My Favourite Television Characters Of All Time - Part Sixteen

#15 - Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) - Seinfeld

Elaine hangs out with a group of friends that she's just kind of stuck with. She hooked up with Jerry, but after breaking up they stay friends. Her other friends are Jerry's obsessive best mate George and his crazy neighbour Kramer. Despite sometimes despising all three of her friends, she often shares their enthusiasm for an in depth funny story about some kind of every day event, and she is very often involved in their schemes.

Elaine is seemingly an intelligent character, but like her friends she is also extremely superficial. If her current boyfriend does one little thing that annoys her, he is immediately dumped. If she meets someone who she doesn't necessarily get along with but who she is very attracted to physically there is a conflict, because looks are important to her.

Elaine is embarrassingly bad at dancing, she can't keep a secret if she gets drunk on Schnapps, and she has crazy awesome 1990s boofy hair. Her friends generally look at her as another man, or at least not in a sexual way, except for a couple of rare occasions. In one episode she plays a joke on Jerry by saying dirty sexual things into his tape recorder at a gig. When the three men find out that it's Elaine talking they start to see her as just a sexy woman instead of a friend and it's pretty hilarious. In another episode Jerry and George need Elaine's help to try and make a television producer understand why they couldn't help but look at his daughter's cleavage. Elaine wears a low cut booby top and the producer becomes so obsessed with her that he goes insane.

All the characters in the show are strangely likable and relatable, despite the fact that they are all incredibly nasty twisted people. I like Elaine the most because she is a portrayal of a strong funny woman in a kind of 'boy's club' show, and it feels natural and believable rather than forced.

Seeing Julia Louis-Dreyfus in The New Adventures of Old Christine was kind of depressing for me because Christine is nowhere near as likable or as funny as Elaine, and Louis-Dreyfus seems to have had botox or perhaps just bad makeup on Christine and she looks really strange..... but let's just ignore that and remember that she was at one time the funniest woman on television.