Popularity of Seinfeld Names Over Time

©2020 Blaire Palmer

Introduction

‘Seinfeld,’ the popular 1990’s TV show is a household name in America. It won an Emmy for outstanding comedy in 1993, a Golden Globe for best TV series in 1994 and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance in by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in ‘95, ‘97, and ‘98. The show ended with an impressive 76.3 Million viewers watching the finale.

It is well known that popular culture has been influencing every part of people’s lives for decades, from the advent of the side ponytail in the 80’s to the comeback of infamous ‘Mom Jeans’ because of instagram influencers. But how far can the influence of pop-culture extend into someone’s life?

In this report, I will be analyzing character names in the show in accordance with baby names in the United States directly before, during, and after the show aired.

Hypothesis:

There is a correlation between the main characters of the show Seinfeld (Elaine, George, Jerry, and Kramer) and the people who were named these characters during the years in or directly after Seinfeld aired.

First I installed and loaded all of the packages / information needed to run this code:

install.packages("tidyverse")
install.packages("babynames")
library(tidyverse)
library(babynames)
dataset <- read_csv("Desktop/all_states.csv")

Then I showed the total male and female names over time, to demonstrate that the a name would likely go down over time and the proportion of females to males in the United States. I set both of the Y-axes equal to each other:

babynames %>%
group_by(year) %>%
filter(sex == "F") %>%
summarise(names_over_time = n_distinct(name)) %>%
ggplot(aes(year, names_over_time)) + geom_smooth() +
ylim (0, 25000)

babynames %>%
group_by(year) %>%
filter(sex == "M") %>%
summarise(names_over_time = n_distinct(name)) %>%
ggplot(aes(year, names_over_time)) + geom_smooth() +
ylim(0, 25000)

Next, I plotted the proportions of the four names of the main characters to the proportion of the US population over time. I created a variable called 'name4' that filtered the four main names of the show, and then graphed that variable. It should be noted that I used proportion for this graph, instead of count. I also only used one spelling for each name, and did not separate the names between sexes. This is because there were no other commonly used spellings, and there were very few male 'Elaines' or female 'Kramers', 'Jerrys', or 'Georges':

name4 <- babynames %>%
filter(name %in% c("Kramer", "Elaine", "Jerry", "George"))

ggplot(name4, aes(year, prop, color=name)) + geom_smooth()

I found Kramer expecially interesting, because it is a very uncommon name. It is the last name of the character Cosmo Kramer, but I decided to graph Kramer instead of Cosmo because the character is called this and not commonly referred to by his first name. I thought that creating another graph of Kramer specifically would show when, exactly, the name was popularized, and if it corresponded with the dates of the show. Seinfeld first aired in 1989, so I set the date from 1980 - 2017 to add a few years beforehand. This graph looks like it shows a large spike around the air date, but the axis on the left shows that out of millions of Americans, only a few named their children Kramer:

babynames %>%
filter(name %in% "Kramer" & sex =="M") -> k
k %>% arrange(desc(n)) -> k1
k1 %>% ggplot(aes(year, n)) + geom_line() + xlim(1980, 2017)

Next, I found an episode of Seinfeld, called 'Seven,' that was released in 1996, about how George wanted to name his child Seven after Mickey Mantle's Jersey number. This episode aired in 1996, so I limited the years from 1991 to 2017. I created a variable named 'seven' that first split all male and female names apart, and then filtered so only the name Seven was showing up. Then I ran the code, and found that there was in fact a rise of male Sevens around the year the episode came out:

seven <- babynames %>%
group_by(sex) %>%
filter(name %in% c("Seven")) %>%
ggplot(aes(year, n, color = sex)) + geom_line() + xlim(1991, 2017)

seven

Conclusion

The graphs clearly show that there is no correlation between the main characters on Seinfeld and the names that people give to their children. The names decline in popularity, almost all of them declining after 1955.

I couldn't clearly see the 'Kramer' line, so I made a different graph, and found that while people may have been influenced by the show, as the name saw a rise in popularity in 1989 (when the season first aired). The peak number, however, was only 60 people in the USA, so there were not very many people inspired by the name 'Kramer.'

The name Seven has had a steady rise in popularity since the early 1990s, the initial spike in the male line being in 1997, the same year as the episode came out.

Another consideration is the average age of the Seinfeld viewer may have been above the childbearing age, eliminating them as a possibility to show that they were influenced by the show in this specific manner. For more insights about the show, check out this report that breaks down the scripts of the show in many more interesting ways.