“I tried to keep that shit on the down-low as much as possible and still do it. O’Keefe’s admits he downplayed the more traumatic aspects of his childhood ordeal in the writers’ room. It’s done nothing to deserve that.’ But they said, ‘Look, it can go in your episode or someone else’s.’ So I figure, fuck it, if this has to be smeared onto the world, that I might as well be the hand doing the smearing.” And they say, ‘Jerry thinks this is hilarious and we want to put it in the show.’ And I tried to dissuade them as convincingly as I could, saying, ‘I have the greatest love and respect for the show. These are like the head writers of the show. And I’m on Seinfeld at the time, and a couple of my co-workers are there and they’re instantly all around me, like flies on shit: ‘Wait, excuse me, what is this?’ And I tried to explain it as calmly as I can, and then turn the topic away.”īut O’Keefe’s colleagues sensed comic gold and lured him to a diner in order to convince him to include Festivus in the show. with one of his brothers, “and my loud-mouth younger brother opens his yap and mentions this weird family holiday called Festivus. O’Keefe had long buried his memories of Festivus-which was “patterned after the Roman Saturnalia and some of the other holidays of antiquity … I think it was to show that he knew who the Romans were”-when he was at a party in L.A. So we celebrated this thing and my brothers and I quickly realized you don’t talk about this at school or you get more beatings than you’re already getting.” “Every time we asked him about, he literally screamed at us-‘That’s not for you to know,’ for some reason, that was what he said. “They say, ‘Jerry thinks this is hilarious and we want to put it in the show.’ And I tried to dissuade them.” “Yeah, growing up, myself and my two brothers were in a form of child abuse that yet wasn’t recognized as such by the state of New York, induced to perform seasonal rituals.” “It was just a very formalized setting for yelling at us,” O’Keefe notes. One real-life feature of the holiday that did make it into Seinfeld lore was the legendary Airing of Grievances.

And I don’t have a copy of it somewhere and I will burn it before I share it with anyone, let alone you.

And it was rhymed-four-line stanzas with a very complicated rhyme scheme.

was a poem that referred to ‘clock and bag’. And the symbol of the holiday was a fucking clock in a bag for some reason. And every year he put a clock into a bag and hung it on the wall. There was a nail that he hammered into the wall in the early ’70s. so who knows?Īnd unlike the fictional Festivus-which featured an unadorned aluminum pole as its centerpiece (Frank Costanza found tinsel distracting)-“in real life, there was no pole. I think the phrase is, ‘came up from nothing and brought it with him.’” O’Keefe’s father invented the holiday: “At one point he said it was an anniversary for his first date with my mom, but he also said a lot of crazy shit. “I mean this in the nicest way possible: My father was an undiagnosed bipolar, severe alcoholic who nonetheless was extremely high-functioning and held down a job as an editor at the Reader’s Digest and had an advanced degree and was extremely erudite,” O’Keefe explains, noting he “came from an extremely working-class background, which he was constantly trying to make sure no one knew about-and in so doing, he reminded everyone of it constantly. But first, he gave hosts Will Sommer and Asawin Suebsaeng a surrealist tour through how Festivus came to be. The Seinfeld writer who gave the world Festivus reveals the origins of the holiday-invented by his father, not Frank Costanza, and featuring clocks and wailing children rather than the famous pole-which are pretty dark indeed.ĭan O’Keefe, who also worked on iconic shows such as Silicon Valley and Veep, joined The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast to talk about satire in the post-Trump age.

The dark side of saturnalia