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Jerry Before Seinfeld

Jerry Seinfeld

Netflix · 2017 · 61 min

Jerry Seinfeld performs his earliest material at his original home club.

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Jerry Seinfeld’s first major outing for Netflix isn’t a fresh hour of observational gripes, but a meticulously staged trip down memory lane that brings him back to the tiny stage of The Comic Strip Live in New York City, the club where his career began in 1976. Seinfeld performs a retrospective set comprised of his earliest, pre-fame material, treating vintage routines on missing socks and the pointless design of cotton balls not as museum pieces but as finely tuned machines that still hum. Filmed in 2017, the special was the opening salvo of a reported $100 million deal that brought the comic and Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee over to Netflix. To bridge the gap between the stand-up set and his biography, the show punctuates his stage time with documentary vignettes, including a striking scene where Seinfeld sits in the middle of Minetta Street in Manhattan, literally surrounded by a sea of yellow legal pads containing every joke he has written since the mid-1970s. While critics noted that Seinfeld remains fiercely resistant to the kind of earnest, confessional soul-baring popularized by modern comics, the hour works precisely because of that emotional distance. He leans into his middle-aged impatience to give some extra weight to forty-year-old bits, whether describing his mother flipping through a wallpaper catalog “like the Quran” or comparing telling his parents he wanted to be a comedian to his “little gay closet moment”.

The set list

8 bits

  1. Living 'on' Long Island versus 'in' New York

    Examines the inconsistent use of prepositions, pointing out that nobody ever claims to have lived 'in' Long Island.

  2. Childhood exhaustion from boredom

    Observes that a bored five-year-old child physically collapses because their body cannot support their weight, defining adulthood as the ability to remain standing while completely bored.

  3. Parents refusing to go to Disneyland

    Recounts how his parents saw no sense in spending money to fly across the country just to sit in a plastic teacup.

  4. Cookie Crisp cereal

    Deconstructs the concept of breakfast cookies, arguing the cereal should have just been named 'The Hell With Everything!'

  5. The self-important aura of a notary public

    Mocks the unearned gravitas, stamps, and official ceremony surrounding the everyday notary public.

  6. The Superman bookends onstage

    Responds to an audience interruption about the stage props by joking that he does not live at the club and noting the bookends represent both sets of Superman's parents.

  7. Running for president

    Suggests anyone who genuinely believes they should be in charge of everything must be crazy, before diverting to question the absurdity of the elephant and donkey political symbols.

  8. The first joke ever told onstage

    Revisits the very first joke routine from his earliest days at the club, self-deprecatingly noting its mediocrity.

How it plays

Tone
Nostalgic, observational, witty, and comfortable.
On stage
Meticulous, poised, witty, and clean-cut, displaying middle-aged impatience, forensic pedantry, and comic exasperation while maintaining an emotional boundary.
Pace
Assured, polished, and engineered with energetic insouciance and tight timing.
About
growing up on Long Island in the 1960s, the craft and origins of stand-up comedy in 1970s New York, childhood vs. adulthood, everyday linguistic and social pedantry, cynicism and human behavior

What the critics said

Jerry Before Seinfeld finds its star revisiting his earliest material on his hometown stage, offering appropriately familiar – yet still abundant – laughs along the way.

In the room: An intimate, club-sized New York crowd engaging with unscripted banter and interruptions.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: en.wikipedia.org, allmovie.com, vulture.com, chortle.co.uk, latimes.com, hollywoodreporter.com.

Backstory

Jerry Seinfeld returns to the Upper East Side comedy club Comic Strip Live where he began his career in the 1970s, framing his stand-up set around his origin story with childhood memories, family home movies, photos, and decades of legal-pad joke archives.

Details

Released
Taped
Comic Strip Live, New York City
Runtime
61 min
Where
Netflix
Director
Michael Bonfiglio
Honors
Nominee, Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album (2018)
Topics
Before
I'm Telling You for the Last Time (1998)
After
23 Hours to Kill (2020)

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