Jerry Seinfeld digs into 45 years of his jokes for new book
LOS ANGELES ( AP) — Forget the high- performance sports cars, the luxury Rolls-Royces and all those other classic automobiles in which Jerry Seinfeld ushers his fellow comics to the diner on television’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”
The most valuable things Seinfeld owns are the thousands of pieces of paper — yellow, scribbled over, sometimes crumpled — that for years he’s been cramming into those brown accordion folders that were once a staple of storage until something better came along called the laptop computer.
They contain the jokes Seinfeld has been writing and telling since that first day he walked into a New York nightclub as a 21- year- old wannabe comic who accepted free hamburgers in lieu of a paycheck. They continue right up to the present-day musings of a 66-year-old man wondering how the world keeps getting more crowded when he doesn’t see any more cemeteries being built.
“Flights, restaurants, theater shows sell out all the time. Cemetery? Anyone croaks, send them in. We just had an opening. What happened? Somebody came back to life and walked out. You’re very lucky.”
He’s compiled them all in a new book, “Is This Anything?,” the title taken from the question every comic asks every other comic when he or she is about to try out new material.
Assembled in chronological order, they provide not just a trove of laugh-outloud one-liners but also a timeline, beginning with a kid commuting from his parents’ home on Long Island to New York City to try to make strangers laugh. It continues through a career during which Seinfeld became arguably the greatest stand-up comic of his era and the pivotal figure of the funniest TV sitcom of its time.
Still, why did he save every joke of his career? Or at least every one that got a laugh?
“A lot of people ask me that question and I always say I don’t know why I saved anything else,” he replies with a chuckle in a phone interview. Then he adds more seriously, “This is the most valuable thing I have.”
Even quarantined from the coronavirus, Seinfeld says he finds no shortage of new material.