Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
When Jerry Seinfeld recorded his 1998 HBO special, I’m Telling You For The Last Time, he meant it literally, vowing to retire all of his old jokes and put Seinfeld behind him.
Seinfeld would start fresh. A conceit that provided the premise for the fascinating 2002 documentary Comedian, following Seinfeld (and also a younger stand-up, Orny Adams) as he built a new hour of comedy material from scratch.
But you can go home again, literally and metaphorically, especially if you’re the richest comedian in the world, and so Jerry Before Seinfeld finds the comedian renovating The Comic Strip on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to look like it did when Seinfeld first auditioned there in 1976. For his first entry into Netflix’s Comedian Hall of Fame Class of 2017 specials edition, Seinfeld not only shows us his audition application and headshot – both of which still hang on the club’s hall amid hundreds of other headshots – but also revisits his childhood and the jokes that eventually earned him his big break five years later, with his first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1981.
Seinfeld doesn’t have a new hour of material for us now. What he does have, and what he can bring to the table that makes his special truly special, is the notion that his millions of fans might learn something intimate about him. For all of the jokes, and all of the episodes of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which Seinfeld brings with him from Crackle to Netflix as part of this deal, we’ve never really known too much about the man behind the material. The jokes have remained surface-level. Despite expanding and perfecting David Brenner’s “Did you ever notice?” into his own “What’s the deal with?”, he’s never really been interested in sharing with us what the deal is with him, personally.
Perhaps working with Colin Quinn, directing Quinn in specials such as HBO’s Long Story Short and Netflix’s The New York Story, has rubbed off on Seinfeld.
So he’ll share with us the very first joke of his that worked in the comedy clubs, and later more of his early material, segueing to stories from his childhood or even footage from home movies taken on Long Island in the 1960s and 1970s. He’ll describe how different childhood and parenting was in the 1960s, and tackle the intricacies of life, and of Life, the cereal. He’ll note in passing that his suburban Long Island experience could never compare to Richard Pryor’s, without actually naming Pryor, and yet also reveal that both of Seinfeld’s parents were orphans. He drops that almost trivially, just to get to a punchline mocking his notion of luxury items.
Because Seinfeld doesn’t really dig deep here. Aside from an observation that as a professional comedian – “I could talk to all of you, but I can’t talk to any of you.” – he’s more interested in taking us all on a nostalgic ride. His parents never took him to Disneyland, but then again, we don’t have to ride a rollercoaster through the South Bronx, either. Instead, we hear him deliver material in a harried manner that reminds us of his repartee with George, Elaine or Kramer.
We hear him tell jokes about clothing, visiting his parents in Florida, and crooks that he hasn’t told in decades. Here’s one such bit, as he told David Letterman back in the 1980s:
Before he could get on NBC, though, Seinfeld needed to work a day job sledgehammering, and relied on free food from The Comic Strip and other clubs for sustenance. So his idea of a perfect relationship meant meeting women in the comedy club’s bar, where they could see him perform the one skill he had that seemed cool.
And he could remember feeling both good and bad about the first time he earned enough money to afford a maid for his tiny New York City apartment.
There’s an amazing visual where Seinfeld stops to show us his written comedy material. All of it. Laid out in yellow legal pad sheets along a Greenwich Village street, not blowing anywhere as Seinfeld sits surrounded by it. The only validation he cared about, then or now, was laughter. “I didn’t really care whether they liked me or not,” he says.
That might hold as true now as it did then.
But repackaged with a new narrative, those same jokes can hold up some 40 years later. Inside The Comic Strip, Jerry Seinfeld can be cool once more.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
