The clip finds King — who famously never prepared for interviews, simply asking inquisitive questions — asking whether NBC cancelled his beloved show Seinfeld, which aired its final episode nine years prior. Of course they didn’t — it was the network’s top show, and Seinfeld simply decided to end it while it was on top. But Seinfeld took extreme umbrage with the idea that there was any doubt.

I’d never seen the clip mentioned here, but it doesn’t sound to me like King is actually asking if it was canceled — he even opens the question by stating “you ended the show”. It sounds to me more like King is trying to push Seinfeld to talk a bit about his decision to end the show, which Seinfeld (rather egotistically) misinterpreted as King being unfamiliar with the situation. It seems pretty clear to me that King is familiar with what happened, but poses it as a question because it’s an interview and his role is to ask questions. It strikes me more as a mismatch of expectations of genre, where Seinfeld (and apparently many viewers) was expecting questions that King needed or wanted answered, whereas interview questions often don’t serve that purpose, instead serving as something more like prompts that allow the interviewee to run with a given topic. I have no idea what King’s preparation (or lack thereof) was for interviews, but this is probably a bad example of his lack of preparation, and more of an example of assuming that an interviewer’s question means that they know nothing about the question’s topic.

But, also, the Danny Pudi clip from that same article is hilarious: