Spike Feresten
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(This entire page is copy and pasted from the Fox website)
Spike Feresten is an American television writer and talk show host. He is known for writing for The Simpsons (Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming) and Seinfeld (The Soup Nazi, among others). He is currently the host of a late night talk show on the Fox network called Talkshow with Spike Feresten.
Spike Feresten was raised in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he attended public school and got his first job as a bag boy at the local supermarket. With a dream to be the next Jimi Hendrix, Feresten attended Berklee College of Music in Boston.
One night, disillusioned with his career choice, Feresten thought he might feel better if he dropped four-foot fluorescent light bulbs out the window of his dorm room – just to watch them shatter on the sidewalk eight stories below. He got caught and was evicted. Soon after, Feresten saw David Letterman performing the exact same stunt on his late-night talk show, and a metaphorical light bulb went on: If network television encouraged this sort of behavior, he might have a future after all. Thus, a career in TV comedy was born.
Feresten came up through the ranks of television, working first as an intern at NBC in New York. His career took on a Hollywood fable quality when his job as the receptionist for Saturday Night Live led him to pass jokes he had written to “Weekend Update’s” Dennis Miller. Eventually, Feresten’s full-time job at SNL led to a staff-writing position in 1990 at Late Night with David Letterman, where he wrote for five years and earned five Emmy nominations.
In 1995, Feresten left the late-night realm to join the writing staff of the groundbreaking sitcom Seinfeld, where he wrote for three seasons, becoming supervising producer in 1998. During his “Seinfeld” tenure, Feresten garnered an additional three Emmy nominations, including one for his famed “Soup Nazi” episode, which remains part of the pop-culture vernacular.
In addition to “Seinfeld” and “Letterman,” Feresten has written and developed other television comedy, penning episodes of The Simpsons, Space Ghost Coast to Coast and The Jamie Kennedy Experiment. Continuing to work with Jerry Seinfeld, Feresten co-wrote the screenplay for the animated feature Bee Movie, scheduled to be released by DreamWorks Animation in fall 2007.
Feresten and his wife, Erika, live in Los Angeles.
