Seinfeld?

I watched a documentary (Comedian) about being a stand-up, with Jerry Seinfeld in the foreground and an intriguing mess called Orny Adams as counterpoint.

Right off the bat, let’s stipulate that there isn’t too much of the actual stand-up, and, frankly, while I often find Seinfeld amusing I’m not sure he is someone I’d seek out for the funny. The same is true for the array of folks around him–we see Colin Quinn, Mario Joyner, and a few others pop up and discuss “work”–but we get little of their acts, beyond a small clip of Quinn and (oddly) Joyner’s entering or leaving the stage. We do see actual comedy from Seinfeld, and from the young car-crash Orny Adams who seems to be playing note for note Tom Hanks’ brittle comic from the film Punchline. What is interesting is that we see them build a joke up to success; we see, as well, their uncomfortable slips, failures, even outright freezes. One sharp moment shows Seinfeld losing his place and timing on a new joke, then completely losing the joke, forced to mutter and wander the stage looking pissed off and forlorn before a heckler kind of gets him back into the groove.

It’s really about the job–or, rather, it’s really about the psychic energy of doing the work. (Not motives or motivations–at best, we get familiar notes about the showbiz mentality, the gotta-dance Mickey-Rooney metaphysics of the compulsions to entertain. And not the mechanics of comedy–although implicitly we can pick up on how a certain kind of comic builds in, works through the conventions of a routine. Emphasis here on the routine–the comics we see have their bits, their familiar rhythms, the classic arc of a certain kind of stand-up.) No, the film is about the self-lacerations when someone walks off-stage.

The downside of the film is that for all its space for contemplation there’s little focus or depth to the pictures of this anxiety. The upside is that it is actually pretty damn interesting as fly-on-the-wall anthropology; I earlier noted Hanks’ underappreciated Punchline, and this film at its best recalls and amplifies the best elements of that (the scorn and anxiety and self-loathing and envy and–in flashes–a sense of the real pleasures of the comic off-stage).
My favorite small scene involved Chris Rock talk about seeing Bill Cosby recently perform, wondering how the hell this guy at that age stands up and does 2 1/2 hours of killer material….

Worth seeing. The funniest bits are actually in the extras, with Jiminy Glick interviewing Seinfeld and Adams.