Jerry Seinfeld

Jerome Allen Seinfeld was born on April 29, 1954, in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. His father, Kalmen Seinfeld, was a sign painter of Hungarian origin who collected jokes during his service in World War II. His mother, Betty, was a Syrian Jew whose parents, Selim and Salha Hosni, emigrated from Aleppo in 1917, listing their nationality as Turkish because Syria was then under the Ottoman Empire. Seinfeld grew up in Massapequa, on Long Island, and attended Massapequa High School. At age sixteen, he volunteered at Kibbutz Sa'ar in Israel. He enrolled at the State University of New York at Oswego before transferring to Queens College of the City University of New York, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in communications and theater in 1976. His older sister is named Carolyn, and his second cousin is musician and actor Evan Seinfeld.

Seinfeld's interest in stand-up comedy developed during college productions, and he began performing at open-mic nights at Budd Friedman's Improv Club while still at Queens College. After graduating in 1976, he performed at Catch a Rising Star in New York City, which led to an appearance in a Rodney Dangerfield HBO special. In 1980, he took a small recurring role on the sitcom Benson, playing Frankie, a mail-delivery boy whose comedy routines went unappreciated, before being abruptly fired due to creative differences. In January 1981, he performed on An Evening at the Improv, and in May of that year he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, a performance that led to frequent bookings on that program and on Late Night with David Letterman. His first one-hour special, Stand-Up Confidential, aired live on HBO on September 5, 1987.

In 1988, Seinfeld and Larry David created The Seinfeld Chronicles for NBC, a series later renamed Seinfeld to avoid confusion with the short-lived teen sitcom The Marshall Chronicles. By its third season the show had become the most-watched sitcom on American television. Seinfeld played a fictionalized version of himself alongside Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michael Richards, and Jason Alexander, and he is the only cast member to appear in every episode. Alexander's character George was written as a caricature of Larry David. NBC offered Seinfeld $110 million — $5 million per episode for a 22-episode tenth season — but he declined. The series concluded in 1998 and has remained a widely syndicated program. Seinfeld earned a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series Musical or Comedy in 1995 for his work on the show, and the production received a Primetime Emmy Award and three Screen Actors Guild Awards among its accolades.

Following the end of the sitcom, Seinfeld returned to New York City and resumed touring as a stand-up comedian rather than continuing an acting career in Los Angeles. His 1998 tour produced the comedy special I'm Telling You for the Last Time, and the process of developing new material during that period was documented in the 2002 film Comedian, directed by Christian Charles and also featuring comic Orny Adams. In 2007, Seinfeld co-produced, co-wrote, and starred in the DreamWorks animated film Bee Movie. He appeared at the 79th Academy Awards that same year as the presenter for Best Documentary, and at the 80th Academy Awards in 2008 he presented Best Animated Short Film as the voice of his Bee Movie character Barry. In 2004, he appeared in two American Express webisodes titled The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman, directed by Barry Levinson, in which he appeared alongside a cartoon rendering of Superman voiced by Patrick Warburton. That same year he donated the puffy shirt from the Seinfeld episode of the same name to the National Museum of American History.

Seinfeld created and produced the reality series The Marriage Ref, which ran from 2010 to 2011, and hosted the web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee from 2012 to 2019, earning three Webby Awards for the latter. In 2024, he co-produced, co-wrote, and starred in the Netflix comedy Unfrosted. His stand-up specials include Stand-Up Confidential (1987), I'm Telling You for the Last Time (1998), Jerry Before Seinfeld (2017), and 23 Hours to Kill (2020). Comedy Central ranked him the 12th-greatest stand-up comedian of all time in 2004, and Rolling Stone placed him seventh on a similar list in 2017.

In 1998, Seinfeld brought his stand-up work to Broadway with Jerry Seinfeld: Live On Broadway, a credit that also lists him as book writer. As an author, he published SeinLanguage in 1993, the children's book Halloween in 2002, and the comedic compilation Is This Anything? in 2020. He practices transcendental meditation and is a fan of coffee and automobiles. He is married to author and philanthropist Jessica Seinfeld, and the couple has three children.