Remember that episode of Seinfeld when Elaine starts hanging out with a guy named Kevin and quickly learns that Kevin’s got a couple of friends named Feldman and Gene?
Writer Dave Mandel dubbed that one “The Bizarro Jerry,” and if you watch it for even just five minutes, you’ll quickly learn why. Elaine’s bizarro friendship world involves three men in their early 30s, one of whom’s tall and quirky, another who’s a bald business professional, and a third who’s really nothing more than a normal man. The difference between that crew and Jerry’s—Seinfeld‘s namesake character, Kramer, and George—was that those three amigos hugged at the end of the episode. By contrast, that day at Monk’s, Kramer and George probably found a way to split out on their checks.
The “Dear Abby” conclusion to that episode was that your one group of friends are just like the other—only slightly different. But anyway you slice it, three guys who hang out with a single girl in publishing are going to be the same as the next group of three guys who hang out with a single girl in publishing. It’s just that the tall guy’s going to be named Feldman.
It’s with that lesson in mind that we turn our attention to the Twitter, where the past 10 weeks have been spent laughing at a series of Seinfeld parody handles that have recast the fabulous foursome in a series of episodic scenarios in times both past and present.
The fun first got started in mid-December, when Josh Gondelman and Buzzfeed’s Jack Moore opened up @SeinfeldToday to plot Jerry and the crew in the millennial age—a funny conundrum that found George getting lost because of Apple Maps and Jerry wrestling with an inability to “speak emoji.”
A few days later came @BCSeinfeld, the brainchild of New York City screenwriter Matt Grasso, who chose to go the “anti-pop” route and refashion the crew somewhere in between the Civil War and Jurassic age. All of a sudden it was Alexander the Great who Elaine had deemed only “okay” and Mary Magdalene who’d been treating Jerry like a God.
Those two accounts followed natural routes to fame and attention, but the one that took over Weird Twitter and earned the awe of all the alternatives was @Seinfeld2000, better known as Seinfeld Current Day, which “Imagen[d] Seinfeld was never canceled and still NBC comedy program today lol” but catered to none of the trend’s preconceived rules.”
In fact, it’s safe to say that the only rule @Seinfeld2000 ever had was that it had no rules. Nothing was off limits—including misspelling known names and creating new characters.
But @Seinfeld2000 also spoke to a certain set of detractors, the ones who thought it silly that people were laughing about a television show that went off the air 15 years ago while other television shows were actually creating new episodes that they could watch and enjoy and laugh at right now. It’s no coincidence that the only person the anonymous account followed was Girls creator Lena Dunham, whose HBO show is basically Seinfeld if you turned Jerry, George, and Kramer into 20something girls and slapped a few tattoos on their backs.
The account closed today after a rash of retweets and #shotsfired at @SeinfeldToday, whose tweets @Seinfeld2000 never really liked. In its time, the account picked up more than 3,700 followers and an entire google’s worth of laughs.
“Better to burn out then to fade away,” fan Michael Primz wrote in a paraphrasing of the great Neil Young. “Thanks for weeks upon weeks of laughs.”
@Seinfeld2000 may be gone, but it won’t soon or ever be forgotten. Below, a collection of our favorites from the more than 1,000 episode scenarios this weird handle played out. Thanks for all the laughs, Jary. We can’t wait to see what you do with Friends.
Photo via Seinfeld2000/Twitter
