How an Audience Member Came Up With One of ‘Seinfeld’s Most Famous Punchlines
While Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David get most of the credit for Seinfeld, the show utilized quite a number of talented writers over the years, including Larry Charles, Carol Leifer and, on one occasion, some unnamed rando in the studio audience.The fourth season episode “The Junior Mint” featured a medically dubious plotline in which Jerry and Kramer dropped a piece of candy into Elaine’s ex-boyfriend’s abdominal cavity during a surgery, inadvertently saving his life. The episode also gave us a story about how Jerry can’t remember his new girlfriend’s name, his only clue being that it “rhymes with a part of the female anatomy.” After workshopping possible names with George, including “Hest” and “Bovary,” in the final moments of the show, Jerry's date confronts him and forces him to take a big swing-and-a-miss at it.
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Jerry’s guesses – “Mulva,” “Gipple” and “Loleola” – don’t go over well, and she, understandably, storms out of the apartment. After watching her leave, Jerry has a sudden epiphany. He races to the window, opens the blinds and shouts “DOLORES!”
But that’s not how it played out in the script.
“We sat in the room for a long time trying to figure out how to pay off that story,” Larry Charles explained in Season Four’s “Seinfeld: Inside Look” DVD bonus feature. “And everybody was pitching, but I pitched the idea that maybe her name rhymes with a body part.”“The name that the script had as her actual name was ‘Chloris,’” Castle Rock executive Glenn Padnick recalled. “And I remember thinking that that really wasn’t very good. But we went into the taping that night, and I sit in the stands during the taping, and between scenes, as the plot was emerging, the warm-up man asked people in the audience if anybody could guess what the name of Jerry’s girlfriend, in fact, was.”“And one woman guesses ‘Dolores,’” Padnick continued. “And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘That is a better name than the name we have in our script.’ So I got out of my seat and I went down to the stage…”
Jerry used the woman’s suggestion in the take that made it into the final cut, despite the fact that the audience member had, in effect, given the script a last-minute punch-up and created one of the show’s most memorable punchlines. However, the Seinfeld staff played it off as though they had come up with the name. “As the audience was filing out, I heard the warm-up man say to the woman, ‘Hey you guessed the right name,’” Padnick noted. They couldn’t even give her a complimentary pack of Junior Mints for saving the show?
