Jerry Seinfeld – review

O2 Arena, London The great master of observational comedy is back. This was Jerry Seinfeld’s first show in the UK in 12 years, and he arrived in the midst of a live comedy boom in full swing: a country crazy for standup, crazy for “have you ever noticed … ?” and “what is it with … ?” – all those things of which Seinfeld is the supreme exponent. And he soon demonstrated his superb knack for hyper-inflating the implications of some absurd little detail, getting massive laughs and making it all look very, very easy. He sets the joke up in the normal conversational voice – and builds, inexorably, to the cartoon-indignant voice: a squeaky-gravelly hysterical rant in which he will briefly fling his arms around with abandon, but complete control, and never a hint that he is seriously exercised or upset about anything. Can it really be true that Jerry Seinfeld is 57 years old? This great comic still appears to have the perky buoyancy of his great TV heyday: the 1990s –that innocent era between the fall of the Berlin Wall and that of the Twin Towers sometimes known, with various levels of irony or insensitivity, as the “Seinfeld decade”, the decade about nothing. Jerry Seinfeld could have been twenty years younger, and yet he still looked a very conservative figure in his sober dark suit and pale yellow tie done all the way up to the top button. This was an old-fashioned set in many ways, and it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Bob Newhart doing it. His best material is about being middle-aged, about not being on Facebook and not being about to “twitter” any time soon. “I could actually set up a little round mirror for me to peck at between tweets,” he snapped, peevishly, exposing his top row of teeth. Only Jerry Seinfeld could do such utterly apolitical material – “The Middle East! Are they all crazy because it’s all sand and no beach?” – without it seeming bland. He talked about his mom in Florida, and we all grinned and applauded – perhaps imagining that his imaginary Florida-dwelling mom on the TV show was in fact his real mother and that we knew all about her. Nowadays, as he indirectly acknowledged in other parts of his set, Jerry himself is getting very close to the oldster time of life. And yet the eternal thirtysomething in him lived again on stage. His gags about marriage, and marriage problems are brilliant – though they do not have the edge of real pain, even despair, that Chris Rock brings to the same subject. Incautiously, Seinfeld sets up the fantasy that marriage is like a game show in which the wife is always last week’s returning, undefeated and undefeatable champion – incautiously, because it ran the risk of reminding the audience of Seinfeld’s recent, unhappy TV show The Marriage Ref. But the gags were just so good that nobody cared. Seinfeld still has the dependable alchemy that transmutes ordinariness – or at any rate a slightly unfamiliar American ordinariness – into comedy gold. His most brilliant line is about things like restaurants or movies which are supposedly “great” yet simultaneously “suck” – and that he longs for a restaurant which is “not bad”. Perhaps his comedy has that same unshowy, inspired not-badness which is also very, very good. There will always be something enigmatic about Seinfeld: he is a comic whose heart is worn invisibly, well away from his sleeve. What does he really think? What does he really feel? Who knows? Who cares? Seinfeld is just a naturally brilliant performer, who only gets better. He is becoming the Sinatra of comedy. Rating: 4/5 Jerry Seinfeld Comedy Peter Bradshaw guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 3, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.