Does any sitcom understand the universal human urge to be lazy like "Seinfeld"? The classic NBC show often toyed with the careers of its four main characters throughout its super-popular run, revealing them to be a bunch of half-assed, quiet quitters and lazy opportunists, all while making their work-avoidance look admirable. The Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld Show nailed a universal truth that felt pretty bold since the Reagan-era 80s: Work is super boring and we shouldn't be doing it.

No character embodied the show's flamboyant approach to careerism like Jason Alexander's George. George started the show with a fairly steady job in the real estate business (albeit he was originally going to be a comedian), and later scored a plum gig arranging a trip to the New York Yankees. Between those two things, though, the writers seem to have realized that Alexander was never better than when playing George as a vengeful, overconfident (yet misanthropic), self-righteous failure. His string of quickly destroyed career opportunities in some of the show's middle seasons is pure comedy gold, and they often intertwine with the lives of the people in his life — including Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Elaine and Michael Richards' Kramer — in bizarre, outrageously funny ways. Here are five of the funniest things George has pulled through all nine seasons of "Seinfeld."

"Seinfeld" spends a good portion of its fourth season abandoning its "show about nothing" premise to focus on a series arc about Jerry and George trying to make a pilot for, well, a show about nothing. It may not be the most comically airtight season of the series (although at least one of my / film colleagues seems to disagree, as seen in our ranking of each season of "Seinfeld."), but Season 4 mines its meta story for all it's worth, including several scenes in which George and Jerry struggle to write anything even close to being as funny as their "real" lives.

George is incredibly bad at all things Hollywood and has almost ruined the pilot a dozen times. Argues with executives, demands more pay, sees daughter of NBC tycoon, gives Cramer cigars to accidentally set fire to houseehe gets fired by his new principal girlfriend, tries to cheat on her by using his TV writing record, and falls in love with the actor playing Kramer over a box of raisins. In the end, the duo's show for nothing makes it past the pilot stage for reasons unrelated to George's ineptitude, but his impressive ability to screw things up at every turn remains one of the best parts of Season 4. audiences—and the show—realized just how low he could stoop while remaining extremely likable.

George gets a job as a computer salesman in rare season 9 banger "The Serenity Now," an episode that popularized his father Frank Costanza's (Jerry Stiller) catchphrase. Frank is who George ends up working for when his dad buys a ton of computers to sell over the phone, but even with the new millennium on the horizon, no one seems to be in the market for a new computer—at least when George is selling it. His rival, Lloyd Brown (Matt McCoy), meanwhile, is an ace computer salesman who earns the love of George's parents while he struggles at work.

"The Serenity Now" is best remembered for Frank's repeated exclamation of "SERENITY NOW," a phrase he is told will help him stay calm in situations that raise his blood pressure. There are plenty of other funny moments, though, like when George uses porn download capabilities as his number one selling point for the new desktops. "There's porn!" he insists when Elaine says she's not interested, after which she takes a long second to think about the purchase. In the end, George's computer sales job is as short-lived as most of his other gigs: he games the system by buying the computers himself with the plan to return them later, but Kramer ends up destroying two dozen of them in a raid. of rage. Funnily enough, it turns out that Lloyd's sale was fake too - his phone wasn't even plugged in.

Then again, the famous "Seinfeld" episode that entered the lexicon for a completely different reason is home to one of the best B-plots about George's failed career changes. Season 5's "The Puffy Shirt" is also notable for its hideous eponymous shirt and the introduction of the phrase "low talker," which Jerry attributes to Kramer's (Wendell Meldrum) new girlfriend, prone to mumbling. Leslie's soft-spokenness leads to Jerry wearing a flashy, pirate shirt on The Today Show, and his disdain for a charity promotion ends George's burgeoning career as a hand model when Leslie accidentally pushes him onto a hot iron.

Hand modeling, George is told earlier in the episode, is the rare gig he might actually be good at. A chance encounter with a woman at a restaurant leads to his booking a gig, and Kramer naturally declares that George has "smooth, creamy, delicate but masculine" hands. On a lesser show, George's subsequent descent into an obsession with looking at his hands (he gets a manicure, starts wearing oven mitts around, and acts like he's been shot when Kramer hits him with a bell) would be the subject of jokes about masculinity or queerness. , but "Seinfeld" allows Alexander to go all out on the schmuck's obsession with barely an iota of success. George's modeling career ends before it begins, and his vanity is deflated after a fatal accident with a hot iron. Years later, Ben Stiller's Zoolander would make his own hand mannequinwith David Duchovny's character going so far as to encase his hand in glass to keep it pristine.

Most of George's best works are those for which he was never actually employed. The master of loosening up and spreading the truth ended up in several misunderstandings or outright lies related to his work over the course of the show's nine seasons, but few were as memorable as his time working on the Pensky Dossier. The audience is never told what the "Barber" Season 5 file is about, or even what the company George works for, but the lack of clarity is intentional: George assumes he's hired after the man finishes his interview for work. Mr. Tuttle (Jack Shearer) is interrupted mid-sentence when he appears to be about to employ George.

Never one to let a chance to do nothing, George shows up for work the following week despite not actually being employed. Tuttle is on vacation, so he spends the week napping in an empty office and putting the file he's been asked to manage into an accordion file organizer. The strategy seems to be paying off at first: he's ambiguously headhunted by Pensky himself (Michael Ferman) and quits in a moment of triumph after Tuttle returns and realizes he's slacking off. However, after trying to take a job from Pensky, he learns that the company's entire board of directors has been accused of white-collar crimes. "The Barber," like many of the best "Seinfeld" episodes, works well because it gives viewers a language for a strange situation that's actually happening, turning the dial on the absurd all the time. Did the job interviewer watch you when they were about to send the offer letter? Hey, you can always pull a George and see what happens.

"Seinfeld" set the bar for intricately overlapping A, B, and C plots, and it's a standard that almost no sitcom has matched since (though "Arrested Development" came close a few times). The show built its reputation for delivering laugh-out-loud funny storylines that intersect over the course of several years, and by Season 5 it had mastered its signature writing trick. Case in point: "The Marine Biologist," a masterclass in comedy writing in which George once again pretends to have a job he knows nothing about. This time, it's Jerry's fault that George ends up lying to his date, former college crush Diane (Rosalind Allen). When their old classmate implies that George is probably a loser these days, Jerry tries to defend him by pretending that his friend has an impressive job - marine biologist.

The yarn works too well, and George and Diane end up taking a romantic walk on the beach. For the sake of the plot, the typically amoral George is against the lie and hopes it doesn't show up, but of course a whale ends up beached and dies in front of them. Everything about the scene that follows is hilarious, from the shot of George decisively taking off his hat and stepping into the ocean with his trousers rolled up as the crowd looks on, to his remark back in the restaurant that "the sea was rough that day, my friends - like an old man trying to put soup back into deli''. In the end, George wins a rare victory (although he later admits he's a liar), as his dramatic story builds to a shrillly funny climax when viewers (and the super-invested studio audience) realize the whale almost died because Kramer hit a ball for golf in his hole. George may never have really been a marine biologist, but he was somehow better at that fake job than any of his real ones.