One More Time With Feeling

I don’t own a television. This has been an idiosyncrasy of mine for five years and, bar the odd drama series like Six Feet Under or comedy like Curb Your Enthusiasm, I don’t think I’ve missed much.

So it always amazes me when I meet people who love their box so much it not only has pride of place in their bedroom, they have memorised lines from their favorite show. You say, ’Hello Jerry,’ and they answer, ’Hello, Newman’ without missing a beat.)

With Hollywood TV writers picketing for a larger piece of the expanding corporate-profits pie, TV schedules have been riddled with reruns. Striking actorwriters, including Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos) and Tina Fey (30 Rock), gathered on Wall Street to make their demands.

One picket sign said, "We can’t BEAR studio BULL", objecting to studios telling writers there was no more revenue to be had from new media, despite selling advertising on those mediums. Apparently writer-producers like John Wells of ER, Marc Cherry of Desperate Housewives, and Larry David of Seinfeld and now Curb have sidestepped the skirmish; they are considered superstars and paid handsomely for their efforts.

And so it was with more than a small dose of curiosity that I joined my Seinfeld-obsessed friend Adam Shapiro on the ultimate rerun: The Seinfeld Tour, run by Kenny Kramer, the man Larry David based his Cosmo Kramer character on. The real Kramer, it turns out, lived across the hall from David in Manhattan Plaza, a midtown building that used to provide subsidised housing for artists.

Today, he makes his living peddling this tour. He calls it "art imitating life imitating art imitating life".

Shapiro, who was visiting New York from Durban, is now the proud owner of a "Yada Yada Yada" bumper sticker. Thankfully, he didn’t purchase the "Assman" car licence plate.

Before his Seinfeld hit, David was paying $67 for an apartment worth $1 500 (other famous Manhattan Plaza residents include Tennessee Williams, Angela Lansbury and Terence Howard). He was struggling to get booked at local comedy clubs, thanks to his reputation for throwing on-stage tantrums.

David’s dream at the time, says Kramer, was to earn $70 000 a year as a stand-up comedian. His mother told him he’d never make a penny doing comedy. Jerry Seinfeld, meanwhile, was making tens of thousands of dollars thanks to his "Did ya ever notice . . ." routine - jokes that David derisively called scraping the bottom of the barrel, right alongside dick jokes. But it was David that Seinfeld turned to when he was offered a show on TV. And it was the real Kramer and David who brainstormed a show based on the real Seinfeld (David used himself as the inspiration for George Costanza).

Kramer, while involved in getting Seinfeld off the ground and often inspiring entire episodes with his real-life antics, was not cast as himself - David said he’d found a far more interesting actor in Michael Richards. And certainly there is something sad about watching Kenny Kramer scrape up the commercial crumbs with the tour that he’s been running for 12 years.

Kramer, dark, but cheerful, claims that David has given him a blank cheque that he’s never had the occasion to cash. "I talk to Larry all the time," he told us. "He’s very happy because his wife dumped him. Until now, he’s never had the money, the house and the fame all at the same time. He’s loving it."

IF you’re a fan, the Seinfeld tour comes highly recommended for such notable landmarks as Roosevelt Hospital (where George went to get actress Marisa Tomei’s number), the West Side YMCA (where Kramer went to take notes on men’s shower techniques), the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Centre (where Elaine went on a date with the gay guy that she thought she could turn straight), and the façade of Tom’s Restaurant, where the foursome took their daily brunch (the interior is a studio on the Seinfeld lot in LA). Of course, no Seinfeld tour would be complete without a visit to where the Soup Nazi once struck terror in the hearts and bellies of the lunch crowd. While the place was closed two years ago, the store front of Al’s Soup Kitchen International still exists. A video that Kramer made preshutdown has Al (who was originally named by a writer from The David Letterman Show) saying: "Seinfeld was great for my business but it ruined my life. Now my store is filled with immature idiots who watch Seinfeld."

At the time of writing, the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers had agreed to return to the negotiating table. But then again, what do I care? I don’t own a TV.

This first appeared as a column in The Sunday Times Newspaper, South Africa