Jerry Seinfeld Only Quotes One Line From His NBC Sitcom

At the beginning of the “Seinfeld” episode “The Pie” (February 17, 1994), Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld) tries to feed a bite of apple pie to his date, Audrey (Suzanne Snyder), but she refuses without giving a reason. The refusal to eat something offered by a peer becomes a motif of the episode. Later on, the pair go to a restaurant owned by Audrey’s father, but refuses to eat a slice of pizza she offers him. She understands immediately that this small social slight is a form of revenge. Like in all episodes of “Seinfeld,” something tiny and incidental is, through a vast network of neuroses, turned into a massively awkward faux pas.

Later still, George (Jason Alexander) is having dinner with a prospective employer at a restaurant. George notices that a rival of his is in the restaurant’s kitchen, and begins to suspect that his food might have been tainted in some way. When his potential employer, MacKenzie (Lane Davies), offers George a bite of chocolate cream pie, he refuses. This is baffling to MacKenzie, as he was just telling George how important it was to conform and to be a team player. One of MacKenzie’s compatriots leans forward and says, with intense portent, “If you’re one of us, you’ll take a bite.” Needless to say, George’s refusal to eat the pie loses him the job.

It seems that “If you’re one of us, you’ll take a bite” is a line of dialogue that Jerry Seinfeld, even to this day, uses in casual conversation. “Seinfeld,” although initially hatedhas since introduced a lot of casual colloquialism into the pop lexicon, of course. “Close-talker,” “Hello, Newman,” “fancy boy,” “sponge-worthy,” “soup Nazi,” etc. But in a Reddit AMA from 2013Jerry Seinfeld admitted that the “take a bite” line stayed with him. He repeats it whenever he shares a meal with his kids.

Seinfeld admitted that it was a strange line to take away from a zeitgeist-altering mega-hit series that lasted 180 episodes over nine seasons. Nonetheless, “take a bite” is the one that stuck. He likes to use it when his kids. As he wrote:

“The only line I quote from the show (and I’ll be very impressed if anybody out tehre remembers this line) is ‘If you’re one of us, you’ll take a bite.’ I find myself saying that to my kids a lot. It’s a very obscure line, but George was working at some company where they all had lunch together, and he wasn’t trying the apple pie, and the boss finally says ‘If you’re one of us, you’ll take a bite.’ A lot of times kids won’t want to try certain foods, and so I’ll use that line. Sometimes I’ll quote Newman in flames screaming ‘Oh, the humanity.'”

“Oh, the humanity!” was, of course, the infamous phrase shouted by journalist Herbert Morrison as he witnessed the Hindenburg exploding on that fateful day back in 1937. But the phrase was repeated by Newman (Wayne Knight, fond of his courtroom work) in the “Seinfeld” episode “The Pothole” (February 20, 1997). In that episode, Newman was driving his mail delivery truck when he hit a sewing machine in the middle of the road (and we needn’t get into how it got there). He began to drag the machine under the car, creating a shower of sparks. He then drove over a puddle of paint thinner, spilled by Kramer (“The Michael Richards Show” star Michael Richards). As the underside of his truck burst into flame, he screamed, “Oh, the humanity!” Yeah, Seinfeld took that one.

Curiously, Seinfeld didn’t take any of his own dialogue out into the real world.