At first look, Mad Males’s Don Draper and Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer are just about nothing alike. One is a slick promoting genius who wears fancy fits, drinks advantageous whiskey and works within the Nineteen Sixties. The opposite is a hipster doofus who mooches off of his neighbor, and barely labored a lot in any respect all through the Nineties.
However upon nearer inspection, these two characters is probably not so dissimilar in any case. As author and Mad Males fan Ben Crew not too long ago identified on social media, Don Draper principally landed his first workplace job the identical method Kramer did — by simply randomly displaying up in the future.
Do not Miss
Yup, Don solely began working at Sterling-Cooper as a result of he pretended like he had been employed — though he did go the additional mile and ensure to get Roger Sterling good and drunk the night time earlier than.
In the case of Kramer, he accidentally stumbled into a corporate position while using an office bathroom, then decided to go along with the mistaken belief that he was an employee, even though he had no idea what he was doing and wasn’t even getting paid.
Come to think of it, the similarities don’t end there. Both Don and Kramer are both sexually active New Yorkers with bold ideas. But while Don comes up with successful ad campaigns, Kramer mainly dreams up kooky business ventures, like the “Peterman reality tour,” the make-your-own-pizza restaurant, and the coffee-table book about coffee tables.
They also both habitually smoke (cigarettes and cigars, respectively) and worked with Big Tobacco: Don Draper’s agency routinely did business with Lucky Strike, while Kramer attempted to sue a Marlboro-like company over his “hideous” appearance, but eventually settled the case in exchange for a starring role in one of their ad campaigns.
Not to mention how they both had dealings with the women’s undergarment industry. While Don pitched copy to Playtex…
…Kramer and Frank Costanza went into business for themselves and tried to sell their Bro/Manssiere invention to bra executive Sid Farkus.
Wait, there’s more: Don Draper, famously, has a hidden secret involving his past. He’s not really Don Draper, he’s some guy named “Dick Whitman.” He took the stylish name after the real Don died in combat (not unlike Armin Tamzarian). Kramer, too, has a buried secret involving his identification. Within the first a number of seasons of the present, he completely refused to let his buddies know his actual first title. That’s, till his mom randomly blurted it out in entrance of George in Season Six.
And had Don, Roger, Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson ever determined to compete in a masturbation contest, presumably Don would have misplaced simply as shortly as Kramer.
However with Don, there would have been lot extra subsequent existential malaise.
