What Seinfeld character is based on Larry David? One famous storyline was lifted straight from David's own resignation
Jerry Seinfeld played a version of himself, under his own name, in his own apartment. His co-creator took the less obvious route and put his version across the hall — short, bald, unemployed, and furious about it.
George Costanza is Larry David. Not loosely inspired by, not partly modeled on. David has said so repeatedly, and the show's most quoted job-quitting episode is a scene-for-scene reenactment of something that happened to him at NBC in 1985.
The character, down to the surname
George was created by Seinfeld and David and named after Michael Costanza, a real friend of Jerry's from Queens College. Jason Alexander, who played him for all nine seasons, spent the early episodes doing a Woody Allen impression because nobody had told him whose life he was performing.
That ended when he complained to David that a George plotline was implausible — that no actual person would behave that way.
"This happened to me and this is exactly what I did," Alexander recalled David telling him, in an account retold by Looper in 2023.
Alexander dropped the Woody Allen voice and started studying Larry instead.
The resignation that became "The Revenge "
David joined Saturday Night Live as a writer for the 1984–85 season and got almost nothing on air. Midway through the season he quit in a rage and made it clear he wasn't coming back. On the way home he realized he'd made a mistake. His neighbor Kenny Kramer — the same neighbor who'd later lend his name and general aura to Cosmo Kramer — suggested he simply show up Monday and act as if nothing had happened.
It worked. Nobody said a word.
"The Revenge," which aired April 18, 1991, is that story with the ending flipped:
- The trigger — George is barred from his boss's private bathroom at Rick Barr Properties.
- The tirade — he storms into Rick Levitan's office to inform him he's a joke and a laughingstock, then quits.
- The regret — he has no other skills, no prospects, and no plan.
- The Monday — Jerry suggests he go back and pretend it never happened. Levitan does not play along.
- The revenge — George spikes his ex-boss's drink at the office party, mostly because it's what people do in movies.
It was the first Seinfeld episode David wrote without Seinfeld. The episode also contains the first appearance of Newman, who exists only as an offscreen voice — David's own, later dubbed over by Wayne Knight for syndication.
What else came out of his life
"The Contest," which aired November 18, 1992, came from a real bet David once made with friends. And the whole apparatus of Curb Your Enthusiasm is David playing an even less filtered version of the same guy, which makes George the middle draft.
For the record: George quitting a job he immediately wants back also inspired an episode of Father Ted, in which Dougal advises Ted to kick a bishop and then carry on as though he hadn't. The advice runs in the family.