And next, a museum about nothing: Seinfeld’s pop-up experience

But will it feature a fusilli Jerry exhibit? Seinfeld, the show about nothing, gets its own museum.

The cast of iconic comedy Seinfeld, from left: Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards.

It was billed as a show about nothing, yet still managed to pose grand philosophical questions about the minutiae of life, including why they didn’t make the whole plane out of black box recorder material or how many times you can dip your tortilla chips in salsa.

Now, somehow, Seinfeld’s wry, antic and free-ranging disposition is to be offered as part of an “immersive” exhibit in lower Manhattan.

The Seinfeld Experience promises a look behind the scenes of the television show. There will be costumes, recreations of sets and clips from the cutting-room floor, all contained in a location somewhere in Gramercy, a well-heeled neighbourhood. There will also be a gift shop.

This museum of Seinfeld is to be produced by a division of Warner Brothers and by Superfly, which generally produces music festivals.

The real Jerry Seinfeld offered an endorsement. “Because I am Seinfeld, for a long time I was the only person to actually have the Seinfeld experience,” he said.

Now that special privilege was to be made available to the masses “so lots of people can interact with our silly 90s TV show”, he said. “All I can say is, in the general context of the world we live in, this now seems completely normal.”

In an episode named The Fusilli Jerry, Kramer famously made sculptures of pasta, including one of fusilli pasta of Jerry doing stand-up comedy. It ended messily. Picture: Twitter/@SeinfeldTV

It is not the first attempt to reincarnate a television show as a pop-up museum. In 2014 a cafe called Central Perk opened in SoHo, modelled after the cafe in the long-running sitcom Friends, and filled with shrine-like exhibits of a few of the costumes — Rachel’s skirt and leather boots, the long suede jacket worn by Phoebe, and Chandler’s check shirt and slacks — and the large yellow sofa that was the setting for so much of the dialogue.

Before that, the Cheers name was franchised to a set of clubs and bars around the world, including one in Piccadilly Circus, London, without much resemblance to the original.

Fans of Seinfeld, yearning to immerse themselves in the show, already beat a path to Tom’s Restaurant, the diner whose neon facade featured on the show.

They can also go to the apartment block that was once Seinfeld’s in real life, and is forever on television, or patronise the soup restaurant chain originally owned by Al Yeganeh, the inspiration for the show’s “soup Nazi”; a chap who had amazing soup but enforced an arbitrary code of conduct on his premises and was wont to punish transgressions with the words: “No soup for you.”

Kenny Kramer, a comedian who lived across the hall from Larry David — the co-creator of Seinfeld — and who inspired the character of Cosmo Kramer on the show, also offers a bus tour “to the sites made famous in the world’s most popular sitcom”.

It began in 1996, when the show was still on air, and Kramer expressed the hope that he would eventually be able to hire an actor to play him on the tours so that he could retire. “That way we’ll have art imitating life imitating art imitating life,” he said at the time. “And I can sit in the jacuzzi back home.”

This has not yet come to pass.

The Times