Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny (3 page)

Chapter 4
Socks and Moxie—Jerry Seinfeld

Like the comics I grew up with, Jerry Seinfeld has a genuine need to perform. No matter his success or the fortune he has made from it, Jerry is still out there on the road, building an act—story by story, joke by joke, laugh by laugh. In 2002, he produced and appeared in the documentary
The Comedian,
which trailed him as he traveled the country, determined to try out untested material one small club at a time, motivated only by the sheer challenge and his love of the craft. It was a brave and humbling adventure, and I found it touching to see into the heart and mind of a comedian who, like the legends before him, takes very seriously the art of being funny.

—M.T.

M
arlo:
Your generation of comedians is not all that different from “The Boys” I grew up with. No matter which generation, there’s never a formula, but always a wide range of styles. And they each have their own loyal following.

Jerry:
I was just saying to someone this morning that comedy is like smells. It’s like a cologne counter at a department store. People just pick up the little tester bottles and say, “I hate this one, I love this one . . .” There’s really no rhyme or reason to any of it.

Marlo:
Did you ever doubt that you could make people laugh?

Jerry:
Oh, always.

Marlo:
Always?

Jerry:
Sure. Still do. I think that’s been the key to my success. I’ve never been overconfident.

Marlo:
So where do you get the guts to say, “Okay, I’m going to do it anyway?”

Jerry:
It’s a very funny little mixture of humility and outrageous egomania. That’s what makes a good comedian.

Marlo:
So when it gets down to it, laughter—

Jerry:
. . . is the greatest thing there is. I mean it. Even if you’re not a comedian, if you say something funny or tell a joke and make somebody laugh, it’s a moment of pure joy, one of the best things I know. It’s cultural, it’s genetic.

Marlo:
You once said that stand-up comedy doesn’t belong on the arts pages, it belongs on the sports pages. What do you mean?

Jerry:
One of the things that drew me to comedy was that it’s a simple world. It doesn’t require the interpretation of any critic to tell you whether something is good or not good. If the audience is laughing, the guy’s good. If they’re not laughing, he’s not good. Period. And that’s the analogy to sports: You can talk all you want about how two teams played in a game. But we all know who won at the end. There’s no debate. It doesn’t require any perception.

That’s where comedy is different from the other arts. Stand-up comedy doesn’t require value judgments. If you get laughs, you work; if you don’t get laughs, you don’t work. It’s all about the score.

Put it this way. When you do a play, your friends come backstage afterwards and say, “You were great,” right?

Marlo:
Right.

Jerry:
And you say, “Really! Was I?” And they say, “Yes!” But all along you’re wondering,
Are they telling me the truth?

Marlo:
Right.

Jerry:
Well, I don’t have to do that. No one has to tell me after a stand-up show whether I did well or not. It’s quite clear to everyone what happened.

Marlo:
Okay, so running with your analogy, does comedy take the same kind of training as sports?

Jerry:
Oh, definitely. I was recently talking to a baseball player who played third base, but his natural position—the one he grew up playing—was shortstop. So I said to him, “If you wanted to switch back to shortstop now, how long would it take you to get comfortable there again?” And he said, “Six months to a year,” because there are so many subtleties to playing that position.

Same thing with comedy. Stand-up has nothing to do with anything but stand-up. If you can do stand-up, that doesn’t mean you can do anything else. And if you can do anything else, that doesn’t mean you can do stand-up.

Marlo:
Were there funny people in your childhood?

Jerry:
Well, I think all kids are funny. But what was different in my life was how I valued it.

Marlo:
I know exactly what you mean.

Jerry:
Yeah, I’ll bet you do. So I thought being funny and making other kids laugh was the greatest thing in the world. Then again, I recently read that the average child laughs something like 75 times a day . . .

Marlo:
Really?

Jerry:
Yeah. And the average adult laughs like 12 times a day. So I think as I grew up, I wanted to maintain that 75 figure into adulthood. It was always the most valuable thing to me, so I developed it. I worked on it. I was completely focused on what was funny.

Marlo:
So were you the class clown?

Jerry:
Not really. I could make other kids laugh, but I didn’t think I had any real talent until I started doing stand-up in my early twenties. Any kid can make his friends laugh. That’s just being a kid. But could I make strangers laugh?
That
was the question.

Marlo:
Who was funny in your life when you were a kid?

Jerry:
My dad was a hugely funny guy—unbelievably funny.

Marlo:
Really? In what way?

Jerry:
Just by being silly and singing funny songs. When he was in the army, he used to collect jokes in a file. He was stationed in the Pacific, in the Philippines, and I remember him telling me that he had all these jokes stored away. He was a great joke teller.

Marlo:
Do you remember any of them?

Jerry:
Oh, sure. One that I loved was about a guy who somehow falls out of a building window and lands on the pavement. Everyone runs over, saying, “What happened? What happened?” And the guy looks up and says, “I don’t know. I just got here myself.”

Marlo:
That’s a good joke. Your father sounds adorable.

Jerry:
He was.

Marlo:
Did your mother laugh at your dad’s jokes?

Jerry:
My mother was a good laugher. She always said that she married my father because he was so funny and the life of the party. But then once they got married, he wasn’t so funny around the house. I think my wife has discovered the same thing about me. Comedians are not that upbeat in their private world, you know.

Marlo:
Yeah, my dad worried a lot about his act. But he sure was funny at the dinner table.

Jerry:
The dinner table is a good stage.

Marlo:
Yup. And my father loved listening to his children tell jokes. Were your parents the same way?

Jerry:
I was never funny around my parents.

Marlo:
Really?

Jerry:
Yeah. I was too shy.

Marlo:
Did your father eventually see you in a club?

Jerry:
Yes. And he’d say, “If I’d had some place where I could have gotten on stage, I would have wanted to do the same thing.”

Marlo:
If you were never funny at home, your parents must have been very surprised to see you perform.

Jerry:
Oh, my God. My first
Tonight Show
? I’m telling you, I have never been more nervous about anything. Having my parents in the audience used to just terrify me.

Marlo:
Really? Why?

Jerry:
Because I was showing them this side of me that they had no idea about. Like, when I first told them I wanted to be a comedian—I was about 19 or 20—they said, “Really? But we’ve never seen you do funny things.”

Marlo:
That’s a riot. So you were like this little closet comedian.

Jerry:
Yes, yes—I was much more the closet comedian than the class clown.

Marlo:
How did you do that night on
The Tonight Show
?

Jerry:
I did well. But I wasn’t that happy with it. I thought I could have done better.

Marlo:
You were probably still nervous. Back then,
The Tonight Show
was like the holy grail for comedians. What does that feel like for a young comic?

Jerry:
It feels like, like the stomach flu, you know? Except it’s in your whole body. You can’t eat, you feel sick. Those first couple of years, every time I did
The Tonight Show
, it was such a gigantic event in my life. I’d be up all night the night before, and so sick the day of the taping. I remember one time asking myself,
Why do I do this? Why would anyone put themselves through this?

Marlo:
And your answer was . . .

Jerry:
Because if anyone can, we can. And that’s why we do it. The only reason anyone would go through this hell is because they love it.

Marlo:
Exactly. What about bombing? Do you remember one particularly awful bomb? Because, sorry to say, nothing makes me laugh more than flops.

Jerry:
Well, I remember once doing a club where the waitress had to step on stage in front of you to get to her section.

Marlo:
Oh, my God.

Jerry:
And so all throughout my sketch, she would get up on stage and walk in front of me, with the drinks and the tray—back and forth, back and forth. Just awful.

Marlo:
That must have been great for your timing. Tell me the anatomy of a Jerry Seinfeld joke. Like your famous missing sock routine, where you try to understand why there’s always an odd, partnerless sock when you pull your clothes out of the dryer. And you theorize that the missing sock is actually a fugitive on the run. That joke’s a classic. How did it come about? Were you actually folding your laundry one day when the idea hit you? How does a piece like this evolve?

Jerry:
Well, first, there’s
always
the missing sock.

Marlo:
Right.

Jerry:
And I can’t remember how I hit upon the idea that they want to escape, but once you get your hook, you try to do what we might call a “switch piece,” where you take everything that fits that scenario and apply it to the joke. Okay, so we have an escaped convict scenario. Now you find all the pieces that match up. You have the sock hiding inside the wall of the dryer, preparing for its getaway . . .

Marlo:
[
Laughs
] Right.

Jerry:
You have the sock out on the street that’s gotten a few blocks . . .

Marlo:
[
Laughs
] Right.

Jerry:
Then you try to figure out the reason they would want to escape in the first place. Maybe it’s because of their horrible life in the shoes, with the smelly feet . . .

Marlo:
Right, right!

Jerry:
And if you can come up with enough examples, what you’ve done is taken an absurd idea, then laid it out, proving it with rock-solid logic. That’s the formula for that kind of joke. That’s what audiences love.

Here’s another one that I do in my act now. It’s about the piñata at children’s birthday parties. I explain how the piñata works, then say, “And then the parents tell the kids, ‘And after we’re done beating this animal senseless, we’re going to put a picture of his brother on the wall, and everyone’s going to get a pin and we’re going to nail his ass!’ ” So I’m basically creating this whole idea about some kind of donkey hostility at children’s birthday parties.

Marlo:
That is
so
great.

Jerry:
And, of course, everybody knows these two things—the piñata and Pin the Tail on the Donkey—but they’ve never put together the thought that they’re both donkeys, you know?

Marlo:
Right, I never thought of it, either.

Jerry:
In the end, you’re creating a false logic for fun.

Marlo:
Most people credit you with doing “observational humor.”

Jerry:
I think “observational humor” is a completely meaningless term. There’s no humor—no
anything
—that’s not based on some kind of observation. Every movie, every poem, every book—it’s all observation. And observing is nothing. The trick is, you have to know
what
to observe and how to present it. People also say, “Jerry Seinfeld just talks about real things.” Well, if I just talked about real things, believe me, I’d be still living in that studio apartment.

Marlo:
Sometimes when I’m watching you, I think, if somebody else was delivering this material, it just wouldn’t work as well.

Jerry:
But you could say that about any comedian.

Marlo:
I’m not so sure. I don’t think that about every comedian, but it’s so apparent with you.