COMEDIAN (2002)
I’ve always thought that people who are professionals at their art have four things in common:
- they make it seem easy
- they make me want to do what they do
- they make me think i can do what they do
- they treat it like a job, not “Art”
Watching COMEDIAN tonight re-affirmed those ideas. I’ve been hanging out to see this documentary since it came out in 2002 and it didn’t disappoint.
The documentary follows Jerry Seinfeld around as he tries to create a new stand-up set from scratch, several years after the demise of his television show. Despite his fame, success and wealth, he demonstrates that comedy, as one of his co-comedians says, is “justice”. Watch Jerry stumble! Watch Jerry fall! Watch Jerry pick himself back up and keep going!
The other comedian featured in the show is Orny Adams, a 30-year old comic on his way up. He comes across as completely arrogant, paranoid and self-loathing, so I understood him totally. He obviously felt worried enough about how he comes across in the film that he has a lengthy quote from Seinfeld on the front page of his website, basically saying that the way Orny comes across is honest and the way every comedian, including Seinfeld, feels.
COMEDIAN also has cameos from comedy greats Chris Rock, Bill Cosby, Robert Klein, Ray Romano, Garry Shandling and Jay Leno, as they chat with Jerry over dinner and backstage.
The weirdest thing about watching this film for me was the similarity between it and the original pilot of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, Larry David’s pseudo-documentary from 1999 which turned into his very successful television series. CYE pretended to follow Larry as he prepared for a return to stand-up.
A couple of the highlights of COMEDIAN for me:
- Jay Leno telling Jerry that he hasn’t spent a dime of the money he’s made from The Tonight Show - he only lives on his stand-up money. It sounds like there are two reasons - it forces him to keep working the stand-up circuit during his downtime from TTS and he half expects to end up fired from TTS and working as a security guard somewhere.
- Chris Rock talking about he caught Cosby’s current stand-up show which went for TWO HOURS AND TWENTY MINUTES and was entirely fresh materials except for one joke. Seinfeld gets to meet Cosby later on in the show, backstage at Cosby’s tour, and you can tell it’s a special moment for him.
- Jerry telling an anecdote about how, many years before, back when he was writing one joke a week, he noticed some construction workers heading back to work after lunch. He could tell they didn’t really want to go back to work, but they did anyway. He realized that he needed to treat his profession in the same way. It’s work. It’s a job. You don’t just sit and wait for inspiration to hit. You work at it.
Anyway… watch this film. It’s a great insight into Jerry Seinfeld, into the psychology of comedians and into the business of making people laugh.