Big Data Analysis of Every Seinfeld Script

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Last May marked the 20th anniversary of the finale of Seinfeld. Two decades later, the newly luxurious Upper West Side is nearly devoid of the mom-and-pop businesses crucial to the show’s ecology, and smartphones have fixed the logistical challenges that drove so many plotlines. And yet Seinfeld, both in viewership and cultural memory, endures like few other shows have. Hulu, which has exclusive rights to the show, reports that the average age of their Seinfeld viewer is 27, meaning they were in 2nd grade when the finale aired.

“I’ve seen so many different people connect over their love of this show,” says Jennifer Armstrong, whose book Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything explores the show’s history and legacy. “Even though it feels so specifically about these white, upper-middle class New Yorkers of the 90’s, it has endured because it has this really relatable nothing. It’s about complete banality.”

In honor of the anniversary of the show's finale, we got our hands on the script for every one of the 173 episodes—from the underachieving pilot to the underwhelming finale—and we tried to make sense of them. The essence of Seinfeld will never be captured in data points, but what the data revealed was more curious than we’d have guessed.

Seinfeld’s dialogue mirrored that of its creators, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. “That’s Jerry and George,” says Armstrong. “And they said, 'You have to have a girl', so they added Elaine, and it makes sense that that’s the next thing you see” on the chart. What may surprise viewers is Newman’s spare screen time, despite the character’s outsized cultural imprint. “He makes a really big impact, but he’s not around a lot,” she says.

What began as a sitcom about a New York comedian grew to equally involve all four characters and their entangled plotlines. As the show wore on, Jerry’s monologues became less frequent and were abandoned entirely in the eighth season. Over time, the writers created more plotlines for Kramer, who was originally conceived as a more minor side character. Through the show’s nine-season run, Elaine’s and George’s share of dialogue remains more or less constant, while Jerry and Kramer nearly meet in the middle.

Seinfeld’s legacy stems in no small part from its unforgettable phrases—“yada, yada, yada”, “not that there’s anything wrong with that”, “no soup for you”—that still feel relevant 20 years later. But don’t call them catchphrases, says Armstrong. “I wish there was a different word for it,” she says. Catchphrases, like Erkel’s “Did I do that?” or JJ’s “Dy-no-mite!”, are more like comedic filler that less inspired writers can return to throughout a show’s run. Seinfeld’s enduring phrases, on the other hand, tended to appear throughout a single episode and then never again—our memory of them is not so much a function of their repetition as of their brilliance.

The phrases below include four-word phrases that are among each character’s most frequently used, but also not among the most frequent phrases for other characters. So, while all the characters say “go to the bathroom”, only George says it so often that it’s in his top 100 most used phrases.