Your bag is empty.
Jerry Seinfeld is one happy stand-up comic. In front of him, filling the cavernous Bren Events Center at the University of California at Irvine, are 1,746 people who have paid to see Seinfeld and only Seinfeld. That’s a lot of people for a stand-up comic—more, for instance, than Bob Hope drew when he played Irvine—and it’s doubly impressive when you consider that this is a Sunday in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend when most sensible students are off skiing or getting their laundry done at Mom’s.
“Here we are in the gym,” jokes Seinfeld. “We’re in the gym and we’re going to pretend it’s a night club. We won’t notice the scoreboard, we’ll just pretend it’s a little intimate cabaret somewhere on campus.”
This isn’t Seinfeld’s first trip to Irvine, a conservative Orange County community about an hour south of Los Angeles. But last time—a mere 10 months ago—he wasn’t headlining at the gigantic school gym, he was doing what he had always done, playing a small comedy club just off campus. For 14 years, the 36-year-old comic has appeared at clubs, opened for big-name acts and done frequent guest shots on Carson and Letterman, but during the past year, there has been a measurable spurt in his career. He sold out New York’s Town Hall, which seats 1,500, found himself courted by NBC for a sitcom and was booked by Letterman as the only legit guest for his seventh-anniversary show. Suddenly, there is a buzz around him, a certain understanding that after 14 long years of paying dues, Jerry Seinfeld is on the cusp of being the Next Big Deal in comedy.
If one can judge by crowd reaction here in Irvine, Seinfeld is already a big deal. His casual observational humor—he’s sort of a white Bill Cosby but with more punch lines—causes rollicking waves of laughter. It’s middle-of-the-road stuff—about his neighbors with the pet monkey (“If you need a pet that roller-skates and smokes cigars, it’s time to think about a family. You’re so close”), about commercials (“They say Tide cleans bloodstains. I say if you’ve got a T-shirt with bloodstains, then maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem”), about the post office (“Watching postal employees is like watching a lava lamp”)—but the delivery and the timing are honed by constant practice, taking the material up several notches. There’s nothing shocking here—not even a stray four-letter word—nor anything that could conceivably go over the head of anyone with even a moderate television education. That’s one of the reasons the turnout is so large—Seinfeld has an appeal that crosses generational boundaries. It’s the type of crowd you’d expect to see at a baseball game or a family reunion, not at a college comedy concert: students, with arms around their dates, sitting next to senior citizens, and lots of couples in between, some who simply live nearby and others who work or teach at the university.
But no one—not even one elderly woman who has dressed for the Cocoanut Grove, with big chandelier earrings and glitter in her hair—is more out of place at a college concert than an adult man sitting all alone, taking notes. I know. That’s what I’m doing. And there’s another one next to me. He’s alone, he’s taking notes. Balding and athletic, he’s too old to be a fledgling comic stealing jokes and too intense to be a hobbyist. Since Seinfeld’s publicist has assured me I’m the only one currently working on a Seinfeld story, I figure this guy is a critic. In fact, it occurs to me that he may even be the legendary Lawrence Christon, the country’s first full-time comedy critic for a major newspaper. Christon has been on the comedy beat for the Los Angeles Times for more than 10 years, and during that time, he has brought a rather rigorous set of standards to an art from populated by rule-breaking renegades. Certainly, no one else who writes about humor in L.A.—arguably the comedy capital of the country—is read by more people, in and out of the industry. We nod politely to each other, and I even watch his belongings at his request when he heads for the men’s room, but neither one of us makes a stab at conversation. We’re just a couple of guys who attend comedy concerts by ourselves and take lots of notes.
On stage, dressed like a creative type from the ad agency on thirtysomething—your basic sneakers-and-Armani look—Seinfeld weaves his way through his set. He exits to thunderous applause—so much, in fact, that he comes back for that oddity, the stand-up encore. Comedians don’t get to do them much in clubs, where the bottom line rises or falls on the ability to clear out the club after one show and get those heavy drinkers seated for the next.
A Seinfeld encore consists of taking questions from the audience, a practice he introduces with a wry “Let’s see how much material he really has….” There are some questions—“Did you go to Catholic school?” (“Guess again,” suggests Seinfeld)—but mostly, the audience, like music fans shouting out titles, wants to hear routines it already knows. “Socks,” one guy yells. “Dogs,” says another. And Seinfeld obliges. When one fan requests the “black box on airplanes” routine, he shakes his head. “I think Jimmy Aleck is the comedian you’re looking for on that.”
Seinfeld jokingly refers to his climb as “seepage, kind of slow seepage.”
Backstage, which is really the girls’ locker room, Seinfeld is tired but genial, signing autographs, enduring interviews by pesky, would-be comics from the campus radio and TV stations, answering more questions. Later, he’ll walk to his car for the drive home, past hundreds of fliers posted to the walls and pillars on campus announcing: A.S.U.C.I. Presents America’s Most Imitated Comedian, Jerry Seinfeld, the Keenly Perceptive King of Observational Humor.
• • •
Jerry Seinfeld is one unhappy stand-up comic. It’s two nights after his triumphant Irvine show, and he’s at the Improv, a landmark L.A. comedy emporium, idly pushing his pasta salad around his plate. That morning’s Times contained a review by the ferocious Christon of Seinfeld’s performance. If that had been, indeed, Christon next to me, we saw very different shows. “Laughing on Empty,” read the headline, and that was the kind part:
“Jerry Seinfeld…bills himself with all due modesty as ‘America’s most imitated comedian’ as well as ‘the king of observational comedy’—news to us…. Seinfeld is a pleasant, effortless performer who works clean (no small feat in this time of the howling, offal-heaving monkey)…. He doesn’t traffic in the mindless hate—or self-hate—that characterizes so many other stand-ups…. He’s expressive. He’s clear. And he’s completely empty…. There isn’t a single portion of his act that isn’t fun—amusing might be a better word—but 10 minutes or so into it, you begin wondering what this is all about, when is he going to say something or at least come up with something piquant…. Seinfeld has no attention span…. He has no frame of reference. Yeats had a line about ‘paying homage to unevent.’ Seinfeld pays homage to insignificance, and he does it impeccably.”
The Improv is the hangout for comics in L.A., so you can be sure that everyone in the club has read the review. Off to one side, Seinfeld’s publicist is busy wringing his hands and looking pale. Seinfeld’s manager spent the day in a state of red alert. He was at a crucial point in the negotiations with NBC, so he promptly photocopied 10 or so good reviews Seinfeld had gotten from other newspapers and had them sent by messenger to the NBC brass, in the hope of offsetting whatever unpleasant effects the Times review might have had.
Seinfeld takes a drink of his Perrier and says what all performers say after a bad review. “It’s one guy, and that’s what he thought. There were 1,800 people there—what did they think? The audience makes the judgment and you can go right to them.”
He does confess, however, that the beginning of the review—the part about the billing—really got to him. Neither he nor his manager had anything to do with it, he protests. It was all the school’s fault. “Most imitated,” he sputters. “The king…it made me sound like Siegfried and Roy. It’s like a side-show byline. I should have said something in the show, when I came back for the encore. I should have never let it go.” He even called Christon’s office at the Times and left a message explaining the mix-up.
But there’s more to Seinfeld’s angst than the billing mistake. Whether he acknowledges it or not, the review hits on the problem that has plagued his career: He’s a consummate comedian. He writes very funny material and delivers it in a polished manner that many other comics envy. But being funny hasn’t always been enough. Seinfeld first appeared on The Tonight Show in May 1981, shortly after Garry Shandling made his debut. Shandling’s career took off quickly—he even ended up guest-hosting for Carson—while Seinfeld kept on touring clubs. Steven Wright became a star after one appearance on The Tonight Show; Seinfeld has had more than 20.
Part of the problem, to be sure, is that Seinfeld is a hookless comedian. He has no gimmick. Unlike Shandling’s single-guy lament or Richard Lewis’s autoneuroticism, there’s nothing unique about Seinfeld’s material. He doesn’t make Sam Kinison-sized waves or stand out physically like Louie Anderson or Gallagher. He’s as well suited for the hip and cynical Late Night with David Letterman as he was in 18 appearances on the cornball Merv Griffin show. He’s Mr. Generic.
Talk with Seinfeld’s friends and colleagues and they’ll point out the up side to his generic comedy. He wears well. There’s no gimmick to get tired of. He’s as funny the 10th time you see him as he was the first.
Jay Leno, who is a kindred spirit comedically as well as one of Seinfeld’s closest friends, sympathizes. “By being a normal person who is a funny guy, Jerry has to do 20 appearances to only one the guy who is outrageous and strange has to do. With Jerry, you say, ‘Oh, I saw a guy last night. He was very funny, but I can’t remember who he was.’ After a while, you get a reputation for being reasonably consistent and reasonably funny. That’s how my career worked, and I think our careers have paralleled almost exactly, even though I am five or six years older. He is at the same point I was five or six years ago. He’s getting some heat and people know who he is.”
Seinfeld jokingly refers to his climb as “seepage, kind of slow seepage” and says he understands the problem. “I don’t have big openings, you know. Everything in my act is of a similar quality. I don’t have really big finishes. It’s just—kind of like me, I guess. My life didn’t have a big opening and I doubt I’ll have a big finish. I’ll probably die very calmly, look at my watch, look at the doctor and say, ‘I think that will about do it.’”
Seinfeld, like Leno, has come of age during a time when life is tough for traditional observational comics. Fads change, and today the important thing for young comedians is to do something new (like Wright) or outrageous (like Andrew Dice Clay). Doing what comics have always done—taking the day-to-day life most of us lead, trying to chase a hair off the shower wall—and reinterpreting it as humor, well, that’s no way for a stand-up to stand out. Leno is one of the few to make the leap from hokum to hip.
Even Seinfeld sees a connection between his recent career surge and Leno’s success. “Jay has established himself now, so people started looking around again.”
“You mean there was a vacancy in the observational-comic slot?” I ask.
“Yeah, in the level that Jay just vacated. So people started noticing me. But I had been there all along.”
He eats a little of his pasta salad and heads for the Improv stage, where he’ll do a 15-minute set. His good friend comedian Jimmy Brogan stands by with a watch to time the first several jokes. They’re the new material he’ll use the following night, when he makes his 23rd appearance on The Tonight Show.
• • •
Fresh out of the shower, dressed only in his suit pants and socks, Seinfeld is padding about his West Hollywood condo, getting ready for The Tonight Show. It’s a sparsely furnished, ultramodern look—what little furniture he owns is either black or gray—and everything is impeccably neat. Of course, when you travel 300 days a year, you don’t need too many chairs, but the neatness is almost off-putting. Seinfeld drives his girlfriend crazy by refolding her towel the right way after she takes a shower. “If someone walks into my house, even if she’s very smart and very aware, there’s nothing she can move—even if she moves it back to where she thought it was—that I won’t notice.” Leno describes his home as a “hospital room for stereos,” and another friend, comic Jeff Cesario, warned Seinfeld, “One of these days, you’re going to be living with a woman, things will be going great, you’ll be getting ready to get married and then, boom, she’ll bring home a throw pillow and it will be over.”
“I like that kind of Zen Buddhist atmosphere, very physically clean, mentally clean,” says Seinfeld. “I’m very organized.” Despite his travel schedule—three or four cities a week—he’s careful about discipline. He writes daily (always with a Bic pen and a legal-sized pad), practices yoga, has meditated for 18 years and eats a rigorous diet of healthful food—an amazing achievement, given the fact that comedy-club cuisine generally runs the gamut from hamburgers all the way to cheeseburgers. He spends half of his life sitting at bars, drinking mineral water. “Comedians either abstain from drugs and alcohol or are the worst substance abusers of all time,” explains Leno. “There’s no in-between.”
Seinfeld pulls something light but high-protein out of his refrigerator, eats while standing up, then finishes dressing. He drives a few blocks to pick up Brogan, who provides emotional support for his Tonight Show appearances. (Seinfeld does the same for Brogan; in fact, a few years back, he was on the road when Brogan was booked on short notice for his first appearance on the show. Seinfeld heard about it from a friend and flew in for the one night.)
Brogan isn’t the only one trying to shore up Seinfeld. On the surface, he seems hardly nervous at all, but around him, his publicist, his manager and the Tonight Show staff are tense. Everyone is worried about the review and feels the necessity to say something about it. Peter Lasally, the show’s producer, goes out of his way to reassure him. George Shapiro, Seinfeld’s manager, tells him how upset Carl Reiner, another client, was about the review. Leno calls to wish him well, just in case. Lawrence Christon may be miles away physically, but he’s a powerful presence backstage in beautiful downtown Burbank.
Preoccupied by the talk about the review, Seinfeld gets off to a slow start, and he knows it. “You’re like a fighter pilot out there,” he says. “You’re checking the dials and seeing if you can find the mistake.” He makes a midflight correction, ends up with a killer routine, including one joke that The Tonight Show uses in its promos: “Nothing in life is fun for the whole family. There are no massage parlors with ice cream and free jewelry.”
That night, after dinner with his manager, he returns home and finds a message from Christon on his machine. “He was as gracious and charming a guy as you could find,” says Seinfeld. “He was sorry she’d gotten the wrong impression about the billing and said he was going to print a retraction.”
No retraction ever appears. Ten days later, the Times publishes a letter from the man in charge of the show at Irvine, who takes the blame for the cheesy advertisement, but it also runs a letter praising Christon for exposing “the most overrated comedian in America.”
Seinfeld assures me he doesn’t care. Later, his publicist tells me that Seinfeld has fired him. “He was unhappy about the Christon deal,” said the flack. “He felt I should have been more involved.”
• • •
“There was a lot of copy coming through that week and I think the editor had a cold and they just didn’t deal with it,” explains Christon, who was, indeed, my fellow lonely comrade at the Irvine concert. “It wouldn’t have been a retraction of the review, of course, just a retraction of the error. I had seen Seinfeld a number of times, so I don’t think my knowing about the billing would have changed the text much, but it did give me a sharper angle of attack.”
In the comedy business, everyone takes getting laughs seriously, but none is more earnest than Christon. He’s 50 years old and spent years as a theater critic before he turned his attention to comedy. Unlike many people who write about humor, he never tries to compete by getting laughs, and while the Times occasionally runs letters from readers who complain that they need a thesaurus to understand him, Christon, by virtue of his tenure, the power of his paper and his intelligence, has clout.
“You always criticize in the name of something,” he says. “You’re not just saying you like it or dislike it. That’s not criticism. That’s opinion. To me, the great comedian gets the joke and the joke leads to something deeper.” He likes Richard Pryor, Robin Williams and Lily Tomlin. He loves Jay Leno because Leno exposes the hypocrisy in the culture around us. Christon doesn’t dislike Seinfeld. “He’s a very likable fellow,” he says. “He’s clear, he has great imagery, he is funny, but after a few minutes, you want more. It’s like eating cotton candy. There’s nothing very nutritious.”
I enjoy all these trappings—the airports, the smoke in my face, the humiliating dressing rooms. I like it.
As the days drift by, the review fades into memory. The NBC negotiations were unharmed, and Seinfeld now has a shot at doing a show for the network. He’ll create it, he’ll write it and he’ll star in it, playing the one character he knows he can play—himself. “I’m no big-deal actor,” he admits. And the subject, of course, couldn’t be nearer nor dearer to his heart. “Hopefully, it’s not a typical sitcom,” he says of The Seinfeld Chronicles. “It’s kind of a look into the day-to-day life of a comedian and how he translates life into comedy.” The show features Seinfeld being a civilian, with wacky neighbors and weird encounters, then cuts to him as a comic, turning what we’ve all seen into a stand-up routine in front of a live audience. “The only reason I would consider committing to it is that I’d be doing stand-up on the show.”
For reasons that not even Seinfeld fully understands, he’s wedded to the idea of doing live, stand-up comedy. “It’s a life mission for me,” he says. “I don’t know what the hell I’m trying to accomplish, but I can’t stop.” There are a few logical reasons, of course. Money is one. Control is another. Most of show business is a collaborative art. Only the stand-up gets to be his own writer, producer, director and star. And Seinfeld loves being in control. That’s why he refolds towels. That’s why he leaves his $50,000 Porsche Carrera at the airport when he travels rather than take a cab or ask a friend for a ride. “I hate depending on anyone,” he says. He lives what for the average person would be a grueling existence. He logs nearly 300,000 frequent-flier miles in an average year of travel (his mom cashed in some of those miles recently and took a free trip to Europe.) He spends 300 nights a year in hotel rooms, by himself, away from his friends, away from his girlfriends, away from any of the normal structure that makes up a life.
Shapiro, his manager, keeps telling him he can stay home for a while. “I said, ‘If your suitcases get too heavy, just let me know.’ So far, they’ve never gotten heavy for him.”
“Well, let’s envision the situation,” says Seinfeld. “I’m sitting in my apartment. My agent calls. He says there’s someone who would like to pay me a tremendous amount of money to come and talk to these people. Can I do it? I can’t imagine myself saying, ‘No, there’s no possible way I can go and talk to these people.’”
“But what about less hardy souls, people who might say, ‘Listen, I’ve already taken three planes this week, I need a break’?” I ask.
“What am I doing on these flights? I’m reading a magazine. I’m saying, ‘Yes, I think I will have lemon with that club soda.’ Does this really wear people down? You refuse to accept the fact that I enjoy all these trappings—the airports, the smoke in my face, the humiliating dressing rooms. I like it. It means I’m a comic. People don’t like the idea that comedians are happy. It doesn’t seem fair that you could make a living like that and be happy off stage. If there are laughs on stage, they want tears on the pillow. I’m just a lucky fucker. I like what I do.”
Seinfeld took a vacation once. He and a girlfriend went to Barbados for a week, drinking pineapple juice with a little umbrella in it. He hated it. “I guess it’s great if you have a job you can’t stand and you live in a place you don’t like. For me, that kind of relaxation is a hairs-breadth away from stultifying boredom.
“I’ll tell you something. I’d rather say something that people would quote as a great line that I said, that I thought of, than win an Oscar. Andy Warhol’s line, about everyone’s becoming famous for 15 minutes, is really just a joke, but it was such a great line it became part of the culture. I was in a car going from Philadelphia to New York, at one o’clock in the morning, listening to the radio. It was the postgame show for the Dodgers game when Kirk Gibson hit that homer. And the guy quoted me as he described what a great day in sports it had been. He said, ‘It’s like Jerry Seinfeld says, How are we ever going to impress our kids? What stories will we have? How can the world change that much again that we can blow kids away with stories like the ones our parents told us, about the war and the Depression, when milk was a nickel and cars were a quarter? What will we say? When I was a boy, dogs didn’t have the vote. They had no say in the world at all. In fact, we kept them on leashes.’ When I heard that on the radio, that was the biggest boost I’d ever had. That, to me, is the coolest thing you could do on this planet.”
• • •
Seinfeld sits quietly at the bar at Laffs, a comedy club in Tucson. In 10 minutes, he’ll do the first of his two shows, but right now, Roseanne Barr is being interviewed on the TV set hanging overhead. A camera is panning across her cluttered living room, with its antiques and bric-a-brac. “You wouldn’t get a shot like that in my house,” says Seinfeld with a laugh. Barr is reciting the litany of her bizarre childhood woes—being Jewish in Utah, getting hit by a car, ending up in the loony bin, being baptized as a Mormon—it’s enough to fill a book.
As long as I’m doing my stand-up, the audience will keep me in my place. It keeps me from being a show-business asshole.
Seinfeld’s childhood is enough to fill a paragraph. His was a Long Island life, a quiet suburban existence with happy parents and happy children. The only unusual aspect of it was the fact that both parents had been raised without parents of their own, which gave them an independence they passed on to their two kids. Early on, Seinfeld became addicted to comics on TV—and to TV in general, for that matter. “Jerry was chained to the television,” complains his mother, Betty. “At one point, I had to get rid of it. I couldn’t stand it.” It didn’t work. He simply went next door to the neighbors’ to get his fix. Looking back, one realizes that it wasn’t wasted time. He talks in TV metaphors, makes jokes about both old and new TV shows and commercials and still harbors a desire to grow up to be Bud on Flipper.
“I swear to God, I’ve learned most of what I know about life from TV,” he says as the club manager taps him on the shoulder. It’s time for Seinfeld to go from watching a comedian at work to being one.
His first show goes well. He has fans in Tucson—many from nearby University of Arizona—and they’re an enthusiastic group. In fact, too many of them want to linger and chat, so Seinfeld has to take refuge in a dark, windowless cube that serves as an office. Dinner is brought to him while the staff readies the club for the next show. Seinfeld is perfectly at home eating a salad at a desk in semi-darkness while employees dash in and out, sticking cash into one of the desk drawers. Very little seems to bother him, except, perhaps, the review in the Times.
“You know,” he says, “there are things in that review that I aspire to. Christon talked about revealing deeper truths and having social impact, and, yeah, I would love to say great things. Who wouldn’t? I mean, these are my thoughts out there. So if they’re shallow, I’m shallow. But I don’t think they’re shallow. They may be light, but I don’t think that they’re shallow. I find that life is interesting on every level. I read a thing that Sam Kinison said the other day, about how it’s tough to live his life so that he has something to talk about. The way I live, it’s not a raw life. I have ambitions and disappointments, but I don’t want to live a ragged, desperate existence just so I can talk about that. I don’t want to necessarily make heavier observations, just better ones. I just want to be good.”
It has been a long day, beginning with a seven-A.M. trip to a local radio station to plug the club. It didn’t do Seinfeld any good—his two shows were already sold out—but it helps give the smaller clubs visibility when the big names do promotion. He was on the air for a quick five minutes. When the disc jockey said, “Thanks for coming in,” Seinfeld responded with an enthusiastic, if slightly sarcastic, “It was worth it.” Then it was back to the hotel room to write. Toward noon, he went for a walk—“In the tall grass along the highway,” he said—and ended up in a Jack in the Box, where he ordered a Chicken Supreme. Now he’s a prisoner in a makeshift office as the second-show crowd files in and orders its drinks.
That’s a comic’s life. One week, it’s designer suits and The Tonight Show. The next, it’s walking all alone in the tall grass in search of fast food.
“I really feel the key to having a successful career in comedy is never taking the bait of stardom per se. If you think you’re a star, you’re not a comedian anymore, because a comedian is one of us. Anyway, being a stand-up is a grimy gig. A big star—well, short of an Eddie Murphy—you get up there and the audience will give you a free ride for five, maybe 10 minutes. That’s it. If you’re not funny that night, I don’t care how famous you are. It doesn’t matter. As long as I’m doing my stand-up, the audience will keep me in my place. It keeps me from being a show-business asshole. Stardom can exist on its own, but laughs do not.
“Now that my career is moving up, I’m enjoying the perks, the hotel with the little extra sitting room, flying first class. But I still don’t look like I belong in first class. People always eye me suspiciously. That’s fine. I like that.”
There’s a knock on the door for the second show. “Well, back to the office,” he says, putting on his jacket.
The next morning, the booker from the club shows up to give Seinfeld a ride to the airport. At the airport snack shop, Seinfeld shovels in two small boxes of Rice Krispies and one of shredded wheat and, like a seasoned traveler, is the last to board the Delta jet headed for L.A. He takes his place in the first-class section—always a window in first class, an aisle in coach—looking out the window, reading USA Today, playing with his Sharp Wizard, as the flight attendant works her way down the aisle, offering champagne and orange juice and checking her manifest.
She gives me a drink and, true to his prediction, she’s clearly puzzled by Seinfeld’s presence. “Do you belong in coach?” she asks, glancing down her list. “I don’t seem to have your name here.”
These are the moments that comedians live for, of course, when the joke is so obvious that nothing more need be said. While Seinfeld produces his ticket to mollify the flight attendant, he turns to me with a gigantic grin. He is, after all, one happy stand-up comic.
From the August 1990 PLAYBOY.