‘I feel like a blacksmith up here sometimes,” says Jerry Seinfeld in a routine addressing 21st-century communication. Talking has been superseded; it’s an outmoded thing to do. That may be true when it comes to phones – or true enough to make a joke out of – but there’s nothing unfashionable about talking a la Seinfeld, whose brand of observational comedy spawned a thousand imitators and remains standup’s dominant mode. Tonight, we see it executed with perfect mastery by a man whose performing powers seem undiminished at a hard-to-credit 65.
Laughs flow freely throughout his 70 minutes on stage. Insights into the real Jerry, or new perspectives on the world – well, there are fewer of those, in a set whose proficiency feels a little facile, just a teensy bit soulless. Two-thirds in, he steps away from the gags to promise us a change of tack, a glimpse of where his life is in 2019. But what follows is more of the same common-touch comedy, in this case about marriage (he’s at 19 years and counting) and kids. Several of the “men do this, women do that” gags are retrieved from his back catalogue. His take on family life you could call timeless – or lacking in novelty.
But, technically, the jokes are so neat – and the delivery, exemplary. This man can do comic timing like Paul McCartney does melody. The opening sequence is a belter, as Seinfeld anatomises the night-out experience. Why are we here? Why is he? This is a “bogus, hyped-up, not necessary special event” designed to pass the time and make us feel our lives are great. But then – next gag – “‘sucks’ and ‘great’ are pretty close”, says Jerry, and isn’t everything a bit rubbish anyway?
It’s a deft start, narrowing the gap between megastar and audience, then stretching it again as comedy requires. But there’s little in tonight’s show to suggest the rarefied life multimillionaire Seinfeld must lead. His modern-life-is-funny gags are hard-wired to be relatable, from the routine about all-you-can-eat buffets to the number addressing the cult of “hydration”. Each is drolly brought to life as our host role plays gluttonous overeaters or energy-drink junkies exhaustedly craving a fix.
Perhaps because what Seinfeld is saying is often trivial, attention strays to how he’s saying it – with a sense of rhythm and cadence so finely tuned it could be applied to almost anything and still make you laugh. You might doubt there’s more humour to be wrung from that hoary standup subject, mobile phones. But Jerry manages it, with a routine looking at the anthropology of Uber, and wondering (as he did about dog ownership many moons ago) whether nowadays the human owns the phone, or vice versa.
As per his wonderfully withering gag about the vapid phrase “it is what it is”, the material zeroes in on how ridiculous we all are. But it also advertises senior citizen Seinfeld’s increasing detachment from the whole rigmarole. In the only section he couldn’t have delivered any earlier in his career, he celebrates life as a sexagenarian, when you can say no to everything with impunity, and anticipates his next decade, when – why bother speaking? – a dismissive wave should suffice.
It’s a lovely joke, but an unlikely scenario. Because nothing tonight suggests that, even at 65, Seinfeld’s appetite for talking – far less his aptitude – is remotely on the wane.
