The Endorsement: Larry David as George Steinbrenner (1996)

How the Steinbrenner Voice became America's voice.

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I.

In 1996, when he actually walked onto the set of one of the most popular television shows in America, George Steinbrenner had already become both a real-life and a fictionalized caricature. He was 66 years old. He had presided over a chaotic era in Yankee history driven by paranoia and fear and marred by gratuitous firings; he had been suspended (and then reinstated) by Major League Baseball after employing a gambler to dig up dirt on one of his own players. Largely because the organization had been saddled by the fear and paranoia that emanated from the very top, his New York Yankees, at that point, hadn’t won a World Series in 18 years.

All of this led one of America’s greatest comedic minds to begin stirring. At that point, in the mid-1990s, Larry David—the co-creator of Seinfeld—had never met George Steinbrenner, but he had grown up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and he was a frustrated Yankee fan who had seen Steinbrenner ramble away on television while making everything worse. He was tired of Steinbrenner trading away his best players, like Jay Buhner. He wanted to lampoon the idea of George Steinbrenner, a powerful man who clearly had no idea how to wield that power responsibly, who terrorized his own employees, and who was so in love with his own ideas that he didn’t know how or when to shut up.

The Seinfeld version of Steinbrenner, said one of the show’s writers, was a parodic facsimile of the worst boss we’ve all ever had. “He can fire you on a whim,” the writer said. “And this one is the Renaissance man of mindless things.” And that character sketch led us to the greatest calzone-related monologue in modern television history, a moment that feels increasingly Shakespearean in scope for the way it prophesied the vapid era to come.

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II.

Three decades later, I believe that Larry David is the Mark Twain of our era, and I’m starting to think that the Steinbrenner Voice might be one of Larry’s greatest creations of all. I hear the Steinbrenner Voice in my head nearly every day, and not just because I have assimilated every line of Seinfeld dialogue into my subconsciousness. I hear that Steinbrenner voice in my head every day because this is the voice that much of the world now speaks in—that of a scattered megalomaniac spewing their own absurd ideas to a largely disinterested audience.

The Five: The Car Pool Lane (2004)

It is not just the president of the United States, another self-absorbed New Yorker given to speaking in utterly mindless and increasingly senile tangents (though he is obviously the most obvious analog). It is the way everything online feels entirely unedited and unvetted, the way our minds are all completely splintered and our attention spans are completely shot and AI chatbots so often spit back nonsense in our faces. Public figures increasingly talk just to hear themselves talk; go on LinkedIn and you’ll find 50 percent of the random posts you come across don’t actually make any logical sense. No one has the time or the will to actually edit themselves (I am not immune from this myself, I admit), and nothing matters as long as the content continues to flow.