Larry David Re-enacts How He Quit Saturday Night Live

Before he created Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David was a writer for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s. But one incident with producer Dick Ebersol pushed him over the edge and nearly drove him to quit, he said in conversation with Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter on Wednesday at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit.

“I got a writing job in ‘84. It was an easy job, I was writing sketches,” David recalled. “They weren’t putting any of my sketches on the air. The sketches were funny at the readthrough but the producer, Dick Ebersol, he didn’t care for them. I was getting increasingly frustrated. The sketches would get cut. I only had one sketch on the entire year.” Then, six weeks into his career, on one night at 11:25, minutes before the show would air, David had another one of his sketches cut. It was the final straw. “Ebersol had the headset on in the back near the monitor,” David said. “I walked up to him and I went, this fucking show stinks! It’s a piece of shit. I’m done! I quit! Fuck you! And that was it and then I left.”

David left and walked home. “It was freezing out and I’m beginning to compute how much money I just cost myself,” he said. But then he ran into his co-worker Kenny Kramer, who would later become the real-life inspiration for Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer. “He said, what happened? I said, I quit. I’m so stupid,” David recalled. Kramer’s advice to David was simply to go back into the office on Monday and pretend the whole thing never happened. “I went into the meeting on Monday, I took a seat with all the writers,” David told Carter onstage on Wednesday. “They start going around the room asking each one what they’re doing. I said, I’m thinking about doing a sketch about a trapeze artist. And that was it.” David would later turn the incident—and his advice from Kramer—into art. In season two of Seinfeld, George similarly throws a tantrum and walks out on his boss, later sneaking back into the office without ever mentioning the incident, in hopes of keeping his job.

David’s conversation with Carter marked the concluding interview of the final day of the fourth-annual New Establishment Summit, held this year in Los Angeles, which brings together leaders in business, tech, media, Hollywood, and entertainment. Over the course of the two-day event, Evan Spiegel explained why he doesn’t regret taking Snap public, Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger talked about Jemele Hill and her tweets about Donald Trump, and Preet Bharara recalled the end of his strange and short-lived relationship with the president. You can watch highlights from the entire event here.