Adroit as ever

A joke settled down, moved to the suburbs and subscribed to Architectural Digest — it became a dad joke, geddit? And if you’ve heard a good dad joke, you’ll know it combines popular wisdom with corniness and just a whiff of existential despair, the kind only parenthood can impart. Jerry Seinfeld the TV character was, for most of Seinfeld ’s memorable run, an unattached nihilist smarty-pants. Jerry Seinfeld in real life is now father to three teenaged children and elder statesman to an entire generation of stand-up comics. At some point, the dad jokes had to flow thick and fast. Netflix’s comedy special Jerry Before Seinfeld gives Seinfeld a chance to revisit his early material — and offer a new, age-tempered perspective on these jokes. It’s like a ‘greatest hits’ package with DVD extras thrown in, but it feels curiously more than that during its runtime. It’s kind of the same phenomenon as Hassan Minhaj’s account of meeting Jon Stewart for the first time: with every word the older man said, it felt like there was a background score informing Minhaj about the Emmys, the cultural impact, the unmissable aura.

The veteran stand-up comedian returns to Comic Strip Live, the New York club that gave him his first break, back in the late ’70s. This immediately proves to be a masterstroke, for Seinfeld has never really been a sellout-crowd kind of comedian. His jokes involve minutiae, the kind of life details that are, at once, accessible and excruciating. It is the Comic Strip Live environs that give Jerry Before Seinfeld its best moments. As the gravitational centre of the New York stand-up scene in the ’60s and ’70s, this was where the young Seinfeld spent six out of seven evenings (if not all seven, as Seinfeld notes, somewhat sheepishly, about five minutes into the show). It wasn’t a professional decision; it was very much a personal one. A socially awkward young man trying to meet women, it would make sense for Seinfeld to be in the one place in New York where he had any kind of social currency.

Listening to Seinfeld’s jokes about being a cocky young comedian in those days is a genuinely moving experience. At one point, Seinfeld shows us the exact spot where he was sitting when he made a major life decision (readers can probably guess which one). For fans of Seinfeld , all of this is pilgrimage stuff. This sentiment reaches fever pitch when we see Seinfeld sitting in the middle of a street paved with every single page of stand-up comedy he has ever written.

Here’s what this show ain’t: unpredictable, bold or even mildly risk-taking. Seinfeld, it seems, has decided to hold on to the brand that he’s built over the decades. Which is not an original impulse at all, but you still feel somewhat disappointed, even as you laugh your guts out at a joke you saw in Seinfeld season four, episode seven. There was a solid opportunity here to tackle some of the thornier aspects of Seinfeld: the comedian as well as the almost-billionaire celebrity.

Seinfeld has, time and again, complained loudly about what he calls the “PC (politically correct) culture” of America’s college campuses, going so far as to say that he would never perform at an American college campus. Amidst the flurry of ethnicity-centric jokes he cracks in the beginning of Jerry Before Seinfeld , it would have been fascinating to see Seinfeld play both sides of the PC debate, so to speak. I suppose asking Seinfeld to address the Bill Cosby issue on his show would be asking too much (he ended up doing that on Stephen Colbert’s show, as it so happened).

And yet, Jerry Before Seinfeld is a show with ‘bestseller’ written all over it. How could it have gone down any differently, with the world’s most famous living comedian dishing out a thoroughly crowd-pleasing hour of carefully calibrated irony? Because, make no mistake, Seinfeld is still technically as adroit as ever: he is nothing short of a walking stand-up clinic. There are amateurs all over the world hitting ‘pause’ right now, just to internalise that Seinfeld smirk, that impeccable timing, the intuitive knowledge of when curmudgeonly humour begins to encroach upon the limits of audience comfort. That old routine about men magnetically drawn towards other men with tools? It remains as full of vitality now as it was when it ended with a fade to black and a return to George and Jerry bickering at a crappy diner. And why? Well, it’s simple.

A show about nothing can only really age when we, as a species, stop asking “what’s the point”? That isn’t happening anytime soon, and so we have Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, two nihilist comedy titans still going strong, reminding us that none of it matters, not really.

Aditya Mani Jha is a commissioning editor at Penguin Random House

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