During the second season of Seinfeld, screenwriter Larry Charles wrote a script for a proposed episode that revolved around the controversial subject of gun ownership. Originally entitled “The Gun,” the story begins with Elaine and Jerry arguing over Elaine’s desire to purchase a firearm. “You just don’t understand what it’s like being a single woman in this city,” she tells him. “What do you know about guns?! Are you prepared to use it? Are you prepared to kill somebody?” Jerry asks her.
Kramer takes Elaine and Jerry to see a friend of his about acquiring the gun, but Jerry leaves before Elaine makes her decision. Although she opts not to get one, she doesn’t want Jerry to think he was right, so she buys a toy gun in order to fool him. This culminates in Elaine accidentally pulling the gun out at an airport toward the end of the script; she, Jerry, and George are then promptly swarmed by armed security guards. The incident scares a female acquaintance of Kramer’s so much that she writes him afterward to tell him she’s purchased a gun herself—because “a girl can’t be too careful these days.”
“I was always trying to find elements that would not normally find their way into sitcoms, and see if we could make those kinds of elements funny,” Charles said of the script in one of the Seinfeld DVD extras. But although sets were built for the show and roles had even been cast, the episode never aired. As Seinfeld director Tom Cherones tells it, roughly 20 minutes into the table read, the cast looked at him and said, “We can’t do this show.” Series co-creator Larry David agreed, and the episode was replaced with “The Phone Message,” which David was forced to write with Jerry Seinfeld in just two days.
“We couldn’t solve the funny problem of it,” explained Charles. “It never seemed to quite be as funny as it should be, and, because of that, the balance was off, and the darkness kind of enveloped it, and it could never really emerge from that darkness and become what it should have been. So, uh, it was disappointing, but also understandable.” An early draft of the screenplay was scanned and uploaded to the Internet Archive in 2024, which you can check out for yourself right here. Charles later confirmed that it was an authentic copy, as it contains some of his handwritten notes and edits; he suggested that whoever was responsible for it being out there must have gotten their hands on it at the ill-fated table read decades earlier.
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