Kramer sold marijuana out of his apartment.
What, Exactly, Is His Job? Turns out he's a pot dealer. And he's making some good money from it, even though he's clearly going through a considerable chunk of his supply. In addition to the obvious explanation for his eccentric behavior, it explains:
- How he can afford the apartment. He never seems to be at risk of being kicked out for lack of money — other shenanigans, sure, but not inability to pay. Sure, the landlord might refuse to rent to a guy whose only source of income is technically illegal, but we see that Kramer had been living there even longer than Jerry; he might still have been working as a "bagel technician" when he first moved in.
- Why he's always raiding Jerry's fridge — it's the munchies!
- Why he knows so many people — everyone's got to be on good terms with their dealer. And many of these people are in shady lines of business themselves, like "Slippery Pete" the electrician.
- Why he has a pipe but never seems to smoke it (he just uses it for his "Dr. Van Nostrand" persona) — it's for the pot. He does smoke tobacco but prefers cigars.
Other implications:
- In one episode, Kramer impersonates a coke dealer and does a horrendous job of it. He did it on purpose — he was afraid of doing too good a job and outing himself as a genuine dealer of a different drug.
- In another episode, he turns his apartment into a "smoking club" for men who were tired of discrimination for being smokers. Those are likely his clients.
- He dislikes hospitals and prefers to go to a "holistic healer". What kind of medicine would such a healer prescribe, pray tell?
- Jerry partakes of Kramer's wares on occasion and wants to be near him. Elaine isn't a fan, and everything we see of George suggests he's the opposite of a stoner (including his marked inability to handle a cigarette). Jerry is looking for a little Artistic Stimulation and credits the pot with helping him be so even-keeled about anything. The others either don't care or don't notice — the building may be so old that the pot stench just fades into the background.
- This seems less likely, as the real life Seinfeld has frequently said he has never been interested in drugs.
There is a good reason Kramer meets influential people with ease; he is already well-connected and has access to untold millions of dollars. He probably inherited his fortune from a relative after leaving the army;
a namesake Uncle Cosmo who died without children of his own. In the wake of the 60s counterculture,
Kramer decided against a conventional way of life in high society. Occasionally he works, but not because he needs the money. Aside from the work giving him an outlet to pursue his unusual interests,
Kramer wants to keep up appearances of being an average person. Even so, he plays hard and leaves everyone wondering how he manages.
- He may be a cousin of Jim Ignatowski, nee James Caldwell (in some early episodes Michael Richards seems to be doing a Reverend Jim impression.)
Kramer is a gigolo
- Not a literal street hustler, but he doesn’t seem above being a “kept man” for some wealthy woman. He always seems to have some money, but not an inordinate amount, he always has schemes going, and he easily makes friends with wealthy people, such as the couple who bought his portrait.
The corner of 1st and 1st really is the nexus of the universe.
Kramer isn't making it up — Jerry seems to back him up on it.
Kramer is a
Marauder and the
Seinfeld-verse is his Paradox realm.
It's
Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
The Lopper was Crazy Joe Davola.
The last time we see Joe Davola is in the "The Pilot", when he tries to attack Jerry in the TV studio, and we don't see what happened to him. Per this guess, he was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for his attempted assault. In prison, Joe became increasingly angry and hostile towards Jerry; by the time he got out, he hated Jerry so much that he started beheading anyone who looked like him. Kramer did make a point to say that the Lopper's victims all looked like Jerry.
The plane carrying the characters in the final episode actually crashes, and they all actually die. What we see after that point is their judgment for their sins in the afterlife, which is why the trial looks so much more like a morality judgment than a legal proceeding. They all get to be in the same prison cell, which is something more akin to an ironic punishment than serving any law enforcement goals. And to hammer home the point, we see said ironic punishment — they
start the same conversation from the first episode. They've run out of things to talk about, and
are doomed to repeat the same conversations over and over again. Except they're not strictly doomed — this is Purgatory, not Hell, and their task is to relive their lives until they can recognize what they did wrong, atone, and become better souls.
They are actually in
Hell.
Purgatory is not sufficient — they're guilty of extreme narcissism, and as such are sent straight to a deeply
Ironic Hell in which they will torture each other with their self-centeredness for all eternity. All the weird things that happen to them during the trial are just part of their punishment, but they don't get it — and they never will. Newman is
the Devil, having given a speech to Jerry in said episode about "revealing myself in all my glory" to watch Jerry's "day of reckoning".
Granted, officially it's Jossed by Curb Your Enthusiasm, whose reunion episode addresses a lot of the ertswhile Fridge Logic of the Seinfeld finale (e.g. the bizarre court proceedings, police priorities, and interpretations of "Good Samaritan" laws). But the canonicity of Curb's reunion episode to Seinfeld (as the latter is a Show Within a Show of the former) is a matter of dispute, and that's enough room for us to squeeze in a Wild Mass Guess!
The
Bizarro George did the opposite at the same time George did.
In the
Bizarro Episode, we meet Gene, a counterpart of George who is kind, even-keeled, thoughtful, and successful. But in "The Opposite", George decides to do the opposite of his every instinct — and this meant Gene did the same thing at the same time. The effect of this is that George turns into Gene, and Gene into George. George orders chicken instead of tuna; Gene orders tuna instead of chicken. George is honest with a girl he's trying to impress and scores a date; Gene lies to his girlfriend, but she finds out and dumps him. George gets a job by
telling his prospective boss exactly what he thinks; Gene sucks up to his boss but accidentally offends him and gets fired. George moves out from his parents' house; Gene moves in with his parents.
Then Gene takes stock of his life and decides that he should have trusted his instincts all along, and he regains control of his life. This is why we never see George follow through on his "opposite" trend in later episodes; since Gene stopped doing it, the laws of the universe meant George had to stop, too!
The NBC show in the finale depicts Jerry Seinfeld in
Real Life.
That makes
Real Life and
Seinfeld Mutually Fictional.
Hey, our world is plenty weird. There's just as much "nothing" here as there is there.
The policeman played by Neil Flynn in "The Summer of George" is actually
the Janitor.
That's totally what he'd do.
He's clearly got some kind of undiagnosed mental condition. Among the evidence: he's
The Klutz, he's got a host of
Character Tics, he's often
Sarcasm-Blind (makes for hilarious interactions with
Jerry), and he's prone to
Brutal Honesty (
e.g. telling a woman she looks pregnant, telling another she should get a nose job). While he has many more friends and sexual partners than one might expect from someone with the condition, remember — he's also the original
Kavorka Man.
Jerry lost his rematch with Duncan Meyer in "The Race".
The happy ending we saw was just Jerry's imagination. It explains why Jerry's girlfriend Lois never appears again; he lost, his masquerade was exposed, and she dumped him. It also explains how Mr. Bevalaqua would be so oblivious to Jerry's patently obvious head start (you can even see Duncan yelling about it in slow-motion during the sequence).
Which is why they now apparently group their students by age, not skill level.
The video clerk from "The Couch" is
Spence.
Before Spence was a token taker at the subway, he worked for a video store.
It makes perfect sense for a one-time drug kingpin to be placed in
Witness Protection.
But wait, you say. First, Walter White's crimes were so notorious (and his ego so inflated) that he'd never be given witness protection. Second, you'd say that Breaking Bad takes place a decade after Seinfeld. But why would you think that the New Mexico chemistry teacher became a New York City dentist, when the New York City dentist could just as easily have become the New Mexico chemistry teacher?
Tim Whatley was certainly exposed to pharmacopoeia in his capacity as a dentist; he was cooking meth (and possibly other stuff) in New York long before he moved to Albuquerque. New York being the big city, it has no shortage of fellow criminals to roll up on; when Whatley got in trouble, he ratted on some associates and got into Witness Protection, who put him in Suburbia two time zones away. He started a family there and leveraged his expertise into a successful biotech company, but a combination of his ego and his thrill-seeking tendencies caused him to quit (and refuse the company's offer to pay for his cancer treatment). Now, instead of giving up like he did in New York, "Walter White" would go as far as he possibly could.
Rolling back to Seinfeld, in one episode Jerry sees Whatley at the dentist and wakes up from sedation to see Whatley buttoning his shirt. Jerry thinks it's because Whatley was having sex with his female assistant while he was under, but Whatley was actually cooking meth and removed his clothes so as not to get the smell of meth on them — a strategy Walter White was seen to employ on Breaking Bad. His would-be sex partner was actually an accomplice. Whatley's Penthouse letter was deliberate, to throw Jerry off the scent.
Or, y'know, Time Travel. It's WMG, it's obligatory! Next we'll be saying Jerry is a Time Lord.
Nina is Bizarro Elaine
We see Bizarro versions of Jerry, George, Kramer, and even Newman. But where's Elaine? If Bizarro Jerry dated "our" Elaine, "our" Jerry must have dated a Bizarro Elaine. And who better to take the mantle than Nina, the woman Jerry never thought about sexually because their conversations were so engrossing that there was never an awkward pause? Until that one time. And at that point, Nina realized just how
weird Jerry and his friends were, just the same as Elaine did about Bizarro Jerry and his friends.
The gang would not have gone to jail if they had brought Newman with them.
Newman could have done one of three things:
- Stepped in to stop the mugger, perhaps identifying with the overweight victim;
- Distracted Kramer to the point where they went off to film themselves doing some inane thing rather than the mugging; or
- Used his Postal Service connections after their arrest to get them out, just like he did in "The Engagement".
All this, of course, presumes that Newman wouldn't manipulate the situation to
ensure that they got arrested (and used his Postal Service connections to avoid prosecution himself).
Because a motherfucker gets surprised.
The whole "show about nothing" thing is a smokescreen. It's all about Jerry and Elaine.
Sometimes it's closer to the surface, sometimes less so, but it's
always about
one or the other of them wanting to get back together, if unconsciously. The "nothing" is a distraction they cling to in desperation to avoid addressing their feelings.
The main reason Jerry hangs out with George, Elaine, and Kramer is for the comedy material.
Whenever his friends get into a ridiculous situation, Jerry usually finds humor in it at everyone else's expense. Although he isn't completely devoid of empathy, he's still a comedian who works for a living.
Susan Ross didn't die.
At some point, Susan realized that getting married to George, and getting effectively manacled to his friends, would be a massive error in judgment. The envelopes (which sickened her but didn't kill her) were the last straw; either George was trying to kill her or too cheap to care about her life. So she decided to go
Faking the Dead.
For help, she enlisted her parents, awash with money and long disinclined to tolerate George. After profusely apologizing to them for what she did, she gets them to fake her death. They also set up the foundation in her memory, partly to torture George and partly to protect the bulk of her fortune and ensure George never gets his hands on it. Susan moves far away to the West Coast, finds a nice, loving partner, and settles down to a comfortable life.
While she might have gotten over George, her parents certainly didn't. While she was just trying to get her life back together, they were making it a point to bother George, and in the finale we even see her father buying a gun when he attends the gang's trial. Susan's dad was probably far closer to that cabin than Susan ever was (and possibly resents George accidentally outing him as gay), so that's why he still holds such a grudge.
Susan never stopped being a lesbian.
Her dalliance with another woman was treated as akin to a
college experiment after the shock of dating George the first time around. But what if that's what she always was? Her family might have been homophobic (in her dad's case it would be
internalized) and pressured her to marry a man. In frustration and confusion, especially what with her girlfriend ditching her for
Kramer, she doubts her sexuality and goes
back to dating men. She might have agreed to marry George because he asked and she needed to sate her parents — or perhaps she was trying to
hurt them by
choosing a man she knows they can't stand.
When combined with the above WMG, one can theorize that Susan still faked her death — but instead of just fooling George, she fooled her parents, too. Then she can settle down with a woman like she always wanted and leave her loser fiancé and her oppressive parents to slowly annoy each other to death.
Jerry and George are half-brothers.
Genetically, George's hair is too dark for him to be Frank and Estelle's child. However, if Estelle had an affair with a dark-haired man, their child could get a dominant dark-haired gene. Dark-haired Morty Seinfeld must have lived in the same neighborhood as Estelle and Frank, since their sons went to the same public school. Morty impregnated Estelle about the same time he and Helen were conceiving a legitimate child of their own. Two families living nearby with sons close in age resulted in the sons forming a lifelong friendship even when the parents' relationships soured after Frank and Helen found out about the affair. (The story of George falling off the rope in gym class was either a mere apocryphal fabrication or simply one of his earliest memories of their childhood.)
As a result, Frank so resented George that he constantly antagonized George to the extent of completely ignoring his other son, which is why we never see him, while Estelle was so ashamed of George she just wished they were all as happy as the Brauns next door; however, Morty sweet-talked Helen into reconciling with the silver tongue that got him so far in the raincoat business, thus Jerry has a much more loving relationship with his parents.
George is a closeted homosexual.
Consider:
- He shows obvious interest in being with women, yet consistently fails to connect with them in every respect. He's much more successful opening up to men.
- He's obsessed with finding a wife, even one whom he realized later he didn't particularly want to marry. It seems like a way to convince himself of his heterosexuality and desirability to a woman.
- He feels the need to proclaim his masculinity, at one point pointing out his "unblemished record of staunch heterosexuality" before declaring Jerry's jacket "fabulous".
- He's paranoid of signs that he might be in the proverbial armored closet, including his contention that "it moved" when a man gave him a massage and that means he must be attracted to him.
- At least once he's been Mistaken for Gay. He went to great lengths to deny it. (Not That There's Anything Wrong with That.)
- And, of course, he freaks out when Kramer mentions that his Girl of the Week looks like Jerry, worried about the obvious implications of him dating someone who resembled his closest friend.
Audrey didn't try the pie in "The Pie" because she witnessed it being prepared in an unsanitary manner.
Based on Jerry's refusal to try Poppy's pizza in "The Pie" (because he witnessed Poppy not washing his hands before returning to work), it's not unreasonable to think that a similar thing happened to Audrey. While she does try a
different pie at the same establishment later in the episode, that doesn't say anything about the
specific pie she didn't want to eat in front of Jerry.
Speaking of "The Pie":
Audrey is an identical twin to Eva from "The Limo".
Both characters were played by the same actress (Suzanne Snyder), but in-universe, the two were identical twins but separated at birth. Audrey was adopted by Poppy and lived a normal life, while Eva was adopted by a man whose intense bigotry influenced her greatly. As a result, she became a neo-Nazi as an adult.
She lives in Manhattan, she loves cleaning, and if she lied to the dry cleaner that she was married to Jerry, why wouldn't she lie to Jerry about her name for a reason that we don't know? We know Monica's thought process could be "out there", especially in the early episodes.
The trial in the finale was rigged from the beginning.
It's a total
Kangaroo Court. It's a conspiracy by someone connected with the trial. Or, as with a couple of other guesses on this page, it's the afterlife.
The group was exonerated after the trial, under the condition they leave New York, or at the very least not see each other anymore.
That's why the show ends when it does.
Lloyd Braun is George's brother.
George mentions a brother in an early episode, but we never see him. Lloyd Braun is that brother. That's why his family is so interested in what he does, what he grew up to be, and how George utterly fails to live up to that example. It's just like his parents to make George
The Unfavorite like that. It also opens up a ton of sub-guesses as to what happened to Lloyd — given up for adoption, separated at a young age, in
Witness Protection, just changed his name to disassociate himself from his crazy family, the list goes on.
The show takes place in an
Alternate History in which Spain really
was invaded by people called the Moops.
Turns out George was right all along, and the Bubble Boy was just being a
Sore Loser.
Kramer is a comedian.
It explains a lot about his lifestyle: his friendship with Jerry, his ideas for routines that he pitches to Jerry, his lack of steady work, his admittedly uneven but also uncanny familiarity with show business, and his membership in a comedy club's softball team (
and his responsibility for the death of the club owner — a guy Jerry said all comedians hated). Jerry allows Kramer to borrow his stuff because he understands the hardships of the profession.
Also, the character was based on the Real Life comedian Kenny Kramer, an acquaintance of Jerry Seinfeld.
