The artifice of stand-up

An old piece of mine in The Daily Texan:

A show about nothing

Some friends and I were waiting to make a left turn exiting Robert Dedman Avenue on Friday night after Jerry Seinfeld’s gig at Bass Concert Hall, when four young men, dressed in coordinated colors like the members of a disciplined ballet troupe, came jogging in our direction. There was quite a distance between us but we stopped just to be sure. Yet, as they got around our car, one of them whacked the hood twice in loud protest of what was essentially a considerate act.

You know what's especially irritating about that kind of behavior? It's the self-righteousness: “I’m out running at night trying to keep myself fit, while you and your debauched friends are conspiring to stop us from running in a straight line.”

That’s the effect Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up routine has on your mind; suddenly you see everything through the lens of comedy – partly from your own outraged sense of self-righteousness and partly to convince yourself that you’re just as observant as Mr. Seinfeld.

On Friday, Mr. Seinfeld, 54, co-creator of Seinfeld – a sitcom purportedly about nothing – was nothing if not reliably observant. He opened with a self-reflexive piece on how everyone was looking to go out on a Friday evening, how going out meant a lot of planning, and how honored he was that “going out” meant being “in here”.

In 90 minutes, Mr. Seinfeld took shots at the news media (none of which came cheap); he went on to mock both Apple i-phone and Blackberry users. He tossed out casual punch-lines – “There really is not that much of a difference between ‘life sucks’ and ‘great’. You’re licking at an ice-cream and it drops accidentally; you’re thinking, man this sucks, but what do you say? Great.” He did a bunch of funny faces, and from time to time the distinctive high-pitched yelp crept into his voice.

You wouldn’t know from watching his television show that Mr. Seinfeld is good with physical comedy. He used the stage well, ambling from side to side, and at one point during his performance, even pretended to drop dead.

Stand-up gigs are surreal events, and a celebrity performance renders it even more so. There is a subtle complicity between the crowd and the comic. You go there expecting to unwind, so unless the comedian is graceless you’d likely indulge jokes that might not sound as funny in the outside world.

It was a little incongruous to see so many well-dressed people at what was after all, a comedy show; most of us are used to grungy comedy clubs, but clearly this was the big league. Frank Sinatra – the presiding deity of upper-middlebrow acts – warbled in the background as the audience waited for the opening act to get on stage.

That part was filled in by comic hustler Mark Schiff, an old friend of Mr. Seinfeld, and whose routine was part-classic New York shtick and part-Morey Amsterdam (from the Dick Van Dyke show).

Whereas Mr. Schiff’s jokes occasionally seemed canned, Mr. Seinfeld had no such trouble. He was able to effortlessly create the illusion of spontaneity, which is so crucial to building a conversational rapport with the audience.

The show ended not with a goodbye, but a hello: an anecdote about meeting Wayne Knight, the actor who plays Newman on Seinfeld. “Hello… Newman,” Mr. Seinfeld said with one eyebrow raised, in reference to a recurring joke from the sitcom.