Alexander said that there was "a solid minute of laughter" from the audience in response to one memorable scene.
What is the funniest scene in Seinfeld history? It feels like an impossible question to answer, as it’s a show that is filled with countless hysterical moments. But in a recent interview on the podcast “Inside of You With Michael Rosenbaum,” Jason Alexander recalled one particular scene that received the biggest audience reaction in the show’s 9-season run.
Alexander, who played George Costanza, said that his infamous monologue at the end of “The Marine Biologist” had the studio audience laughing like he had never heard before. Specifically, the moment where pulls Kramer’s golf ball out of his pocked had the audience in stitches.
“There was a solid minute or more of laughter,” he said. “That’s a lot of laughing, where you can’t go on, you can’t do the next line, because the audience is laughing that hard? That was huge.”
If you need a little reminder of the scene that Alexander is referring to, here is a brief refresher: George has to pretend to be a marine biologist in order to impress his old college crush, Diane. It all goes surprisingly well until George and Diane encounter a beached whale, requiring George to try and save it by using his nonexistent skills as a marine biologist. And the episode concludes with Alexander delivering a speech that is right up there with “To Be or Not to Be” and “Always Be Closing” as all-time great monologues.
What’s really impressive is that the monologue was written just before the shot was filmed, as Alexander said that Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David quickly put it together because they were unhappy with the original ending of the episode. Alexander only read through it a single time before doing it in on camera and he told Rosenbaum that it was “the first and only time we shot that rewrite.”
