Elaine Marie Benes. Where to start? As one-fourth of Seinfeld’s core cast and the only woman of the four friends, it would have been easy for her character to fall victim to any number of sexist tropes often assigned to the female friend on sitcoms. But Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ portrayal launched Elaine into the canon of all-time great sitcom characters, and you can still find her lines quoted by Seinfeld lovers everywhere. It’s also a credit to the writing that she never once feels like a side character, getting as much screen time and as many plot lines as her male counterparts.
It wasn’t just her line delivery, either. Visit any hipster neighborhood in America and you can still find young women dressed a bit like Elaine: vintage calf-length print dresses and boxy, over-sized blazers paired with oxfords, glasses, maybe even a scrunchie. And although Louis-Dreyfus’ subsequent role on Veep was obviously very different, she invests so much of herself in both roles that you can often see glimpses of Elaine Benes in Selina Meyer. Every character on Seinfeld has a few lines that fans will never forget: “It’s the summer of George,” “A Festivus for the rest of us,” “But I don’t want to be a pirate!” “Giddy-up” “Hello, Jerry”.
But Elaine seemed to have a memorable zinger in just about every episode of the most famous show about nothing. Here’s a ranked list of her most iconic dialogue over her nine seasons on the show.
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10 “I don’t know how you guys walk around with those things.”
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The gang have headed out of the city for a weekend in The Hamptons to see a friend’s new baby, which proves an underwhelming experience (the baby turns out to be objectively unattractive). George gets angry when everyone sees his girlfriend topless, and lights upon the idea of seeing Jerry’s girlfriend topless to make things even. But, being George, nothing quite works the way he’d planned, and Jerry’s girlfriend gets an eyeful of him naked, crucially, right after he’s been swimming. This leads to a discussion of ‘shrinkage’ and the vagaries of the male genitalia. Elaine, listening in, declares, “I don’t know how you guys walk around with those things.”
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9 “Next!”
We probably don’t need to go over the summary of “The Soup Nazi”, but it’s pertinent to note that got herself permanently banned from the soup stand for not following proper ordering protocol. There’s a back-and-forth side plot involving an armoire, the result being that Elaine comes into possession of the Soup Nazi’s own armoire, in which he has accidentally left all of his original recipes. At the end of the episode, Elaine swans into the soup stand (she definitely swans) to gloat about her possession of the recipes, holding them just out of his reach before using the Soup Nazi’s own dismissive trademark line, “Next!”
8 “I don’t have a square to spare.”
In an episode about phone sex, it’s a testament to Louis-Dreyfus’ comedic skills that the truly memorable line comes from behind the door of a bathroom stall. Elaine has an altercation with a woman in the next stall of a restaurant bathroom when the woman refuses to pass over any extra toilet paper, as Elaine’s stall has run out. When Elaine discovers later in the episode that the stingy woman is Jerry’s girlfriend Jane, she runs to the bathroom of the coffee shop before Jane enters and gets her revenge, declaring, “I can’t spare a square” before fleeing with armfuls of toilet paper.
7 “And the heat, my God, the heat.”
Elaine’s on/off boyfriend David Puddy never seems like a logical choice for her, which is why it’s such a delicious relationship to milk for comedy. This time, Elaine has become suspicious that Puddy might have secretly become a Christian and is enraged, largely because Puddy has no interest in saving her soul. She starts yelling about how awful hell is, and how he should want to save her from it, “and the heat, my God, the heat!”, just before confessing to stealing Puddy’s Jesus fish off of his car.
6 “I mentioned the bisque.”
This is one of the many episodes that inserted its vernacular into the common parlance. The key scene involves the propriety of the term, “yada yada”, and especially whether or not it’s okay to yada yada sex. Elaine declares that she has, telling a brief story about a date with a lawyer, which included lobster bisque. Jerry accuses her of yada yada-ing the best part, to which Elaine replies smugly, “No, I mentioned the bisque.”
5 “Well, the counter was right there.”
Things are going well for Elaine; she’s gotten a promotion at work, and she’s back together with a former boyfriend. George? Not so much. So Jerry convinces him that maybe doing the opposite of his usual instincts could change his fortunes. As George’s star rises, Elaine falls, starting with an ill-fated trip to the movies, where she is when she hears that her boyfriend has been in an accident. She dashes to his side, but not before stopping at concessions for some Jujyfruits. Turns out it’s hard to prove your devotion to someone when you’re eating of candy you just stopped for, and when her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend demands to know why she didn’t come straight to the hospital, Elaine can only say through a mouthful of sticky Jujyfruits, “Well…the counter…was right there…”
4 “I would put an exclamation at the end of all of these sentences! On this one! And on that one!”
This is classic Elaine, breaking up with someone over a difference of opinion regarding punctuation. (Bonus trivia: this is the same boyfriend she gets back together with in the previous entry.) Elaine happens to be editing his book as well as dating him, and is dismayed when she finds he jotted down a phone message about a friend’s baby without adding a sufficient number of exclamation points. The boyfriend tries to play it down, but Elaine will not be deterred, shouting, “I would put an exclamation at the end of all of these sentences! On this one! And on that one!” And when Elaine finishes editing his book, she adds a whole boatload of exclamation points to make her point.
3 “So you think you’re spongeworthy?”
Another seminal moment for Elaine. The news comes through Kramer that Elaine’s preferred form of birth control, the sponge, is being taken off the market. She does what most women in her situation would do, and she hunts down as big a stash as she can, which ends up being a stock of 60 sponges. The problem is, these must now last her the rest of her life, so every prospective lover must undergo a rigorous test to determine the answer: “So, you think you’re spongeworthy?”
2 “Maybe the dingo ate your baby.”
To a certain generation, a reference to a dingo taking one’s baby would more likely refer to the Meryl Streep film “A Cry in the Dark”, based on the tragic true story of the 1980 disappearance of Australian infant Azaria Chamberlain at a campground, the prosecution and eventual exoneration of her parents for her death, which was in fact caused by a wild dingo. But to another generation, their minds go immediately to a party on Long Island, where George happened to get lucky, borrowing Jerry’s car and leaving Jerry and Elaine with no way to leave the increasingly boring party. Elaine is trapped in a conversation with an insipid woman who keeps referring to her fiancé, whom she can’t find. Elaine, out of nowhere, adopts an Australian accent and says with a grin, “Maybe the dingo ate your baby.”
1 “Get out!”
This one makes the most iconic list because it combines the perfect Elaine line with a perfect bit of physical comedy, at which Louis-Dreyfus is an absolute genius (if she’d had a line to speak while dancing, that would have made the list). It happens in numerous episodes, but the set-up is always gloriously the same: a character (usually standing in a doorway) says something to Elaine that she finds surprising or unbelievable. Elaine reacts by shouting, “Get out!” while simultaneously shoving the person with an amount of physical force that you wouldn’t expect from the dainty, diminutive Elaine. It’s comedy gold.
