Jerry Seinfeld Goes Back to Work

By Jess Cagle

He is immortalized--in syndication and on DVD--standing in his kitchen, eating sugary cereal for dinner, in jeans and sneakers and an untucked shirt. But on a warm, rainy evening in August in a nondescript dressing room backstage in a theater in Colorado Springs, Jerry Seinfeld is dressed as if he were going to church: a dark suit, a crisp, white shirt and an elegant, silvery tie. And he acts a bit devout too, bowing his head in a moment of silence.

But Seinfeld is getting ready for a different sort of ancient ritual: stand-up comedy. "It's kind of that feeling before an ocean swim," he says of facing an audience armed with nothing but jokes. "You know it's gonna be cold at first, but once I get in, it's really fun. And you never know what the waves are going to be like."

Onstage, Seinfeld is, of course, neither blue nor edgy but meticulously funny. "I love having kids," he tells the audience. "I used to see couples pushing strollers and think, Why would you do that? Why would you want someone in your house that just craps in their pants while they're looking you right in the eye?" On al-Qaeda training videos: "Why are terrorists always working out on the monkey bars? Has there ever been a war where the decisive battle was fought on a children's playground?" And he says dryly, "Everything in Iraq seems to be going smoothly." Pause for the laugh. "Is it just all that sand and no beach that just drives everyone in the Middle East out of their freaking mind?"

This is what he has been doing on most weekends since Seinfeld went off the air: traveling to stand-up gigs across the country. No press, no entourage, just a tour manager, a garment bag and an opening act (usually one of Seinfeld's old friends--Mario Joyner, Tom Papa or Mark Schiff). "Doing my act and working on that--that's my job," says Seinfeld. "To actually do your creative thing right in front of an audience and have them judge it right there--that's exciting." His life on the road was chronicled in the 2002 documentary Comedian, and Seinfeld does occasionally emerge to promote the DVD releases of his sitcom, but he has made no effort to cling to the global fame that it bestowed on him. To most people--the vast majority of fans who haven't been lucky enough to catch his stand-up act--he has seemed almost Johnny Carson-esque for the past few years, the wealthy recluse who left us wanting more.

But in the next few months, Seinfeld will be making a brief yet very noticeable return to mass media, a comeback that began four years ago when he had dinner with director Steven Spielberg, a partner in DreamWorks SKG and a neighbor of Seinfeld's in New York's tony Hamptons. The star casually mentioned an idea for an animated movie to Spielberg. "A movie about bees," Seinfeld says he told the director, "called Bee Movie." (As in B movie, get it?) Spielberg then alerted his colleague Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation. This eventually led, in the way of Hollywood, to Seinfeld's co-writing, co-producing, starring in and overseeing the film, which opens on Nov. 2, with Seinfeld as a young bee named Barry who ventures out of the hive, becomes sweet on a human florist (voiced by Renee Zellweger) and ends up suing the human race for exploiting bees for their honey. And soon Seinfeld will return to his old sitcom home, NBC, in comedic vignettes about the making of Bee Movie. (Though the shorts are designed to promote the film on the Internet, NBC acquired the rights to air them during commercial breaks in an effort to encourage viewers to watch the neighboring advertisements.) And Seinfeld is appearing as himself on the Oct. 4 season premiere of 30 Rock, trying to foil a plot by the network to digitally insert old footage of him in all its shows, even the soaps.

The Seinfeld now playing is a remarkably different star from the one who personified narcissistic baby-boomer bachelorhood throughout the 1990s. Seinfeld is 53 (though he could easily pass for 40), and since the show ended its run, he has acquired a wife, a daughter and two sons. "As a single person, I was always exploring the world," says Seinfeld over lunch one day at the DreamWorks lot in Glendale, Calif., where he's putting the finishing touches on Bee Movie. "Now I've lost some interest in the world. I'm more interested in my wife and kids." After his show went off the air, he did some soul-searching, fell in love and came to the conclusion that the applause of a few hundred people is worth more than the adulation of millions. "I've had the ride," he says. "I want the freedom that I've been so lucky to earn." He agreed to appear on 30 Rock simply because the prospect amused him. "I'm just a crazy, crazy Alec Baldwin fan," says Seinfeld. "Everything he does, he just has a very pure, straight-ahead way of performing. I thought, When am I ever gonna act with Alec Baldwin in a comedy?"

After the release of Bee Movie, Seinfeld plans to return to being a stand-up comic and quasi-stay-at-home dad. Home for Seinfeld (who made a reported $225 million for Seinfeld's syndication alone and appears almost annually on Forbes' list of richest celebrities) is an apartment overlooking Central Park. It's also an estate in the Hamptons, on Long Island, that he purchased for $32 million from Billy Joel in 2000 and a new spread in Telluride, Colo., not far from Tom Cruise's place. He keeps his collection of Porsches (he won't say how many, though it's assumed there are more than 30) in a private garage in Manhattan. He hits the gym regularly, and every day when he's in the city he walks 25 blocks through Central Park to his midtown office--a spacious aerie with sweeping views of the skyline--where he works on his stand-up act. The office is equipped with a high-tech videoconferencing system called Halo so he can communicate with the directors and animators of Bee Movie.

One surprising thing about Seinfeld: He actually seems rather nurturing, especially at mealtime. He'll warn you away from a tuna melt at one of his favorite restaurants because it has too much garlic, and he'll make sure you don't miss the bread pudding at the DreamWorks commissary. He visibly softens when you mention Michael Richards, the Seinfeld co-star who got into trouble last year by going on a racist rant in a comedy club. "He's a dear, sweet guy," says Seinfeld. "But he just got too angry." Seinfeld, who's generally easygoing, admits that he too can be moody. "There is a thing about comedians," he says. "They are cranky--all of them. If you're not cranky, you're not funny."

In the May 14, 1998, finale of Seinfeld, the cast of self-involved characters ended up in jail for nine seasons' worth of selfishness and hilariously brutal indifference to the rest of the world's feelings. At the time, Seinfeld was suffering from too much freedom. "To be honest," he says, "I was kinda lost after the show. I really didn't want to get married, I didn't like being single anymore, and I didn't know what I wanted to do." Whatever he did, it wouldn't be in Hollywood. "I got tired of being treated like a precious little egg on a pillow," says Seinfeld, who moved back to Manhattan, where he had gotten his start as a comedian while attending Queens College in the 1970s. "'That's not the water Mr. Seinfeld prefers, you idiot'--I just wanted to get away from that. I missed people yelling at me and treating me like a regular guy." After a few months of doing not much besides playing pool every afternoon at a billiards hall on the Upper West Side, Seinfeld decided to return to being a stand-up comic. During his years of working on the show in Los Angeles, he says, he longed for the "griminess of the stand-up world." Even today, he says, "whenever I have the opportunity to go to an old bar in New York that has that smell--that beer-soaked wood, that cheap-wine smell--I just swoon."

His first step was to put his old act behind him. He retired the material in a limited Broadway engagement, I'm Telling You for the Last Time, in August 1998. One night he invited a woman he had met at the gym, Jessica Sklar, to his show. In his current act, Seinfeld jokes, "I was dating for 25 years. Do you know how exhausting that was? Do you know how much acting fascinated I did?" But Jessica, whom he calls a "neighborhood girl," actually did fascinate him. Like Seinfeld, she had grown up on Long Island, and of all the nice Jewish girls available to him, he says, "she was the nicest." There was one catch: two months earlier, she had married Eric Nederlander, the son of a prominent New York family in the theater business. Her marriage ended, she and Seinfeld began dating, and the tabloids loved it. "I couldn't believe anybody thought it was anything," says Seinfeld of the media storm. "And I had trouble understanding how painful it was for her. I was used to it. I think I made some mistakes in that period as far as helping her through it."

"It was a brutal time for everybody," says Jessica, 36, seated beside her husband one afternoon at the diner by his office. "I had left a relationship where I was sort of supposed to be someone I wasn't. That relationship was never going to work, and I met someone who was heaven and earth to me." On Dec. 25, 1999, they were married in a small ceremony. Two months later, says Seinfeld, he was awakened by a tap, tap on his pillow. "She had one of those [home pregnancy test] sticks that you buy at the drugstore. I was sleeping, and she started tapping the stick on the pillow. So I opened my eyes. It was great." After the birth of daughter Sascha, now 6, Seinfeld published a children's book, Halloween, and dedicated it to his wife and daughter, whom he called "the sweetest candy of all." Their son Julian followed in 2003, and son Shepherd (whom they call "Pepper") in 2005. "The great thing about kids is there's nothing I find too embarrassing to do in front of them," he says. "To hear them laugh is worth anything. It's the best sound in the world."

Seinfeld, who has an older sister, Carolyn Liebling, describes his parents, Kal and Betty Seinfeld, as loving "but not interested in a good way." Seinfeld's mother had grown up in orphanages and foster care. His father, who owned a sign-making business, came from a broken home. "They were loners," says Seinfeld. "They kind of raised us in a very hands-off way. I said, 'I want to be a comedian.' They said, 'Oh, well, we look forward to hearing about it.'" When his father died in 1985, Seinfeld was already a successful comedian who had appeared on the Tonight Show, but "after he passed away, somebody said to me, 'Now your career is really going to take off,'" says Seinfeld. "In some way the child will sometimes hold back so as not to surpass the father while he's alive. Maybe it's the mortality thing. I just started driving a little harder, working a little harder." Seinfeld says his dad was funny, and he still laughs at his jokes. "There was one he liked to tell about a guy who falls out of a window," recalls Seinfeld, smiling. "He's lying there on the street. This other fella runs up to him and says, 'What happened?' The guy says, 'I don't know. I just got here myself.'"

Seinfeld spends a lot of time figuring out ways to make his own kids laugh. Not surprisingly, he usually succeeds. "He makes these children laugh so hard, I have to watch them to make sure they're not choking," says Jessica, who founded Baby Buggy, a children's charity, in 2001. She has also written a cookbook, Deceptively Delicious, about making healthy food for kids--which is coming out in October.

While Seinfeld was busy starting a family in New York City, Hollywood kept calling. He was never tempted to return to sitcoms. "When I was done, it was like, I can't touch that again," he says. "Who wants second best?" Plus, he says, "television is for young people who want to put their whole life into something. I'm way past that point." He admits he occasionally stops on Seinfeld while flipping through the channels ("I watch it now, and I go, 'Oh, now I see why they liked the show'"). No, he says, dollar signs do not flash before his eyes when he sees it in syndication. "Bad fashion choices flash before my eyes." Seinfeld isn't impressed by most TV now and believes that the medium's fragmentation over the networks and the sprawling cable universe has made it too difficult to get together great writing staffs. He says he has never seen The New Adventures of Old Christine, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the only Seinfeld star to have reemerged in a hit, but he has appeared on Seinfeld co-creator Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Oddly enough, Seinfeld considers The Sopranos "a really good sitcom. I watched that show for the jokes. It always made me laugh." When he saw The Sopranos' ambiguous finale, "at first I thought, Oh, great, somebody finally did a worse finale than me," says Seinfeld. "Then I realized a couple days later it was brilliant."

Until Bee Movie, he had never seriously considered making a big commercial feature film. "They're too long," he says. "Comedy should be short. I don't even think they should make movie comedies. The last third is almost always torture. There's no energy left." And Seinfeld never harbored dreams of being a movie star. "If you read something somebody else wrote, no matter how well you read it, you didn't think of that," says Seinfeld. "I once had a bit I was going to try and do. I love when people talk about movies, they go, 'Oh, I loved when Brad Pitt said ...' No, no, no, no, no. Brad Pitt didn't say anything. They told Brad Pitt what to say. Brad Pitt said, 'Is the masseuse here?' That's what Brad Pitt said."

When he mentioned the idea for Bee Movie to Spielberg in 2003, "I was just trying to make witty conversation," says Seinfeld. "It was never my intention to make the movie." He said yes, however, when DreamWorks Animation offered him complete control, and he thought it sounded fun to get together some former Seinfeld writers to work with him on the script. "We had a blast," he says. Plus, computer animation "just felt so different. What if I can be funny this way? I just kind of got sucked in."

Katzenberg says animation appealed to Seinfeld "because he's a perfectionist, and it's probably the only form of moviemaking where you can actually get near perfection." Seinfeld disagrees, describing himself as "obsessive, yes; perfectionist, no." For more than three years during production, Seinfeld continued his stand-up gigs on weekends and also oversaw everything from Bee Movie's casting to the most minute hand movements of the animated characters. (He began flying out to the DreamWorks studio so often, in fact, that he eventually rented a house in Bel Air, Calif.) During the final stages of production in August, Seinfeld is listening to the film's score in the Santa Monica, Calif., studio of Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer. "Wow, that was Zimmer-rific," he says somewhat tentatively after listening to a few bars of music played over some footage. He's pensive for a moment, then continues, "What was that instrument that has a little pathos to it? A clarinet? That's a very emotional instrument, a very Jewish instrument. I'm not sure this is that kind of scene. It feels a little like Yentl."

A week later, the clarinet has been silenced, and after several weeks spent finishing the movie on the West Coast, Seinfeld flies off to entertain the nice folks in Colorado Springs. After the set, he bows to a standing ovation, and then he's gone, ducking into a Mercedes waiting behind the theater. "That show, for me, was one of the best ones I've had in a long time," says Seinfeld en route to the airport. "It's a focus thing. I haven't been onstage not thinking about the movie for a long time." In a few minutes, Seinfeld will fly east, just in time for son Shepherd's birthday, and he's looking forward to spending a few days with his family in the Hamptons. Still, he's perfectly happy right where he is--on the road, going to or from one stand-up gig or another. "I had a really good time tonight," he says as the car pulls into the airport. "I'm a comedian again."

Six Things Jerry Likes on TV Now Talkshow with Spike Feresten (Fox) Anything Bob Einstein does on Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO) Announcer talk over Baseball Tonight's Web Gems segment (ESPN) Mad Men (A&E) Commercials with unattractive people just staring into space Johnny Dark on Late Show with David Letterman (CBS)

Video: Behind The Scenes How does Seinfeld make his kids laugh? Watch Jess Cagle's interview with the comedian and find out. At time.com/seinfeld