2014 marks 25 years since one of the greatest TV sitcoms of all time, Seinfeld, made its television debut, and the show has been celebrated in a ton of ways over the past 10 months. But this supercut video of Kramer stealing food is one of the most unique tributes out there. Grab a beer and a sandwich from your neighbor and check it out below.
If there was an award for the world’s biggest moocher, I’m pretty sure it would go to one Cosmo Kramer, Michael Richards’ pseudo-entrepreneur oddball, but I’m pretty sure he’s already borrowed the award and is using it for something. (Possibly a Merv Griffin Show episode taping.) This supercut brings together what feels like thousands of instances where Kramer bursts through Jerry’s door and waltzes up and into the refrigerator. This simple act of friendly food vandalism quickly became one of Kramer’s most recognizable traits and as the video shows us, it was something the writers took pleasure in going back to time and again.
Obviously if this is a combination of every time Kramer took food, it has all the greats. The caution tape around the broken egg. The debate over what kind of mustard Jerry should have. The fatigue-influenced tomato juice cereal bowl. It’s all here! Below is my favorite of the bunch, in which Kramer just has a bottle of Jerry’s maple syrup in his pocket while he’s out on a date. It ends up making sense within the context of the show, as it’s introduced that bringing your own syrup to diners makes pancakes much better, but it’s a wonderfully silly moment taken out of context.
And it isn’t even only Jerry that Kramer is keen on robbing snacks from. He also gets chided by Jerry’s mom for eating cookies for breakfast. (Reminder: make myself a feta cheese omelet to see how that goes.)
It ends with the logical conclusion plotline for Kramer’s constant food theft. In the episode “The Seven,” Kramer wants Jerry to keep a running tab of all the food he eats, and also all the half-food he eats. But since he never has any money, Jerry takes away all food-binging privileges. One has to wonder why he hadn’t done that in the past, and why he didn’t keep it enforced for the remainder of Seinfeld’s run. Chew on that.
