Jerry Seinfeld has had an eclectic career since his enormously popular sitcom went off the air in 1998, and now he’s carving out yet another niche for himself in the stand-up world, announcing at a press conference this morning that he will be performing monthly at New York’s Beacon Theater beginning 7 January.
He’s currently set for a sixth-month residency at the theater, with shows booked for 18 February, 2 March, 14 April, 5 May, and 8 June, and possibly more. “We’ll see how it goes, and if everybody’s happy, maybe we’ll do some more,” he said, according to the New York Times.
The shows will be titled Jerry Seinfeld: The Homestand. A press release revealed no details about the content of the shows, or whether he would be performing the same material each month. The Madison Square Garden Company, which owns the Beacon, has a similar arrangement with the singer Billy Joel, who performs monthly at Madison Square Garden.
The 2,800-seat Beacon is a favorite for big name comedians who prefer the intimacy and ambience of theaters to cavernous arenas. Ticket prices for Seinfeld’s shows will range from $79 to $175, and the first shows go on sale next Tuesday.
Despite his television success, Seinfeld has continued to doing stand-up and touring around the country; in the next few months, he has shows booked in New Jersey, California, Texas, Illinois and Ontario. But he’s also struck out into other fields, hosting the web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and directing two of his fellow comedian Colin Quinn’s one-man shows. (He also routinely tops Forbes’s list of the world’s highest paid comedians.)
He remains one of the most lauded comedians in the world, and his minutiae-dissecting brand of observational comedy influenced a generation of stand-ups. For comics and comedy fans, his 2002 documentary Comedian is an iconic film, following him as he re-entered the New York comedy scene and capturing the enduring allure of stand-up, even for a sitcom star.
He continues to perform surprise sets around the city at clubs like the Comedy Cellar, and he seems to enjoy experimenting with his shows in New York. In 2012, he played his first full-length shows in the city in nearly 15 years, performing one show in each of New York City’s five boroughs over the course of five weeks.
While it’s not uncommon for comedians, especially comics visiting from other countries, to book a month-long residency at a small theater in New York, a monthly show like this is an unusual set-up for stand-up. It works for musicians like Joel, whose fans will return again and again to hear the same songs, but even the most dedicated Seinfeld admirer is unlikely to want the same hour of stand-up every month.
And yet it takes months and years to turn over new material until it’s polished, which means that there is likely to be some overlap between these shows. Or perhaps he’ll use this residency for “work in progress” style-shows, something most comedians reserve for smaller, less-expensive performances. But for Seinfeld, this is as small as it gets.
