George Costanza

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Jason Alexander as George Costanza

George Louis Costanza is a fictional character on the US television sitcom Seinfeld (1989-1998), played by Jason Alexander.

George was Jerry Seinfeld's neurotic best friend. He sometimes lived with his parents, Estelle and Frank Costanza, a bitter couple who were almost as neurotic] as their son. As a teenager, he was tormented by his gym teacher, who called him "Can't Stand Ya." George and Jerry attended public school together, setting the dynamic for their later relationship. George claims that he and Jerry met in gym class when George, climbing rope, fell on Jerry. But in a few episodes, it is hinted that Jerry and George may have been friends before high school.

George has numerous psychological problems, including: habitual lying, low self-esteem, sudden fits of anger, impulsive acts of ill-considered genorosity, cheapness, selfishness, living in fantasy and a codependent friendship with Jerry. Like Kramer, he would often concoct elaborate plots to weasel out of relational, financial, or legal obligations, always with unexpected and negative consequences.

It is said that the character of George is based partly on the show's co-creator, Larry David. In the first couple of seasons, George was restrained by the standards of his later actions. But as the series went on, his schemes and personality became more outlandish.

Over the series, George had a number of recurring fears and obsessions, including baseball, pretending to be financially successful, contracting lupus, and dating Marisa Tomei.

George's professional life was unstable and he was unable to remain in any job for any great length of time before making an embarrassing blunder and getting fired. Over the course of the series he worked for the New York Yankees, an industrial smoothing company, and countless other places. He was fired from his job at Pendant Publishing for having sex with the cleaning woman. His original job when the series started was as a real estate agent; he ended up getting fired after he slipped his boss a mickey. His dream job was an architect, a job he would often pretend to have. In one episode, Jerry told a girl George wanted to impress that George was a marine biologist. The plan backfired when he was called upon to save a beached whale with a golf ball in its blowhole; he saved the whale, but the woman rejected him when he confessed that he was not, in fact, a marine biologist.

George briefly gained experience as a sitcom writer as he helped Jerry to write the pilot for the fictitious show Jerry. While pitching the concept of a "show about nothing" to NBC executives, George claimed to have written an off-Broadway play entitled La Cocina, about a Mexican chef named Pepe. In La Cocina, George claimed Pepe mimed the preparation of tamales and it was the mime aspect that made the play so funny.

George's alter ego, Art Vandelay, first appeared in the episode "The Stakeout," in which George and Jerry needed an excuse to a woman on why they were waiting in the lobby of the office building she worked at. Their excuse was that they were meeting Art Vandelay, the importer/exporter, for lunch. His original name, before George changed it at the last minute, was Art Corvelay.

For a period George was engaged to Susan Biddle Ross, a wealthy woman who used to be one of the executives at NBC who approved Jerry and George's show-within-the-show sitcom pilot. They dated on-and-off for a year, during which time the commitment-phobic George was constantly trying to find ways to end the relationship without actually having to break up with her. He proposed to her in a short-lived bout of midlife crisis, after he and Jerry made a "pact" to move forward with their lives; when Jerry broke up with the woman he made the deal over, George panicked and again tried repeatedly to weasel out of the relationship. He got his wish days before the wedding, when he indirectly killed her by selected the cheapest envelopes (not knowing they contained toxic glue) for their wedding invitations. Susan's parents never forgave him for this, and appointed him to the Board of Directors of the Susan Biddle Ross Foundation to keep him trapped in their influences.

George had an unusual affinity for velvet. When he was dating a woman who had velvet-covered furniture but lived with a man named Scott, he desired to replace Scott so that he could be "ensconced in velvet." His scheme had unintended consequences, because when Scott moved out, he took all the furniture (complete with the velvet) with him. In another episode, George stated that if it were socially acceptable he would "drape" himself in velvet. He dated a woman who had absolutely no interest in physical appearances, so he started wearing a velvet jogging suit. This may be an affinity of Larry David. (See the 60 Minutes II interview with Larry David.)

George hates the December holiday Festivus, mainly because as a kid he was forced to celebrate it with his father Frank, who invented the holiday to counter the commercialism of Christmas. He shows his strong dislike for the holiday when he refuses to take down Frank in the Feats of Strength (but Frank provokes him into doing it anyway.)

George Costanza moments

• Being Mistaken for a Neo-Nazi leader when he takes a limo that he believes is for four passes to a Bulls-Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.
• Taking up smoking so that Susan would call off the wedding, but the cigarettes caused him to cough and vomit
• Inventing a fictitious company named "Vandelay Industries" where he said he had a job interview, in order to keep getting his unemployment benefits. The company was run by the fictitious Art Vandelay. Vandelay Industries is, according to George, a latex manufacturing company based out of Jerry's apartment. Art Vandelay was also an importer/exporter as well as an architect. The judge in the final episode of the series was named Art Vandelay, which George interpreted as a "good sign."
• Passing an incomplete IQ test through an open window to Elaine in order to cheat on it, all with his one-time girlfriend on the other side of the door. He did this so she'd think he was smarter than he really was. Elaine ends up getting a worse score than George would have if he hadn't cheated due to distractions while at Babu's restaurant (although she later scored 151).
• Proposing a sexual relationship with his cousin to get his parents' attention, which she agreed to.
• Wearing Kramer's father's wedding band to get women to flirt with him (the conjecture being that women were more attracted to married men.) The theory worked perfectly, but all the women were offended when George flirted back.
• Telling Susan that he was meeting Elaine to discuss problems about her (made-up) boyfriend Art Vandelay when he actually was meeting Marisa Tomei. George and Elaine failed to develop the story enough and Susan suspected George was having an affair with Elaine.
• Calling Marisa Tomei on the eve of Susan's funeral to arrange a date: "I got the funeral tomorrow but... my weekend is pretty wide open."
• Attempting multiple times to pass off a red-dotted cashmere sweater which he bought at a discount. Eventually, even one of Elaine's alcoholic coworkers sees the dot.
• Leaving his car parked at Yankee Stadium so that George Steinbrenner would think he was there working even when he wasn't. Other escapades while at the Yankees included: turning the space underneath his desk into an area suitable for napping, pretending to be stressed in order to avoid work, and masquerading as a Communist in order to date a woman whose personal ad appeared in the Daily Worker newspaper.
• Getting ensconced or draped in velvet.
• Buying a car solely on the belief that it was once owned by Jon Voight.
• Faking a handicap so that he could get his own private bathroom at work.
• Trying to get money back for a book he brought into a bookstore bathroom. He was forced to pay for it because the book was "flagged" at all the area bookstores.
• Recording a telephone message, and singing it to the tune of the hit song "Believe it or Not" (from The Greatest American Hero). The message is sung this way:

Believe it or not, George isn't at home

Please leave a message at the beep

I must be out or I'd pick up the phone

Where could I be?

Believe it or not, I'm not home.

• Trying to get the Frogger game to his house from Mario's Pizzeria, where he and Jerry used to hang out when they were younger. The game is running on batteries, because George wants to preserve his all-time high score on the console (the high scores would be erased were the machine to lose power). Unfortunately, while George tries in vain to get the console to the other side of the street after performing a series of maneuvers resembling the game itself, a truck destroys the machine, after which Jerry remarks, "Game over."
• Continuing to use the name Art Vandelay until the show's final episode, when a judge by that name presides over the trial of the "New York Four," in which the defendants broke the Good Samaritan Law in the fictional town of Latham, Massachusetts. Jerry and George take it as a sign that they will be acquitted, but after a swarm of previous guest characters (from Marla the Virgin to the parents of Susan Biddle Ross) testify against the four friends, Judge Vandelay sentences George, Jerry, Kramer and Elaine to one year removed from society.
• Demanding that an area hospital pay for his damaged car after a man committing suicide landed on it after jumping off the roof.
• Trying to convert to Latvian Orthodoxy in order to keep a girlfriend. Told the priest that the reason for his conversion was the nice hats worn by the clergy.
• Not reading the book Breakfast At Tiffany's for a book club his girlfriend set him up with, but decided to rent the movie instead. When he realized the movie was checked out, he got the address of the people who had checked it out and was allowed to watch the movie with them. That is until he spilled grape juice on their couch.
• Pretending to have severe eyesight problems so that he could get a certain textbook on tape, his reasoning being that whenever he reads a book he hears his own voice reading the words. But when he gets the tape, he realizes the narrator sounds exactly like him.
• Developing back problems because of his oversized wallet. The wallet finally "exploded" out in the street.
• Competing for an apartment with an SS Andrea Doria survivor by telling the board about his horrifying life. He lost the apartment to a boyfriend of Elaine's who had paid the super $50.
• Working briefly as a hand model before he burned his hands on an iron.
• Agreeing to play Trivial Pursuit with Donald the Bubble Boy in upstate New York. Got in a fight with Donald when George insisted the answer was "Moops" but Donald said it was "Moors" (the card was a misprint). Susan ended up deflating the Bubble Boy and George was accused of trying to kill Donald.
• Trying to become friends with a black man to prove to his boss that he was not racist.
• Performing a series of stunts at Yankee Stadium, such as wearing Babe Ruth's jersey, streaking across the field in a body suit, and wrecking the team's 1996 World Series trophy with his car. He does this in an attempt to make Steinbrenner fire him so he can take a job offer from the New York Mets. In the end, Wilhelm is fired instead and is the one hired by the Mets.
• Claiming to have won "the contest," though in the finale, he admitted to Jerry that he cheated.
• Attending anger management sessions at the request of his friends, but the fact that the coach wanted him to hide his anger angered him too much to continue. Incited a participant at a Rage-aholics meeting by referring to him as a pinhead.
• Asking Elaine to get him a job at Pendant Publishing. Elaine's boss, Mr. Lippman, conducted an impromptu job interview with George, asking him what authors he liked. Pressed for specifics, George mentioned he liked Art Vandelay. According to George, Vandelay was an obscure beatnik writer who wrote Venetian Blinds.
• Crashing a baby shower to confront an ex-girlfriend who threw Bosco on his red shirt during a performance.
• Mistakenly thinking that he impregnated a woman in The Fixup. This happened because Kramer had given him a defective condom. George yells that "My boys can swim!" but it later turns out that the woman was not pregnant.
• Pitching some new ideas for two other NBC shows while backstage at The Tonight Show. First, George pitches his idea for "the perfect episode of L.A. Law" to Corbin Bernsen, then makes a suggestion to George Wendt that the setting of Cheers be changed because it's "enough with the bar already." Bernsen and Wendt make George the butt of their jokes on the talk show, much to his dismay.

Famous George Costanza quotes

• "It's not you, it's me."
• "Nobody ever says it's them, not me. If it's anybody, it's me."
• "You're damn right it's me!"
• "I'm disturbed, I'm depressed, I'm inadequate, I've got it all! "
• "I am speechless, I have no speech!"
• "Why do I get pesto? Why do I think I'll like it? I keep trying to like it, like I have to like it. Everybody likes pesto. You walk into a restaurant, that's all you hear - pesto, pesto, pesto. Where was pesto 10 years ago?"
• "No, no, I don't think I'm special. My mother always said I'm not special."
• "George is getting upset!"
• "You're killing independent George!!"
• "No one gives us the finger. We're Yankees!"
• "My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents."
• "You know, we're living in a society!"
• "Lupus? Is it lupus?"
• "Jerry, just remember: It's not a lie if you believe it."
• "I've driven women to lesbianism before but never to a mental institution."
• "My father was a quitter, my grandfather was a quitter, I was raised to give up. It's one of the few things I do well."
• "Alright, that's it for me, you've been great! Good night, everybody."
• "I can't believe it! I'm a father! I did it! My boys can swim! I can do it! I can do it!"
• "He's beboppin' and scattin' and I'm losing it!"
• "You had to hop. You had to hop on the plane!!!"
• "I was in the pool! I was in the pool!"
• "It's not my fault. Seinfeld can't drive! How hard is it to follow somebody?"
• "The jerk store called, and they're running out of you!"
• "You tell that son of a bitch no Yankee is ever coming to Houston, not as long as you bastards are running things!"
• "Parking in the city is just like sex. Why should I pay for it when, if I apply myself, I might be able to get it for free?"
• "I can't carry a pen, I'm afraid it'll puncture my scrotum."