Jerry Seinfeld Didn’t Appreciate This Kid in the Hall’s Festivus Ideas
It’s that time of year when we celebrate the season by watching “The Strike,” the Seinfeld episode that first introduced us to the pseudo-real holiday known as “Festivus.”
In addition to the core cast members, “The Strike” also featured some interesting guest performers, including actor and acclaimed playwright Tracy Letts, as a creepy betting parlor employee, and the Kids in the Hall’s Kevin McDonald as “Denim Vest” (aka Steve), whose less-than-smooth moves and jean-heavy fashion choices don’t impress Elaine.
According to Seinfeld writer and producer Jeff Schaffer, the Denim Vest character was “inspired by all Canadians. Everywhere.” So it was “only fitting” that he be played by a member of Canada’s legendary sketch troupe. But McDonald’s comedy credentials didn’t seem to mean much to Jerry Seinfeld.
McDonald revealed to the CBC in 2020 that Seinfeld was “very nice,” but because Dave Foley was the most famous member of the Kids in the Hall at the time, thanks to NewsRadio, Seinfeld was a little confused. “All week he accidentally kept calling me Dave," McDonald recalled.
Worse still, during the filming of the scene in which Denim Vest runs into a steam-soaked Elaine on the street, and ends up giving her a fake number as a result, Seinfeld, who from McDonald’s perspective was “pretty much directing the episode,” attempted to rewrite McDonald’s final line on the spot.
“Two of the writers were with him, and he wasn’t happy with the joke, so him and the two writers started spritzing jokes,” McDonald told The A.V. Club in 2010. As a comedy writer and performer who was used to collaborative environments, McDonald, naturally, made his own suggestion. “I just flashed back to the Kids in the Hall days when we’d be on set like this, where it’s a communal kind of thing, so without thinking, I offered one up.”
Yeah, that was a mistake. “And all of a sudden it was like a Western movie, where someone walks into a saloon and everyone goes quiet,” McDonald explained. “It was a stunned silence. Then Jerry Seinfeld turned and looked at me and said, ‘Noooo.’ And then he turned back to his writers and they kept spritzing jokes. I realized I had overstepped my bounds — and I didn’t mean to. I had just gotten caught up in the comedy river of it. We were all swimming in the comedy river. But I understand.”
On the plus side, the episode did teach McDonald not to wear too much denim at one time (“I actually used to wear jean jackets and jean pants, and that’s when I learned that you shouldn’t do that, that women think you’re a loser. I didn’t know that until then”), and now he’s become a fixture on the Festivus event circuit.
Not to be a broken record, but that’s not exactly in keeping with the spirit of Festivus.
