From the Archives: An Interview with Jerry Seinfeld

This article was originally published in the Oct. 26, 1987, issue of The Tufts Daily.

"There are not too many comedians that you see out there doing this as their first choice. They’re doing it as a stepping stone to get someplace else: movies, sitcoms, talk shows. I’m doing this as my first choice. I wanted to be a comedian.”

Jerry Seinfeld took a fairly direct path to the field of stand-up comedy. While at Queen’s College in Long Island he majored in theater and communications. Within six months after he was graduated, he was earning a living as a comedian. For a short time he held a job selling light bulbs over the phone, but as he says, “It was so hard trying to talk people into [buying them]. There’s not that many people sitting home in the dark going, ‘I can’t hold out much longer. Somebody better call.’”

Jerry Seinfeld has come a long way since then. Last month, he premiered on HBO with his “Stand-up Confidential,” and he currently holds the record for the most money earned by one comedian in one show at a comedy club. He estimates that since his first appearance on 'The Tonight Show' in 1981, five years into his career, he has appeared 20 to 25 times and has been on 'Late Night with David Letterman' about as often. At 33, he says, “I don’t look back on my youth wishing to be younger ever. To me, life just gets better.”

Jerry Seinfeld couldn’t be happier with the career he has chosen. “College to me was four years of going, ‘I hate this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t like this. I might as well just do what I want which is to be a comedian even if I fail at it, which is what I was fully expecting to do ... I thought, ‘Why not just have fun your whole life?’” He spoke of making his choice to be a comedian even if he couldn’t earn a living doing it, “and it turns out you can make money too, so I’m very happy with the whole thing.”

The following are excerpts from the interview I conducted with Seinfeld last week following his appearance at Catch a Rising Star:

Q) Do you get nervous before doing a show?

A) If you’ve got the people there and they can hear me and they can see me, I’m not nervous. It’s when there’s something out of my control [that I get nervous].

Q) When you're feeling down before a show, how do you become funny on demand?

A) Their laughter. You can do a couple of jokes on automatic pilot, but when you start to hear the audience laugh, that changes your mood. I can’t feel bad when I’m getting laughs... You learn over the years how to do it. You just leave your problems at the stage and you pick them up when you’re done. They’ll be there when you get off, but for this hour, everything’s great in my life.

Q) Do you do anything to warm up for a show? Anything superstitious?

A) A shower... I like to take a shower ... and put on clean underwear.

Q) What do you see yourself doing in the future?

A) Better.

Jerry Seinfeld remains a likable character on and off the stage. On stage he allows us to laugh at ourselves, reminding us of the silly things we do each day but that we would never really admit to ourselves. Off stage, he has a lot of respect for his fans. When our interview was interrupted by a drunken fan banging on the door, he said, "That's the other side of alcohol. I'm sure he's not a bad guy." He really likes his fans and the feeling is mutual.

Jerry Seinfeld's career has been advancing for eleven years, and if he can maintain his down-to-earth attitudes about his profession, he will have audiences crying with laughter for many years to come. In his own words, "To me, a 'comedy star' is an oxymoron. There shouldn't really be any such thing... I think success is the poison of comedy. As you make it, you start to lose that hunger, you start to lose that drive that you've got to prove something, you've got to really prove you're funny every night. If you lose that, you erode the foundation that got you there... Joan Rivers, case and point."

"If you enjoy getting a laugh enough, comedy is the right career. I never get tired of it."