying to play — like when South Park made George Clooney voice Sparky the gay dog in “Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride.” 

And so, though many superstars have instructed their agents to get them an offer from South Park in the last 27 years, few have humbled themselves enough to actually accept the part Parker and Stone have in mind.

Jerry Seinfeld is one such star who considered himself to be too important to play a deliberately insulting and hilariously insignificant role when he reached out to Parker and Stone to appear in South Park in the show’s first season. With Seinfeld still putting out new episodes and South Park just getting started, Parker and Stone offered to let Seinfeld play the role of “Turkey #2” in the episode “Starvin’ Marvin.” Seinfeld declined.

In the very first South Park Thanksgiving episode, the boys unintentionally take in an emaciated Ethiopian child whom they name “Starvin' Marvin.” While Cartman, Stan and Kyle are busy traumatizing Marvin with an all-you-can-eat buffet, a horde of genetically engineered super turkeys overbreeds and begins to terrorize the town. The FBI accidentally sends Cartman to Ethiopia when they try to return Marvin home, and a coalition of townsfolk led by Chef doing his best Braveheart impression successfully fight off the turkey invaders — but not before the birds kill Kenny.

Again, Seinfeld was supposed to voice one of these fowl, but when Parker and Stone told Seinfeld’s agent that his star client would have to play a killer turkey who doesn’t speak English and doesn’t have a name, Seinfeld’s representative was reportedly “a bit put off” by the offer.

It’s too bad Seinfeld and his people didn’t think the part was worth his time — he could have used a Thanksgiving-themed comedy redemption after what he did to that Woody Woodpecker balloon.