The Surprising Similarity Between Don Draper and Cosmo Kramer

At first glance, Mad Men’s Don Draper and Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer are pretty much nothing alike. One is a slick advertising genius who wears fancy suits, drinks fine whiskey and works in the 1960s. The other is a hipster doofus who mooches off of his neighbor, and barely worked much at all throughout the 1990s.

But upon closer inspection, these two characters may not be so dissimilar after all. As writer and Mad Men fan Ben Crew recently pointed out on social media, Don Draper basically landed his first office job the same way Kramer did — by just randomly showing up one day.

Yup, Don only started working at Sterling-Cooper because he pretended like he had been hired — although he did go the extra mile and make sure to get Roger Sterling nice and drunk the night before. 

In the case of Kramer, he accidentally stumbled into a corporate position while using an office bathroom, then decided to go along with the mistaken belief that he was an employee, even though he had no idea what he was doing and wasn’t even getting paid. 

Come to think of it, the similarities don’t end there. Both Don and Kramer are both sexually active New Yorkers with bold ideas. But while Don comes up with successful ad campaigns, Kramer mainly dreams up kooky business ventures, like the “Peterman reality tour,” the make-your-own-pizza restaurant, and the coffee-table book about coffee tables. 

They also both habitually smoke (cigarettes and cigars, respectively) and worked with Big Tobacco: Don Draper’s agency routinely did business with Lucky Strike, while Kramer attempted to sue a Marlboro-like company over his “hideous” appearance, but eventually settled the case in exchange for a starring role in one of their ad campaigns. 

Not to mention how they both had dealings with the women’s undergarment industry. While Don pitched copy to Playtex…

…Kramer and Frank Costanza went into business for themselves and tried to sell their Bro/Manssiere invention to bra executive Sid Farkus.

Wait, there’s more: Don Draper, famously, has a hidden secret involving his past. He’s not really Don Draper, he’s some guy named “Dick Whitman.” He took the stylish name after the real Don died in combat (not unlike Armin Tamzarian). Kramer, too, has a buried secret involving his identity. In the first several seasons of the show, he absolutely refused to let his friends know his real first name. That is, until his mother randomly blurted it out in front of George in Season Six. 

And had Don, Roger, Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson ever decided to compete in a masturbation contest, presumably Don would have lost just as quickly as Kramer.

But with Don, there would have been lot more subsequent existential malaise.