We’ve all done the thing where we use our phone’s predictive text to spool out long sentences of utter nonsense that still manage to cohere into grammatically recognizable sentences. It’s interesting technology, if a little insulting to think that our thoughts are so easy to grasp that a computer could anticipate them before we even speak them. But what if, instead of trying to predict the sentences of any old English-speaking person, it zeroed in on someone very specific? Like, for example, the four main characters of Seinfeld as they spoke on season three?
That’s what a cohort of comedy writers did, feeding individual libraries of text into predictive keyboards for Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine, as well as the scripts’ stage directions and Jerry’s separate standup segments. Led by Jamie Brew (who is, full disclosure, a former Clickhole writer), the team then put together a three-page script, which you can read below:
The result starts off with uncanny accuracy, as far as the rhythms and diction of the show. Jerry’s asking rhetorical questions on-stage, Kramer pops in with some weird new fixation, George brags, “I’m kinda like the captain of hygiene,” and Elaine groans, “Right now I want to find someone who doesn’t believe George is back from the bathroom.”
Things take a turn for the surreal with the stage direction “Kramer enters quickly, sliding around the floor on his knees,” after which muscle relaxers come out and words like “cowbanes” come into existence. Jerry closes things off with a stand-up bit that scans more as the nihilistic conclusion to “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” than a riff on airline seats. You can see more of Brew’s experiments with predictive text here.