As hilarious as the show was, Seinfeld, as much as it is a show about nothing, is centered on four friends with rather self-serving, and at times questionable motives. The most questionable of these four in my eyes is without a doubt Mr. George Costanza. Before I start this I must say that to me Seinfeld is the greatest sitcom to ever air on television, and George Costanza is a Top 5 TV character of All Time. I even own The Puffy Shirt. I am one of the biggest Seinfeld fans you will ever meet and it is through my extensive knowledge of the show that I have determined that George Costanza is a full blown psychopath and a reckless threat to society.
George is personified as the loser of the group of friends, which really adds to his instability. To sidetrack for a minute here, George is not a loser. He holds what I assume to be a well paying job with the New York Yankees, even traveling with the team at times. He has a new girlfriend every week adding up to over 90 confirmed sexual partners throughout the course of the show. While that’s maybe not a healthy lifestyle, it’s certainly impressive. On top of that George comes close to landing a date with Marisa Tomei, at the time fresh off her Oscar Winning performance in My Cousin Vinny. But George dwells in this role of loser that his friends have given him, a psychopath like him may even use it to his advantage.
George is a master liar and manipulator. It’s the manipulator part that helps him get so many dates and we see this trait put to use frequently throughout the course of the show. For instance there’s the time that George goes as far as converting his religion to avoid being dumped by a girl. To do this, the depraved little bald man even cheats on the test by scribbling answers on his forearm. Because George is a man that never matured past middle school tricks. That’s not even the only time George cheats on a test to impress a girl either. One time knowing he wouldn’t score high on an IQ test he hid in his girlfriends bedroom and passed the test out the first floor window to a friend to take for him. In another instance, George goes on several dates with a woman who believes that he is a Marine Biologist, and even keeps the act up to save a beached whale. This is a truly disturbed individual.
George is not only too willing to jump right into some sort of lie or scheme, he’s too prepared for it. At a moments notice he is ready to jump into his alter ego of Art Vandelay. We first hear the name when George is trying to con the unemployment office into extending his benefits, he says he’s interviewing for a job at Vandelay Industries and gives his friends apartment as the company address. It’s rather alarming how quickly George and his friends jump into committing felony fraud, but again these are sociopaths were dealing with here. George uses the pseudonym of Art Vandelay, Architecht, an astounding 11 times throughout the course of the show. We’ve all had dream jobs, but creating a whole other identity for yourself is just not normal behavior.
George also displays a frightening lack of remorse at times. In one episode while at a birthday party for a girlfriends kid, George is the first to notice a fire going in the oven. Rather than try to put the fire out or try to help the situation at all, George takes off running through the crowd of women and children, bulldozing and trampling everyone in his way. After the incident George even spins a whole story about how he was really just trying to help doing all of this. The most disturbing instance of his lack of remorse is when his fiancé of several years suddenly dies shortly before their wedding. How soon before the wedding you ask? She was mailing out the invitations. How did she die? She was poisoned by the glue on the cheap invitations that George had insisted on getting. So essentially, George’s fiancé died because he was such a cheap bastard. This kind of revelation would break a normal human being down. Not George. There isn‘t even a hint of emotion on his face when he is given this news. He just goes and gets a cup of coffee.
Of course writing a piece about the psychotic tendencies of an individual is never complete without taking a look at what might have caused them to be this way. And growing up the offspring of Frank and Estelle Costanza is anything but a normal upbringing. We see time and time again that Mr. Costanza has a serious anger problem and while Mrs. Costanza may not react with anger, her reactions to happenings aren’t exactly normal either. All the two do is argue with each other and one has to assume that growing up in that sort of environment has to be fairly traumatizing on a child. When you pair that with the insanely bad luck we see that George has, and the fact that even his best friends treat him like he’s a loser, it’s really not much of a surprise that George grew up to be a twisted sociopath.