Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David Only Wanted Writers With No Sitcom Experience
Carol Liefer had an advantage over other prospective Seinfeld writers when she was approached for a job, she told Dana Carvey and David Spade this week on the Fly on the Wall podcast. It wasn’t that she knew Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David from the days when she was a fledgling stand-up comedian (though that didn’t hurt). It was that she had no experience writing traditional situation comedies.
“They didn't want people who'd written for sitcoms before because Larry hated all other sitcoms,” Liefer explained. “They wanted people new to the task. So I was lucky that way. That’s how I got hired.”
Seinfeld and David were familiar with Liefer’s joke-writing skills. As a young comic, she “auditioned at the Comic Strip along with Paul Reiser and Rich Hall,” she said. “Jerry was the MC, and he put us through the audition. And then when I auditioned at Catch A Rising Star, Larry David was the MC, and he put me through that audition. So I go back to my first days at these clubs with them.”
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She went on to several appearances on shows like Late Night with David Letterman, in addition to spending a season as a writer on Saturday Night Live. That SNL experience proved useful on Seinfeld. “In a lot of ways, (Seinfeld) was like SNL to me because you had to pitch your ideas to Larry and Jerry,” she said. Liefer threw out story concepts that were only allowed to be “like two sentences max. You know, ‘Elaine thinks the Korean manicurists are talking about her behind her back at the nail salon.’”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re doing that,” David might respond. “Yeah, yeah, that’s a great idea!”
Other times, she said, David had a habit of rolling a shoulder. “Nah,” he’d sigh, “I could see that on another show.”
David didn’t need to hear much more than a single line — Elaine thinks there are skinny mirrors at Barney’s, for example — but might ask writers to come back with additional storylines for Jerry, George and Kramer.
Liefer went on to write for Curb Your Enthusiasm, which David ran in exactly the same way. “You know, you’d go in and pitch ideas, and he would love them or not like them,” she said. “I remember the first time I pitched him Curb ideas. I said, ‘You know when you are with regular people — and by regular people, I mean not comedians — and you make a joke and one of them goes ‘ba-dum-dum’? You know how you want to strangle them?’ And he loved that.”
Liefer likened the Seinfeld/David collaboration to the sitcom Beatles. “What made the show great was the two of their sensibilities together,” she said. “I always call it like Lennon and McCartney. Jerry had the more pop sensibility, friendly. Larry (was) more the Lennon, the curmudgeon with the edge. Together, it made it lightning in a bottle.”
