THE SOUP NAZI ("The Soup Nazi")

The Original Soup Man (259 W 55th St, New York, NY 10019)

"I pitched a bunch of ideas and it wasn't going so well, then I started talking about this guy, the Soup Nazi, and they started laughing. His name is Al Yeganeh. He's someone I used to visit when I was writing for David Letterman. I'm pretty much George in that very first scene and Dave Hanson is the writer that introduced me. But it's pretty much like the first scene is written. Like ‘Wait, what? The soup is great but if I don't follow the rules they'll take it away?’ He's called the Soup what? The Soup Nazi?’

"And I came out of that conversation with them saying there's your first episode. And I pretended to understand what they were talking about. But as I left Larry and Jerry's office, I could not have been more confused. It wasn't a traditional pitch, where I was saying here's the story, here are the characters, here's how it moves through the plot and here's how it resolves. You know, it was really a baptism by fire. I was just tossed into the middle of the swimming pool as a Seinfeld writer.

"The next morning it was all over the New York media. We could not have been more surprised by that reaction, because I guess everybody in the local media there would get [the] soup and immediately recognized Larry Thomas as a guy who looks like Al Yeganeh and it became this big deal. For at least a year whenever I was back in New York, I never let on for a second that I was the guy that wrote it, because I didn't want to be kicked out of the soup line.

"And when eventually I did go there with Jerry and he saw Jerry and recognized him, he screamed at him, and kicked him out. And Jerry said, "But I made you famous." And he goes, 'No you didn't. The Today Show made me famous,' and he weirdly held out a half-inch VCR tape [saying] 'This made me famous.' I still don't know what was on that tape. So he, like a lot of people, took to exception to being referred to as a Nazi on national television, and understandably so. Especially in this day and age. And I don't know that he's ever come to terms with it, nor have I ever discussed it with him, or Jerry either. That's what we all should be doing at Complex, is we should be getting us all in the room, and talking for the first time and working this out. It's been long enough.

"I watch the episodes now, I look back and I see what was going on in my life 30 years ago. There are all of these little biographical touches, things that were bugging me at the time and oddly they're very accurate. Like The Wig Master. I was living with a young woman at the time and she said, "My friend is going to stay with us for a month." That immediately created a boundary issue for me and we were starting to fight about it. That's something that I could not stop thinking about. Like why she found [him being a Wig Master for Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat] to be perfectly normal, and I found everything she was saying to be perfectly insane. Or how, I need[ed] paid parking for my Jeep, and suddenly, one Saturday afternoon, I discover there are prostitutes using it.

"Or being at a party and seeing my boss dance and he intimidates me until I see him dance and now I realize he's human and he's a worse dancer than I and I'm not intimidated [anymore]. That becomes “The Little Kicks.” The the thumbs up and the kicking was a very accurate portrayal of the way Lorne Michaels danced, and that's who it's based on. Lorne has inspired a lot of comedy and if this reaches some sort of legendary status, here he is again. So I hope he's not offended by it.

"Those are the moments in life I really live for, and right now there's no place to put those, So you know, that's where Seinfeld was genius kind of therapy writing, is I could put this on television and put my point of view out of this incident that happened in my life and then be done with it, you know? I always thought the junk mail episode that I wrote would be a little bigger than it was, because it really... I thought it would touch a nerve with all the paper being wasted, that was being delivered to houses everywhere in America. I was talking to him the other day. The world is so much more complex and full of issues and etiquette problems than it's ever been, from airlines to grocery stores to people on phones in traffic to the online dating scene and... it's just a mess. And I think we could come back right now and do nine more seasons. We won't, but I think we could in a second."

As told to Complex by Spike Feresten