{"id":4953,"date":"2016-05-22T22:45:10","date_gmt":"2016-05-22T17:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=4953"},"modified":"2016-05-22T22:45:10","modified_gmt":"2016-05-22T17:15:10","slug":"30-years-of-seinfeld-all-hail-the-lord-of-the-idiots-george-costanza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=4953","title":{"rendered":"30 Years of Seinfeld: All Hail the \u201cLord of the Idiots\u201d George Costanza"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I<\/span><\/p><\/div>

n the eleventh episode of <\/span>Seinfeld<\/span><\/a>\u2019s sixth season after George unintentionally lands Jerry the company of two women, he asks his friend, elated, \u201cDon\u2019t you ever just get down on your knees and thank God that you know me and have access to my <\/span>dementia<\/span><\/a>?\u201d That is George Costanza for you. His plans don\u2019t end where they are supposed to, but he finds his little, bittersweet destinations in them anyway. George doesn\u2019t take himself any more seriously than the people around him. On the show, he described himself as \u201clord of the idiots\u201d. His friend Elaine calls him \u201cslow-witted\u201d, Kramer called him \u201cspineless\u201d. Jerry, perhaps the only one who understood George called him \u201cduplicitous\u201d. Played by Jason Alexander, George Costanza hit TV screens exactly 30 years ago. For every self-regarding, ripped male Adonis on television, George\u2019s consistency with incompetence and failure has served as the grounding tug of middle-age realism.<\/span>\n\nCostanza, named after one of comedian <\/span>Jerry Seinfeld<\/span><\/a>\u2019s friends and based largely on the show\u2019s co-creator Larry David (who called himself a \u201closer\u201d) is a man down on his luck, his wits and pretty much anything else fate can snatch from you. George stumbles into situations, more than he ever pursues them. He is unlikeable, undependable, all heart and mouth without the head and the hair. He doesn\u2019t have his friend Jerry\u2019s (Jerry Seinfelds) charisma, his friend Kramer\u2019s eccentrically charming worldview, or Elaine\u2019s zeal for life. George is a <\/span>handwritten note<\/span><\/a> you write to yourself and forget because you move onto more interesting things. He is the kind of character who needs the lens of observation, rather than empathy to emerge. And that is what Seinfeld, a show presumably about \u201cnothing\u201d did. It centralised a total bum, a man out of his depth with the world and perennially on the brink of farce.<\/span>\n\nIt is now unthinkable that in the shadow of pristine, likeable ensembles like <\/span>Friends, <\/span><\/i>Seinfeld demanded the world to deal with the rough-cuts of manic sub-mediocrity, the kind that repeatedly manifests in everyday life. George can\u2019t get women to like him. When they do, he can\u2019t trust them enough. George can\u2019t get work. If he gets any he can\u2019t keep up. In every equation, variables of George\u2019s failings changed according to his paranoia and anxiety. The only constant was the inevitable evisceration of love, lust, prospects, faith and hope. Even George\u2019s <\/span>parents<\/span><\/a> didn\u2019t like him for the cynic he is. \u201cMy life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be,\u201d he tells Jerry. But even when that life is flipped for the better, George cannot handle the expectations, the shift from his comfort zone of a participating underdog; a zone within which he can set the bar comfortably low. All because he knows who he is.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nLife is about survival for most. Key to that survival is an empirical estimation of the heights you can hit, the targets you can chase and the potholes you are better off not trying to leap over. Through the nine seasons of the show, George failed at pretty much everything he tried. Even his attempt to save the high-score on a <\/span>frogger machine<\/span><\/a>, that could have become a synonym for salvation, <\/span>goes up in flames<\/span><\/a>. George accomplishes nothing, but he doesn\u2019t particularly yearn for anything either. He survives, and to him, like perhaps most of us that is all there is to life; that all there is going to be. He moves from one anxiety attack to another, constantly reminded and comforted by the mediocre built of his instruments. Perhaps it is just better knowing your distance from the sky than knowing the chances of you becoming a star.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\n\n

He is unlikeable, undependable, all heart and mouth without the head and the hair.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\nWe live in a world where we are bombarded with cosmetic perfection. We have been raised on heroes and we are suckers for a good rags-to-riches story, however temporary. It, therefore, stresses us that we never match up to these silver-foiled narratives of distinction. Our <\/span>salaries<\/span><\/a> are never enough, our savings, our partners, our houses, even our history at times. Our aspirations arrive before us, like a prefix you cannot shake. And we spend lifetimes petrified about never crossing certain socio-political bars. To George none of that mattered. It was okay for him that he wasn\u2019t as magnetic, as talented, as successful or as motivated as people around him. It was okay to be paranoid, inept or thoroughly flustered by the complexities of life. Not that he didn\u2019t try, but whatever George did to gain, he lost. Whatever he tried to protect, he had to surrender.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nA couple of years ago when I left a cushy IT job, I realised I wasn\u2019t cut out for the suit, its length and breadth I couldn\u2019t find comfort in. There was a certain joy to giving up, not on yourself but on an aspect of life, a puzzle that you could neither bring yourself to solve nor take pleasure in.<\/span>\n\nPerhaps the greatest accomplishment of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld in carving a character like George was that he was mindful of his place in the world. He didn\u2019t try to become Jerry. In the event that that seemed likely, George felt out of his element, uncomfortable that life would suddenly turn around rather than flip him over like it had been doing since birth. \u201cI feel like my old self again. Neurotic, paranoid, totally inadequate, completely insecure. It\u2019s a pleasure,\u201d he tells Jerry. His antics may have been for comedy but George\u2019s life was rife with failure, a perpetually closed gateway to better pastures. Pastures whose elusiveness never forced him to closet his <\/span>grief<\/span><\/a> or feed on it. George\u2019s shell may not have reared oysters inside it but it did cultivate grit, the kind that is groomed in last-chance-salons. He was perpetually on the brink, but only he could manage living there, survive nonetheless, scraping through, making do, manoeuvring as needed. That is what life is like, isn\u2019t it, because there is more George in each of us than there is Jerry.<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Played by Jason Alexander, George Costanza hit TV screens with Seinfeld exactly 30 years ago. For every self-regarding, ripped male Adonis on television, George\u2019s consistency with incompetence and failure has served as the reminder of middle-age realism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":137,"featured_media":4954,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\n30 Years of Seinfeld: All Hail the \u201cLord of the Idiots\u201d George Costanza<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Played by Jason Alexander, George Costanza hit TV screens with Seinfeld exactly 30 years ago. 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