‘Seinfeld’s’ Real Elaine Spills a Lifetime of Comedy Secrets

Carol Leifer has been a working stand-up comedian and writer for nearly 50 years. And she shows no signs of slowing down. After winning her first-ever Emmy Award in 2024 for her work on Hacks, Leifer, 68, is currently toiling away in the writers’ room for her 11th Academy Awards ceremony, this one airing live with host Conan O’Brien on March 2. And she is about to release a new book that attempts to teach people How to Write a Funny Speech for the big events in their own lives.

In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Leifer looks back at her extensive comedy career, including her one season as a writer on Saturday Night Live’s “weird year,” her role as a “real-life Elaine” behind-the-scenes at Seinfeld, why she tried to talk Larry David into keeping Curb Your Enthusiasm alive, what she makes of Curb star Cheryl Hines embracing the MAGA movement alongside her husband Robert F. Kennedy Jr., channeling her experience with aging into Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance on Hacks, and a lot more.

When I ask Leifer directly how true it really is that she was the inspiration for Elaine Benes on Seinfeld, she replies, “Well, I know that Jerry has said that.”

“Look, we have a unique relationship,” she adds. “We dated early on at the beginning of my stand-up career, beginning of his, and since then we really only went out for a year or so, but we’ve stayed very good friends. And I think in them talking about the genesis of the show to have a woman on the show who is not only a friend, but someone that Jerry once dated, makes for an interesting relationship. So in that regard, I feel like, yes, maybe I was the inspiration.”

But all of that being said, Leifer also distances herself from Elaine by insisting that she is a “good dancer” who never pushes anyone away while shouting, “Get out!” And even though she went to write some classic storylines for Elaine when she eventually joined the writing staff in Season 5, she confirms that “never auditioned” for the role herself. “But god, look, they came up with the perfect person,” she says of Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Leifer has spent her entire comedy career turning her real-life experience into comedy, something she learned early on from her longtime friend Larry David. “Larry, especially, always loved when you would pitch a story that happened in real life,” she recalls, citing Seinfeld episodes like Elaine recruiting George’s father to translate Korean for her when she suspects the women at her nail salon are talking about her behind her back.

It’s a technique she still employs today, whether it’s the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry tries to retrieve the umbrella he stole from the Omni Dallas Hotel and then left at a restaurant (“When I lost it, I was distraught,” Leifer says of the real thing) or the work she has put in bringing her own experience as a female comic of a certain generation to Jean Smart’s character Deborah Vance on Hacks.

“They were very keen on gleaning a lot of my experience back then, and I appreciated that they wanted validity to her story,” Leifer says of the three co-creators of Hacks, who are all about 30 years her junior and initially reached out to her as a consultant before she ended up joining the writers’ room full time for Season 3. She ended up spearheading the equal parts hilarious and moving episode in which Deborah and Hannah Einbinder’s Ava go for a hike and get lost in the woods after Deborah injures her ankle. Titled “One Day,” for Leifer it was an episode about getting older and seizing the moments you have left.

“When you get to be my age, and I mean, I’ve been doing this for almost 50 years, which blows my mind, you get to the point where you start thinking about, ‘Oh, I’d love to do a little part in a Broadway show, or I’d love to do X, Y, and Z,” she says. “And it’s like, well, if it’s not now, when? One day becomes your reality. So that became the thread through it for Deborah, and something that she could talk about with authenticity. Because I do think it’s something that you think about as you get older.”

But for now, Leifer is keeping her nose to the grindstone trying to come up with jokes for Conan O’Brien, who she is thankful is hosting this year’s Oscar ceremony after the show went without a host several times in recent years. “The show needs a host,” she says. “It’s kind of rudderless when it doesn’t have a host.” She also confirms they have been discussing how to balance the seriousness of the aftermath of the L.A. wildfires with the comedy necessary for the broadcast, but doesn’t want to elaborate too much for fear of breaking the NDA she signed.

“It’s not an easy gig, and a lot of comedians don’t want to do it, because they know that the risk ratio is very high. But I think he’s excited at the possibility,” Leifer, who has written for iconic Oscar hosts like Bill Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and many others, adds of O’Brien. “He takes a lot of pride in carefully going over what he delivers, so I think he’s going to be great. He’s also good on his feet, which you have to be when you host the Oscars. You have to be able to go with whatever’s happening, and a lot of weird s--t happens.”

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