OPEN THE VAULT

Jerry Seinfeld Reveals ‘Greatest Regret’ of ‘Seinfeld’ Show

Larry David was responsible for nixing a very specific joke.

Jerry Seinfeld has revealed that his “greatest regret” from the hit sitcom Seinfeld was his co-creator Larry David’s fault.

Seinfeld, 72, and David, 79, are longtime collaborators who co-wrote Seinfeld, in which Seinfeld also starred. The sitcom ran for nine seasons, collected 10 Emmy Awards, and became a cultural touchstone for generations of comedy enthusiasts.

Seinfeld hoped to include a joke about a specific running gag on the show: a through-line in the series involved a character asking their confidante to put secret information “in the vault.”

Seinfeld viewed the joke as a prime opportunity for a pun, he said in Wednesday’s episode of Ari Emanuel and Ben Persky’s The Rushmore Podcast, which taped live in May.

“This is what my greatest regret of the entire series,” he said. “There was one section of dialogue we were working on, and we had established this running little line, and there was an opportunity for a character to say, ‘But it’s in the vault,’ and the other character would go, ‘Oy, the vault.’”

The pun was supposed to riff on the Yiddish phrase “Oy, gevalt,” but David nixed the idea.

“I said, ‘Larry, we’re never going to get a chance to make this joke ever again in our lives to go, ‘Oy, the vault,’” Seinfeld continued. He turned to David and asked, “Do you remember this conversation?”

David laughed and nodded. “I do,” he said.

“I begged him, and he didn’t want to do it,” Seinfeld said. “Too Jewish.”

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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