Dan O’Keefe on the founding of Festivus and secrets of HBO’s Silicon Valley
Air your grievances as comedy writer Dan O’Keefe reveals the origin story of Festivus and why it’s always funny to watch smart people behaving irrationally
It’s a special holiday edition of Venture Voice, and the holiday we’re celebrating is Festivus. You may know it from the hit TV series Seinfeld, where the holiday “for the rest of us” is featured in the episode “The Strike” as an invention of George’s dad, Frank. Festivus was, in fact, invented by someone’s dad, but as you’ll hear in this episode, it wasn’t George Costanza’s; it was Seinfeld writer Dan O’Keefe’s. Dan also shares some insider details from his time writing for HBO’s Silicon Valley, where he interviewed start-up founders and entrepreneurs as part of his research. It was a blast talking with Dan, and I think you’re going to have a lot of fun listening in on our conversation. Tune in now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast and Spotify. If you love it, please leave a review! Happy Holidays!
“We celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas and whatnot, but also this weird holiday, which didn’t have a set date. Unlike on the show, it could happen sort of at any time. We'd get off the school bus and there would be...it would be very strange.”
Dan O’Keefe is a television writer and producer who has worked on such shows as Silicon Valley, Veep and Seinfeld, where he turned a family holiday memory he’d long tried to repress into one of the most iconic episodes of the series. I watched Seinfeld, well, religiously growing up, and was thrilled when I got to meet Jerry Stiller and his wife Ann Meara when they presented at The Shorty Awards, which I co-founded and run. So learning about the origin story of Festivus from Dan was a special treat — and what better way to celebrate the holiday season?
Here I am at The Shorty Awards in 2011 with Jerry Stiller, who played the inventor of Festivus in Seinfeld, and his two bodyguards.
As you’ll hear from Dan, his father, the author Daniel O’Keefe, invented Festivus back in1966, originally to commemorate his first date with Dan’s mom. “And then,” Dan says, “it sort of metastasized into this weird thing he celebrated with his family through the 70s and 80s.” You’ll hear some of the details from the O’Keefe version of Festivus, and let’s just say, as outlandish as some of Frank Costanza’s antics are on the show, Daniel O’Keefe could clearly give him a run for his money.
“I figured if this, you know, disgrace tied to my DNA had to be televised, I might as well at least get a script fee out of it.”
As a staff writer for Seinfeld in its ninth season, Dan had no intention of turning this weird family holiday into a script. In fact, he and his brother had a tacit agreement never to talk with anyone else about it. But once the head writers got wind of Festivus, after overhearing Dan’s brother talk about it at a party, there was no turning back.
Dan wasn’t convinced it would be well received. “It seemed like a terrible idea,” he says. “It was embarrassing to me and seemed insane and not in a good, quirky TV way but in, like, a sad creepy dysfunctional way.” And yet that episode, “The Strike,” was not only a hit with audiences, decades later, the holiday lives on. In preparing for the interview, I looked up media mentions for Festivus in our Muck Rack software and found over 3,000 articles have mentioned it in the past 12 months alone.
“It’s a complicated legacy to this strange cultural sub-footnote of the late 90s.”
Castle Rock Entertainment now owns the rights to Festivus, which is fine by Dan, and speaking of Castle Rock, you’ll also get to hear about how a holiday message they sent out that year spawned the “Human Fund” storyline in that episode.
Real-life stories played a big part in informing Dan’s writing for Silicon Valley, as well. I have to admit, watching that show was always stressful for me, because it hit a little too close to home as I was building my own software company, Muck Rack, at the time. After talking with Dan about their research process, I now understand just why it was so realistic.
“[Tech] is such an unbelievably specific culture, and to lampoon it properly, you actually need a very granular knowledge of the way it works.”
To nail down the Silicon Valley culture, the writers piled into vans and went out on research trips to various tech companies, where they hit up founders, executives, engineers and VCs for stories. They visited all the usual subjects, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and GitHub, filling up notebooks with anecdotes from “unbelievably interesting people who were very generous with their time,” Dan says.
In fact, they interviewed a few of the entrepreneurs I’ve talked to for Venture Voice, including Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Dick Costolo, my very first guest on the podcast when I launched it back in 2005. At the time, Dick was the CEO of FeedBurner, and I was a little concerned it might be a bit of a dry interview. Little did I know that he used to be an improv comic. As Dan shares, Dick came on as a consultant on Silicon Valley and was so funny, he even pitched jokes.
It was such a coincidence to discover this connection to the podcast in an episode where I was initially trying to find out more about the origins of Festivus. It just goes to show, you never know where your entrepreneurial journey is going to take you.
“A lot of the original holiday was...mostly it was talking about how terrible the year was.”
As we close out 2020, we’re all probably feeling a bit of the Festivus mood, especially considering, as Dan told me, a large percentage of the original holiday was spent on the airing of grievances. Among the “extraordinarily depressing” Festivus themes that he remembers from his childhood: “Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?” and “Too easily made glad?” Emphasis on the question mark.
But we can also be hopeful looking toward the year ahead. After all, Dan is finally coming around to the spirit of Festivus and how it’s become a symbol of celebration and inclusiveness for a lot of people. He’s even going to make a donation in your name.
Happy Festivus!
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