Once upon a time—back before the show’s dedication to documenting minor human evils was quite so widely known—fans trying to describe It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia to other people were often forced to resort to comparisons to that last great sitcom about mostly awful semi-humans living largely meaningless lives: Seinfeld. In fact, Sunny went ahead and made those comparisons part of its own text last night, when, in the middle of a very meta clip show, it included a scene lifted directly from Seinfeld’s famous “The Contest.”
Lifted with near-perfect fidelity, as it turns out; reddit user EzloTheMinish put together a quick comparison of the two scenes, and it’s borderline eerie how close Sunny got to its recreation, even with Mac and Dennis pulling double duty as Jerry. Sure, the timing gets off in one or two spots, but the camera angles, the cadences, even the slight tilt in the apartment’s blinds: Almost every detail is spot-on, suggesting that even in the middle of all their reality-altering nonsense, the Sunny team was dedicated to getting their homage to their comedic sociopath forerunners right.