I think he’s very funny. I was happy to see him live although it was long after the show was off the air (about five years ago). He was a semi popular comedian before the show. Something I heard a lot when the show was in its first two seasons or so was, “I like his stand up but I don’t like the show”.
It was at an immediate disadvantage because it debuted in late spring (May, I think), and the “first season” was only four or five episodes long. I guess it did well enough before breaking for the summer that NBC gave it a commitment for the Fall Season. I have read, though, that it took time to build an audience the first year.
You’re not alone. That’s the problem with observational humor, generally; if it’s verifiable in nature, then it just comes off as lazy or willfully ignorant. I saw it once lampooned somewhere where a comedian asks why airplanes aren’t made of the same material as the black box, then noting that the plane would then be likely too heavy to fly.
Oh man, I went to search for the source and found this TVTropes page… which begins with a Cecil Adams quote on the very subject.
I think delivery has something to do with it also. Rodney Dangerfield could get away with it. Steven Wright gets away with it.
Seinfeld is gifted with a quirky sense of humor that lets him see the world from an unusual and often very funny perspective. That doesn’t explain why the guy is worth billions of dollars, though – most of that is pure luck, with the totally magical eponymous TV series being the major part of that. I know this thread is about the stand-up part but I wanted to say a few things about the show.
I thought the show was mostly pretty funny and very innovative, but I didn’t like the narcissism that sometime pervaded it. “Seinfeld” wasn’t “a show about nothing”, it was a show about Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. No other comic who had managed to get NBC to buy their sitcom idea would have had the gall to inflict on their audience a couple of episodes with a running story about a comic trying to get NBC to buy his sitcom idea. That was just bizarre, and one of the low points of the series. It was like, “here, let me tell you about my life; it’s nothing at all like your life and you won’t identify with it at all, but I’ll enjoy telling it”. The show’s genius shone when it dropped the most blatant self-reflection and created caricatures in which we could see traits of many of our acquaintances and our own selves. That was Seinfeld’s observational humor come to life.
Later on, the show got a reputation for trendy memes that became office watercooler conversation the next day. The writers at times seemed to become annoyingly and self-importantly infatuated with their ability artificially create trendy memes. Jerry also couldn’t act worth a shit but somehow managed to make his own ineptitude a funny part of the show.
That said, I did mostly really enjoy the series and watched it repeatedly in recent years. There was a lot of talent there – the writing talent was great and the chemistry among the cast was just magical – and Jerry was right in refusing to try a spinoff series – it never would have worked.
Useless trivia alert: it’s pretty well known that the exterior shots of the ubiquitous restaurant that Jerry and the gang are always hanging out in are of Tom’s Restaurant, at the corner of Broadway and West 112th. What is less well known is that the building that houses the famous restaurant, pictured in almost every Seinfeld episode, is almost entirely occupied by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), a major center of climate research. GISS used to be headed by James Hansen, a towering figure in climate science, and since 2014 has been directed by Gavin Schmidt, another prominent figure in the field, one of the major contributors to RealClimate, and a real warrior in the battle against climate change disinformation.
So whenever I see Jerry and the gang in Monk’s café, I imagine James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt clomping around just a few floors above!
Seems an appropriate place to link to the Family Guy take on Paul Reiser’s stand up.
I think he was a very good stand-up, good enough to be on Carson multiple times and good enough for NBC to give him a sitcom. He is mostly a “clean” comedian like Jay Leno, but still very funny IMO.
If you watch his online show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee you’ll also see he has a lot of respect for the art of comedy. Seeing him discuss the craft with people like Carl Reiner, Bill Burr, Norm MacDonald, and Chris Rock is very interesting to me.
I’ve listened to many many podcasts of comedians talking about their professional journey and influences. Before the TV show comics already recognized Seinfeld as one of The Godfathers of that generation of stand up. He was at the top tier of comics even if he wasn’t the household name he would become.
Right, but just to clarify for anyone who doesn’t know, yes, the establishing shots were at 112th and Broadway (as is the real diner, which, incidentally, was also the inspiration for Suzanne Vega’s hit “Tom’s Diner”), it’s well-established in the world of the show that Jerry and Kramer live at 129 W. 81st St. Which of course begs the question, why the hell are they traveling 31 blocks to eat, but there it is.
To me, when Jerry Seinfeld, a real life comedian who starred in a show as a comedian had his character on the show create a show where the main character was a comedian… Well, I could only sit back in amazement.
I was surprised to find out that the exterior of Jerry’s apartment building that’s shown in every episode is actually a building in LA and there are palm trees right across the street.
He was good, he was very influential. A lot of other comics imitated his observational style. So he reversed it and started making fun of that style. Which contributed to his own act becoming stale.
His 2002 Comedian documentary was sort of interesting but not all that funny. Cosby references!
Since then he really hasn’t been much of anything to me. His “… In Cars” shows rely on the other person to deliver the laughs.
He’s a walking museum of 80s/90s comedy.
I assumed it was because the location of Monk’s Diner was left ambiguous, and not actually pinned to being at 112th and Broadway or any other specific place, but since I don’t recall Seinfeld’s address ever being established either, my recollections aren’t very reliable!
Sorry just seen this. Yes would love for it to be corrected, makes me cringe when I see it now!
Thanks for the replies. I’ve seen Comedian but never watched one of his routines all the way through so I will go and do that…
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
I remember a special he had on HBO before the TV show came out which was hilarious. One scene I still remember:
Jerry (to himself, while waiting for his date to get ready in her apartment) “Oh great, she has a cat. I can’t wait to pet its stupid head and hear its stupid name.”
Woman: “Did you meet Cleopatra?”
What I remember of Seinfeld’s 80s standup was the same routines over and over. Must have heard the parakeet flying into the mirror bit a hundred times. A few years later, I was watching a Behind the Scenes of Seinfeld and it had him warming up the audience and he was using the same bits. I presume that’s why he had a tour “retiring” his 80s bits, as he used them like a music band’s setlist.
I don’t remember how the establishing shot looked when the episodes originally aired, but in this day and age of HD and large TV screens, you can definitely see the street sign in front of the diner indicating 112th St.
The thing is, though, that Seinfeld and David never considered their show to be “about nothing”. The point was that the show characters thought that was a great idea, and pitched it to NBC. Seinfeld has said that he was surprised the “show about nothing” label attached itself and stuck, because to them the show was “about everything”. No, audiences weren’t used to seeing television where the characters nitpicked every nuance of life, which could be argued to be “about nothing”, but when George is pitching a TV show where people read on it, that takes it to a whole new level of banality, the joke being that they took the idea too far and NBC lost interest. Even when they do get their pilot shot, it’s with that horrible storyline of having no insurance, and the judge decreeing the guy who caused the accident becomes Jerry’s butler. Which is the opposite of “nothing”.
Right: cite here (#4 on the list).