A ‘Seinfeld’ Veteran Has Been Keeping the Oscars Funny for Decades

For the millions of people who haven’t even heard of the movies nominated for Best Picture this year, there’s still a very good reason to watch the Academy Awards: comedy. 

After all, this year’s ceremony will be hosted by none other than Conan O’Brien, who previously hosted the Emmys, the MTV Awards, the NFL Honors, and, of course, the esteemed Audiencey Awards.

We also just learned who will be writing this year’s ceremony. In addition to several names that may or not be pseudonyms for Bruce Vilanch, the team includes comedian Carol Leifer. While she’s written for hit shows like Saturday Night Live, Modern Family, The Larry Sanders Show, and most recently, Hacks, a lot of us first became aware of her because of Seinfeld.

Leifer was Emmy-nominated for her work on Seinfeld, writing six episodes (and working as a story editor on dozens more), including classics like “The Rye.” She’s also, at least to some extent, the inspiration for the character of Elaine and briefly appeared in “The Kiss Hello.”

This will be the 11th time that Leifer has written for the Oscars; she first started writing for the awards show back in 2000, when she supplied jokes to host Billy Crystal.

Since then, Leifer has written for a wide variety of Oscar hosts, including Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, Whoopi Goldberg and the Steve Martin/Alec Baldwin combo. But she’s argued that writing for such different comedic styles isn’t as tricky as one might think. “They are all different voices,” Leifer explained to The New York Times, “but the beauty of joke writing is once you hit on a good joke, a good joke is a good joke. And if you put the same jokes in front of all of those hosts, they’d certainly grab the best joke.” 

In a 2012 interview with Vulture, Leifer was asked about what kind of jokes to submit when the nominated movies weren’t huge box-office hits (that year’s Best Picture winner was the wildly forgettable silent film homage The Artist). That question also seems very pertinent to this year’s show, when the Best Picture frontrunners are a Netflix movie that nobody seems to have both seen and liked, and a nearly four-hour drama that has so far earned less than Dune 2’s catering bill.

“Jokes are jokes. And you just write jokes around the movies that are out there,” Leifer revealed. “We’re not thinking consciously about small or big. We’re aware that a lot of people haven’t seen The Artist. But I’m sure they’ve seen commercials, so they know enough to know that it’s in black and white and that it’s a silent movie. Beyond that, you don’t really need to know much more.”

Leifer also made sure to point out that she was in no way involved with the show during the James Franco year. 

Hey, another plus.