Man Fired Over ‘Seinfeld’ Joke Won, Then Lost $26.6 Million
Is it okay to discuss the plots of watercooler sitcoms by the office watercooler, even if you work at a brewery?
Management at the Miller Brewing Company didn’t think so when it fired an executive in 1997 for recounting the plot of a Seinfeld episode that featured risque wordplay.
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The episode in question was “The Junior Mint,” the 20th installment of the sitcom’s fourth season. The title comes from the episode’s main plot, in which Kramer drops a refreshing chocolate treat into a man’s body during a surgical operation. But that’s not the storyline that got Miller executive Jerold Mackenzie in hot water.
The provocative plot involves Jerry, who can’t recall anything about his new girlfriend’s name other than it rhymes with part of the female anatomy. The insulted woman leaves in a huff as Jerry desperately guesses her name. Is it Mulva? Gipple? Once she’s gone, the answer finally dawns on him. Delores!
Mackenzie, who was making $95,000 a year in 1997 (about $185K in today’s dollars), testified that he described the episode to a female coworker, but was too bashful to say aloud the body part in question. Instead, he pointed to the word in a dictionary, according to the Los Angeles Times. That gave Mackenzie’s colleague a major case of the ick, and she told a supervisor that she’d been sexually harassed. Mackenzie was shown the door.
Fortunately for Mackenzie, his attorneys were savvier than Jackie Chiles. Poor Mackenzie was simply “a goof who comes into work and talks about Seinfeld and finds himself for 1,573 days without a job,” argued his lawyer. “They were out to get this guy.”
That wasn’t exactly wrong. Miller’s attorney argued that Mackenzie was a lousy manager, and the Seinfeld incident was merely the final straw after a series of poor decisions. “He was on thin ice,” the Miller lawyer said.
But it was Miller Brewing that landed in the freezing water — at least at first. The jury agreed that sitcom talk was fair game for the workplace, awarding Mackenzie $26.6 million, including $24.5 million from Miller and an astonishing $1.5 million from his offended coworker.
Mackenzie was thrilled with the verdict. “You should be able to talk to your co-workers,” he crowed. “You should be able to talk to subordinates as you would talk to anybody else.”
But the victory was short-lived. In a plot twist that could only happen to George Costanza, an appeals court and eventually the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed that while the Seinfeld story inflamed the jury, the case should have been based on Mackenzie’s claim that Miller executives had assured him that his position was safe after a reorganization, reported CBS News. The courts ruled Miller had no obligation to tell Mackenzie anything about his future with the company.
The decision was reversed, and the temporarily wealthy Mackenzie was left just as empty-handed as Jerry after Delores stomped out of his apartment for good.
