Standup guy: `comedian' - Screen

Is it true, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked, that there are no second acts in American life? Few celebrities are better positioned to find out than Jerry Seinfeld, whose first act defined the pop-culture Zeitgeist for a decade and pushed TV star power to new heights, winning him a cool $1 million an episode. Seinfeld pulled that rarest of career feats--going out not as a dimming red giant, but still at supernova brightness. Comedian, a documentary by Christian Charles, investigates the afterlife of a star, tagging along with Seinfeld as he tries to restart his standup act in a series of small comedy clubs like the ones he ruled almost three decades ago. He's back where he began--though now he travels to his gigs in a Porsche and private jet.

If you're hoping to get to know the "real Jerry," you'll be disappointed by Comedian. The film stays out of Seinfeld's personal life, giving only a few glimpses of him with his wife and infant daughter; and even there, Seinfeld seems a lot like TV Jerry (in one backstage shot he holds his baby and makes a lullaby out of the Cracker Jack song), presenting much the same smirky, mildly mischievous facade, albeit with a few swear words thrown in. As an urban Jewish humorist, Seinfeld stands in minimalist opposition to Woody Allen. Non-psychological, unintellectual, and impersonal as well, he's all surface and no interior; part of his appeal has always lain in seeming essentially untroubled.

Not that he isn't worried. Indeed, Comedian catches him in an existential quandary. "What am I doing here?" he jokes at a club in Cincinnati. "I made it--I had my own show! And now I'm back here?" But what are the alternatives? Other mega-comedians, like Steve Martin and Robin Williams, have transformed themselves into movie actors--unimaginable for Seinfeld, the only one of the four stars in his TV show who wasn't acting. Yet it also seems unlikely he could settle for the anonymity of being a writer/producer/director type. So he's trying to be a comedian again; and that means developing new material and taking it to audiences. Can he still do it?

Early on, Seinfeld seems rusty and out of shape onstage--working awkwardly from notes, at one point losing his train of thought entirely, triggering a silence that would be excruciating if he weren't Jerry Seinfeld. But he is Jerry Seinfeld, and when a woman in the audience calls out, "Is this your first gig?" everyone laughs. Audiences adore him so much that even his failure to be funny becomes a joke; he's disaster-proof. Of course, that's a problem for a comedian. Seinfeld's audiences are laughing before he even says anything. "If something is good, it's good," he comments, trying to reassure himself after an impromptu appearance at a comedy club one night. But what if his stuff was only OK, and they laughed anyway?

The film juxtaposes Seinfeld's club tour with that of a brash younger comic, Orny Adams, who's been knocking his head against the door of success for a decade, pursuing fame with a ferocious intensity that makes Seinfeld seem like a guy relaxing on his yacht. In his apartment Adams rummages through chests full of notebooks, reams of jokes filed in cabinets, and shelves of taped performances which he watches over and over again, analyzing his act down to the tiniest gesture. His self-involvement is scary--fretting over every word in a newspaper review, obsessing about getting on the Letterman show. It's as if nothing in the world exists aside from his career. At one point he boasts, without a trace of irony, that he's living on L.A. time. "It's all I think about," he says, looking at his watch. "Who's having lunch out there right now, who's talking about me?"

Adams is a caricature of ambition, and when he meets Seinfeld offstage at a club, Jerry seems appalled. As Adams pours out an agonized litany of doubt, describing his anxiety over being thirty years old and envying friends pulling down big bucks on Wall Street, Jerry stares as if he's from Mars. When Adams finally shuts up, Seinfeld reproaches him for fetishizing fame and money. Any comic should be glad he's doing the thing he loves to do, is Seinfeld's message. True enough, and yet it's clearly the kind of thing an already successful person can afford to say. Comedian shows us middle-aged success complacently condescending to, and also perhaps at some level envying, youthful monomania.

Fortunately, the film offers plenty of relief from the unbearable intensity of comedian angst. It's fun to listen in on Seinfeld hanging out with confreres he admires, talented comics such as Colin Quinn, Robert Klein, Garry Shandling, and Chris Rock. Over drinks or dinner they work out jokes and discuss the ups and downs of the profession. We see Jerry's genuine awe when Chris Rock describes watching Bill Cosby do a two-and-a-half hour show without a break. "Two and a half hours straight?" Seinfeld says, incredulous. "Yeah," Rock answers. "Two and a half hours of killer shit. Killer."

Frequently the comics return to the agony of trying out new material. Will it fly with the audience? In one revealing scene, Orny Adams, having finally succeeded in getting on Letterman, suffers a near meltdown over being forced at the last minute to change "lupus" in one of his routines to "psoriasis." Even the change of a single word in a familiar routine is enough to unsettle a comedian. Seinfeld has jettisoned all his old bits and is slowly building a new repertoire, one joke at a time. First he does short stints--twenty minutes, thirty, forty--and finally, after six months, a full hour-long set, which he debuts at the Improv in D.C., where we see him sitting quietly backstage, trying to get himself in the zone. Seinfeld judges his performances harshly. "I have no excuse," he says after a mediocre show. "I just wasn't good."

What little of his new routine we get to see (alas, the film doesn't give us nearly enough of it) seems pretty sharp, and we sense Seinfeld gradually getting his funny muscles back into shape after his long hiatus. Finally he has a good night--"Wall-to-wall laughs!" his manager, George Shapiro, congratulates him afterward. But Jerry is never satisfied. "It didn't have the confidence I wanted it to have," he says after one show. "There are just glimpses, little moments when I feel comfortable."

Still the film leaves us wondering, Can a comedian ever get truly comfortable? So much dread of the audience is involved, and so much confidence required to overcome it. In the film's final scene, Jerry tours a huge, empty theater where he's going to perform that night. From onstage he looks up at tier after tier of seats. "How am I going to make all these people laugh?" he mutters, and we feel a flash of vicarious stage fright. It's a reminder of how deeply Seinfeld, the TV show, was a comedian's show, with a comedian's performance anxiety doled out among its characters, and then gently spoofed, in the form of narcissism.

Late in Comedian, Jerry gets to meet Cosby, his lifelong idol, and as Cosby praises his work--generously and thoughtfully--Seinfeld gazes in gratitude and awe, authentically starstruck. It's interesting to note Cosby's calm, deliberate presence, such a contrast to the edgy, brilliant, adrenaline style of most of the comics we've spent the evening with. Cosby's preternatural calm offers clues to his success as a performer--his immaculate timing--but also his success as a person. He comes across as that near impossibility, a comedian at peace with himself. And as every young and tormented standup guy should know, that's gold, Orny--gold!

COPYRIGHT 2002 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group