Does This 'Seinfeld' Spec Script Prove America's Ready to Laugh About 9/11?

Seinfeld's finale aired in 1998, but that hasn't stopped people from imagining how the misanthropic show "about nothing" would handle the new millennium. Most famously, the Twitter account @SeinfeldToday placed the show in the modern day:

Elaine has a bad waiter at a nice restaurant, her negative Yelp review goes viral, she gets banned. Kramer accidentally joins the Tea Party.

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday)December 10, 2012

Jerry's gf (Carla Gugino) is mad he can't 'speak emoji.' JERRY:'It says building, crying cat, clock!' KRAMER:'She's running late, Jerry!'

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday)January 22, 2013

However, until this week, no one had tried to figure out how Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer would have tackled the most defining event of the post- Seinfeld America: September 11. The horrible tragedy of 9/11 has been one of the truly taboo subjects in comedy. ( The few comedians who have tried their hand at it received boos and Twitter pile-ons.) Yet as they like to say, comedy equals tragedy plus time, and 15 years after the deadliest foreign attack on American soil, comedian Billy Domineau has produced a pretty amazing Seinfeld script set in the days after 9/11.

Domineau told the Comic's Comic the idea came to him when he "was helping someone write a sketch a few months back and told them theirs needed to be an exercise in bad taste, 'Like imagine if there was a 9/11 episode of Seinfeld… wait a minute.'" Given how quickly the fake episode went viral, it seems that Americans might be ready to joke about the tragedy after all.

The script, called "The Twin Towers," functions both as a mocking parody of the show—juxtaposing the characters' deep inhumanity next to a horrifying terrorist attack—and as a pitch-perfect homage. This actually really reads like a Seinfeld episode, which the characters acting exactly how you'd imagine they would. And it's pretty damn funny to boot.

In the episode, Elaine is excited her bland boyfriend died in the attacks—"saved me an awkward dinner"—only to find out he survived. George pretends to be a hero who dragged people to safety, but soon finds the lie spirals out of control. Kramer learns he leant his box-cutter to one of the terrorists, but the government won't reimburse him for it: "You realize we're all here because of your damn box-cutter?… You don't go to the burn unit to bum a cigarette!" Meanwhile, Jerry neurotically fears that every speck of dust is from the fallen towers. "Eat around it," George says when Jerry finds dust on his Monk's Café sandwich. "I can't eat around this. This could have been a person. Hey, Larry? Could I get another sandwich?"

Other Seinfeld favorites like Jackie Chiles and George Steinbrenner make appearances as well. You can read the whole thing below.