Jerry Seinfeld Shot Down ‘Seinfeld’ Jokes From Kids in the Hall’s Kevin McDonald
Kevin McDonald, one of the Kids in the Hall, had a memorable turn in Season Nine of Seinfeld, playing a dude in a denim vest who unsuccessfully hits on Elaine. She brushes off Denim Vest by sliding him a fake phone number, only to discover that she needs his help later in the episode. Awkward, especially because now he’s wearing even more denim. It’s denim on denim on denim. It’s a denim epidemic.
But Elaine wasn’t the only person McDonald annoyed — for some reason, he got under the skin of the real-life Jerry Seinfeld, he told The A.V. Club in 2010 (via SlashFilm).
The problem began when he was filming the second scene with Julia Louis-Dreyfus (“She was super-nice,” he explained). Seinfeld wasn’t satisfied with the scene’s final joke, so he huddled with two of the show’s writers to brainstorm some alternative punchlines. “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,” McDonald remembered. “And all of a sudden it was like a Western movie, where someone walks into a saloon and everyone goes quiet. It was a stunned silence. Then Jerry Seinfeld turned and looked at me and said, ‘Noooo.’”
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McDonald figures he broke an unspoken rule that guest actors shouldn’t weigh in with script suggestions. “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.”
To make matters worse, Seinfeld seems to have held a grudge over the years. On the episode’s DVD commentary, Jerry groans when McDonald appears onscreen. “Oh, that guy.”
“I guess he had a bad taste in his mouth about me,” McDonald said.
Seinfeld wasn’t exactly a cordial host when McDonald was on set, constantly calling him “Dave” instead of Kevin. Was he thinking of Dave Foley, McDonald’s partner on Kids in the Hall? “He kept calling me ‘Dave’ over and over,” McDonald explained. “I guess he thought I was a jerk. But I didn’t mean to be!”
A nice-guy Canadian to his core, McDonald refused to blame Seinfeld for the strife. “I understand his position, I really do,” he insisted. “I didn’t mean any offense, I swear.”
If nothing else, McDonald learned a valuable life lesson from his time on Seinfeld. “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,” he admitted. “That’s what that episode taught me.”
