‘Seinfeld’ Fans Have One Specific Note for Stephen King’s George Costanza Reference

Horror icon Stephen King has written about killer cars, haunted hotels and cell phones that turn people into bloodthirsty zombies for some reason. Less famously, King once used his literary skills to briefly reference a bald pathological liar who killed his own fiancée with cheapness. Spooky.

As one person recently pointed out on Reddit, King’s novella Big Driver, from the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars features a grisly murder scene that just so happens to occur right as the Seinfeld episode “The Hamptons” is playing on a TV in the background. 

As you may recall, that’s the show where Jerry’s girlfriend Rachel inadvertently walks in on George while he’s removing his swim trunks. While King doesn’t go into too much detail about the episode, he does recount George Costanza’s frantic defense of his penile shrinkage, which finds him repeatedly shouting “I was in the pool.”

It’s not a total shock that King would include a shout-out to Seinfeld in his novella, which, incidentally, also goes on to describe how the rerun was followed by an episode of Frasier. King has been known to pepper his novels with pop-culture references, like how the revised version of The Stand randomly mentions Who Framed Roger Rabbit. 

In response to the Reddit post, a lot of Seinfeld fans had the same note for King: What’s with the lack of exclamation points?

This was, of course, a callback to the storyline in which Elaine criticizes her author boyfriend for not using the emphatic punctuation mark while jotting down a note about her friend having a baby. She then allows the fight to influence her editorial suggestions for his new book, filling the manuscript with unnecessary exclamation points.

But in this case, Seinfeld fans are arguably correct. According to the University of Sussex, an exclamation point is used “at the end of a sentence or a short phrase which expresses very strong feeling.” In the shrinkage scene, George’s emasculated screeching certainly seems like it would qualify. 

Incidentally, decades before Big Driver came out, Seinfeld included a low-key nod to King. In the background of one episode you can faintly see the spine of a hardcover copy of King’s Dolores Claiborne — or is it Mulva Claiborne? 

And, come to think of it, literally every single episode of Seinfeld contains a reference to King, because the show was produced by Castle Rock, the company named after King’s fictional town.

Sadly, the author never found a way to include Cosmo Kramer in the Dark Tower series. Although George’s run-in with a birthday party clown wasn’t so dissimilar from It.