The King of Queens ran for nine seasons on CBS between 1998 and 2007. The hit sitcom centered around Kevin James and Leah Remini as Doug and Carrie Heffernan, a married couple living in Queens along with Carrie’s eccentric father, Arthur (played by Jerry Stiller). Also featured prominently throughout the show’s run was Doug’s childhood friend, Spence Olchin, as portrayed by comedian Patton Oswalt. Spence had many memorable moments over the years, but one that really stands out in hindsight was an unscripted moment that went seemingly unnoticed until well after the episode first aired.
At the beginning of the 2006 episode “Emotional Rollercoaster,” we find Doug celebrating his 40th birthday with some friends and family. Standing behind him in the scene as he opens his gifts is Spence, whose presence starts to become creepier and creepier the more you watch him. Before long, you’ll come to the realization that he’s the only one in the room who doesn’t seem to be paying attention to anything or reacting to what’s happening. He lingers there, motionless, for over two minutes, as if someone hit the pause button and it only affected his character. Even as the camera jumps to the next room to cover the conversations going on elsewhere, you can still spot him frozen in place like a statue looming ominously in the background. Take a look at the full scene below.
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When somebody brought the subject up to him in 2011, Oswalt tweeted that he’d forgotten about doing the scene, and referred to the footage as “eerie”:
So what happened here exactly? Did he just zone out because he didn’t have anything scripted to do, or was this some kind of intentional gag? In an interview for Howard Stern’s Stern Show Summer School in 2022, Oswalt briefly touched on the incident, explaining that working on The King of Queens was a blast for him because “all the writers were stoners.” Furthermore, he said, there were always weird pranks going on during production.
Chief among them, evidently, was what we saw play out in the video above. As Oswalt tells it, “There’s a scene where I’m in it, but I don’t have any lines, and they went, ‘Do not move the whole scene. See if we can get away with it. See if anyone catches it,’ And there’s a scene [where] I am completely immobile through the whole scene.” Well, we’re happy to report that they did indeed get away with it, and we can all rest easier now knowing that we didn’t actually witness Oswalt being possessed by those little girls from The Shining.
