Half an hour with Jerry Seinfeld. How wonderfully apt. Who else has been able
to pack so much, and so consistently, into a 30-minute time slot (23, if you
will, minus the ads)? Not for nothing was Seinfeld’s eponymous sitcom
anointed, officially, The Most Successful Sitcom in Television History.
Though today’s encounter is also turning slightly surreal. Put it down to
the indivisibility of Seinfeld the man from Seinfeld the character, always a
problem when the screen persona you have peddled all those years is an
extension of your own.
Seinfeld is in Amsterdam to promote his new film, the animated feature Bee
Movie. In his hotel suite, however, all is not well, for Seinfeld – like his
alter ego, famously pernickety (and not short on narcissism) – is unhappy
with the mineral water at his disposal. Just as TV Jerry was mollycoddled by
an overly fussy manager, so Real Jerry is cosseted by his venerable minder,
George Shapiro, who has scuttled off in search of alternative hydration.
“I hate Evian,” goes Seinfeld, in that light New York whine. “It’s got the
highest particles of mud in it of any other water.” He looks good at 53, if
more jowly, and sporting a pair of wire-framed specs. Mercifully, TV Jerry’s
high-waisted jeans and pristine sneakers have been binned for the sharpest
of suits. Still, there’s an overwhelming sense of the familiar. If Kramer
were to come swinging, “Giddy up”, through the door, or Elaine turned up to
mooch some Snapple, or George burst out of the loo, trousers down, jabbering
about Vandalay Industries, it would seem entirely reasonable.
We are in Old Amsterdam, rather than the New one of Seinfeld’s (LA-faked)
milieu, so I remind him of a typically inane coffee-shop conversation
between Jerry and George, in which the latter gets in a lather over the
difference between “Holland”, “the Netherlands” and “the Dutch”. “I remember
we decided to put those moustaches on,” Seinfeld chortles. “Over the summer,
Jerry and George had decided to grow moustaches.” He sips the substitute
water – Spa, Belgian. (Me, I’m still quaffing the French muck.) “If you try
any other water,” he insists, “you’ll tell the difference right away.”
I must open the vault here and declare that I am a huge fan of Seinfeld.
Clearly, I am not alone. In the USA, nine years ago, 75m viewers tuned in to
the final episode of his show, which rivalled M*A*S*H’s as the biggest adieu
in television. Strangely, in the UK, due to the vagaries of BBC2 programming
in the 1990s, Seinfeld’s profile is lower than elsewhere, the sitcom never
afforded the platform Channel 4 later gave to Friends and Frasier. But
that’s all right, as we can keep it cultish – a Festivus, as you might say,
for the rest of us (a season-nine motif).
Seinfeld’s cultural influence in America has been profound. In 2004, he
donated the fabled Puffy Shirt, from season five, to the Smithsonian.
Everywhere he goes, people still feel compelled to quote his zingers back to
him. “But I don’t understand when they think I’m gonna laugh,” he says. “I
was there. It’s like if you go into the office and tell someone a joke. What
if, the next day, they came in and toldyouthat joke? You would go, ‘I just
told you that!’”
In 1998, preferring not to see his show waddle flaccidly into the sitcom
sunset, he quit, moved back to New York and – professing a yearning for a
connection to an audience – returned to his first love, stand-up. “What
happens when you’re a success in show business is they start building
scaffolding underneath you, and keep raising it up,” he explains. “The next
thing you know, you’re sitting on top of this structure and you don’t know
what the hell is going on any more, because people are bringing you the
water you like.”
Alongside an HBO special and more salubrious gigs, Seinfeld has spent much
time getting down and dirty in comedy clubs, cropping up, unannounced, on
the beer-sticky boards of obscure Laugh Factories and Ha-Ha Holes, leaving
incredulous Tuesday-night audiences in Stink, New Jersey, or wherever, to
ponder whether it’s the real deal regaling them with tales about airline
peanuts, or just some arch impersonator (travails detailed in his 2002
documentary, Comedian). Hollywood, meanwhile, had been wooing him like
crazy, but he never felt films would offer much. “I’d done the actors with
the scripts and the casting, and ‘You stand over here’; ‘Am I in focus?’. So
it’s in a movie theatre? Big deal!” But not even Seinfeld could resist the
persuasion of Steven Spielberg.
Four years ago, over dinner (Seinfeld being both an Alist diner and a serial
name-dropper), when he joshed that someone should make a cartoon about bees
and call it Bee Movie, the wheels of Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio began
trundling. “He just got very excited about this, and would not relent until
I agreed to make the movie,” Seinfeld says. “But there was no movie. I had
to make the whole thing up.”
The challenge, he adds, came in the format. “Creating comedy out of
three-dimensional computer-generated characters, that’s a whole new sport
for me.” He has proved master of his new domain. The result, co-scripted by
him, and with a character, Barry B Benson, modelled on him, recently topped
the US box office.
Opening here next week, it’s the tale of an errant drone who, disillusioned
with hive life (working for the Honex corporation), buzzes off to the
outside and gets the interspecies hots for a florist, voiced by Renée
Zellweger. Superficially, it bears resemblance to a previous DreamWorks
offering, Antz, starring a similarly disaffected Woody Allen.
“Yes, but what is an ant?” Seinfeld contests. “They’re annoying, you just
spray ’em. Bees and flowers and honey, it’s a whole other level.” Indeed,
Barry’s mission becomes one of ending human exploitation of his kind’s most
famous produce.
There are big-name cameos – Ray Liotta, Sting, Chris Rock, Oprah Winfrey.
“Well, that’s one of the fun things about being me – you can call anybody
and they’ll consider it,” Seinfeld says rather nonchalantly. The resultant
package has taken $93m in its first three weeks in the USA. Throw in his
share from that, and the rakings from the recent Seinfeld DVD box sets, and
it’s still loose change to a man who, according to Forbes, last year
trousered $60m from his show’s syndication, making him one of the richest
entertainers on the planet.
These days, married with kids, Seinfeld splits his time between his Long
Island spread (bought from Billy Joel for $40m) and an apartment on Central
Park West, for which he has been constructing a garage so he can relocate
his fleet of vintage Porsches. Never in his wildest dreams did he think it
would end up like this.
“Never, never, ever, ever,” he assures me. By the mid-1980s, the Brooklyn-born
comic had seemingly reached his potential as a likeable stand-up – a genial
variant of the new breed of “observational” funnymen – who had been granted
a guest spot by the king of late-night talk, Johnny Carson. Legend has it
that he was grocery shopping with his pal Larry David (whose Curb Your
Enthusiasm has since achieved its own glory), wondering why sitcoms never
reflected the kinds of trivial conversations they themselves had. Their 1989
antidote, a pilot called The Seinfeld Chronicles, had Jerry playing himself
as a jobbing stand-up. “That was a character I knew better than any other.
If I were to have created a character and given him a job, that would
actually have been more risky.” David chose to employ his own proxy in the
series, in the shape of Jason Alexander’s dyspeptic George Costanza,
throwing in Michael Richards’s manic Kramer, based on a former flatmate, for
the hell of it.
Dismissed by one NBC high-up as “too Jewish”, and by others as too clever by
half, the show required tweaking, and Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) was
added, initially as a love interest. It was but a short step to nine
seasons, record ratings and absolutely no hugs whatsoever. “I mean, Larry
and I, we had never done anything like this. We’d never had a show. We had
to figure it out.”
The self-styled “show about nothing” tag is overblown (what the hell was
Cheers?), but they discovered what legions of executives hadn’t: that
self-absorption, lovelessness and misanthropy were universal themes,
celebrated even in the darkest recesses of middle America. “I thought maybe
we’d find a small kind of intellectual group that is kind of interested in
this wordplay and subtle kind of humour,” Seinfeld says. “What happened is
that the cast were so strong comedically, they carried what may have been
more difficult material to a wider audience.”
Sadly, like many winning teams, it proved greater than its constituent parts.
The other three principals have since flopped in solo projects (until
Louis-Dreyfus undid the Seinfeld curse with her mainstream television hit
The New Adventures of Old Christine). “Nobody mentions me,” Seinfeld laughs.
“I haven’t suffered.” But Richards’s career might be over, following his
weird racist outburst on stage a year ago, after which Seinfeld acted as a
peace-broker, hauling him onto The Late Show with David Letterman to make a
public apology.
“Obviously, it’s a tough thing to deal with,” Seinfeld muses. “But I think
he’s gotta do something else to fully pass through this. A lot of black
comedians found it funny. I was talking to Chris Rock the other day, who was
telling me Michael Richards was the greatest gift to black comedians,
because he gave them so much material.” (A sign of the enigma that is Real
Jerry: a one-time Bush campaign contributor whose pals are black America’s
top social satirists.)
Don’t harbour any hopes that the Fab Four will reunite, as is occasionally
rumoured. “I haven’t heard any numbers,” Seinfeld quips.
“But that would be pretty sad, wouldn’t it?” In his youth, he says, he’d
always hoped the Beatles would reform. “I really understand now why they
didn’t. When you’re lucky enough to have created some magic, you don’t want
to disturb it, because you didn’t even know why it happened. I’ve met Paul
McCartney a few times, and we’ve talked about it. You realise you’re a
passenger in this vehicle as much as everyone else is.”
Later, Seinfeld goes on stage at the Expo to talk up Bee Movie to besuited
distributors, an audience absolutely thrilled to have a real live king of
comedy in its midst. “Hello. My first time in Holland . . . the Netherlands
. . . Amsterdam . . . the Dutch,” he begins. “What’s the deal with all the
bicycles?” In your head, you can hear that corny, synthesized slap bass, and
TV Jerry’s stand-up apprentice, Kenny Bania. “That’s gold, Jerry,” he’s
going. “Gold!”
Bee Movie opens on December 14
