Jerry Seinfeld
Jerry Seinfeld is an actor, born 1954.
Before the sitcom there was the club circuit. Seinfeld built an act out of observational comedy, small nouns examined at length, and carried it onto television the way stand-ups did in the early 1980s: sets on Late Night with David Letterman, and an early part as Frankie on the sitcom Benson.
Seinfeld ran on NBC from 1989 to 1998, co-created and written with Larry David, with Seinfeld playing a fictionalized version of himself. The performance is easy to undervalue because it is the least showy thing in the room. Three loud comic inventions orbit a straight man whose job is to react, hand the scene along and keep the arithmetic of the plot visible. He took a Golden Globe for it, and the show a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series.
Since then he has built formats rather than characters. He co-wrote, co-produced and starred in the DreamWorks animation Bee Movie (2007) as Barry B. Benson, created and produced the reality series The Marriage Ref (2010 to 2011), and made Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012 to 2019), a web series that is really two comedians talking, which won him three Webby Awards. Unfrosted (2024) put him back on camera in a Netflix comedy he also co-wrote and co-produced.
He never stopped touring, and the screen work now reads as a sideline to the stand-up rather than the other way round. He still turns up as himself, on Curb Your Enthusiasm and on other people's talk shows, which is the only character he has ever needed.
Movies (13)
- Bee Movie (2007)
- Unfrosted (2024)
- Unfrosted (2024)
- Eddie (1996)
- Being Eddie (2025)
- Top Five (2014)
- 2Everything2Terrible2: Tokyo Drift (2010)
- Saturday Night Live: 25th Anniversary Special (1999)
- Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman (2006)
- The Concert for New York City (2001)
- Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999)
- This Is Stand-Up (2020)
- Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis (2011)
TV (25)
- The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (2014)
- Seinfeld (1989)
- Seinfeld (1989)
- Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000)
- Late Night with David Letterman (1982)
- The Larry Sanders Show (1992)
- Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012)
- Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012)
- Benson (1979)
- The Jay Leno Show (2009)
- Dilbert (1999)
- Rove (1999)
- Inside Comedy (2012)
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 (2017)
- The Marriage Ref (2010)
- The Marriage Ref (2010)
- My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman (2018)
- Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis (2008)
- Primetime Glick (2001)
- Mark Twain Prize (1999)
- Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! (2026)
- The New WKRP in Cincinnati (1991)
- John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's in L.A. (2024)
- Talkshow with Spike Feresten (2006)
- Norm Macdonald Live (2013)
Where to start with Jerry Seinfeld
Start with Seinfeld, and start in the middle rather than at the beginning: the first season is a slower, stranger show, and the machine only clicks once the other three are running at full speed. Watch how little the lead does. He sets a scene, absorbs a complaint, and lets everyone else be funny at him.
Then Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, the best thing he has made since, and the closest he comes to showing his working: shop talk between professionals about why a joke has to land on a hard consonant. Curb Your Enthusiasm is worth it for how differently Larry David writes him when he is a guest in someone else's show, and his appearances on The Larry Sanders Show catch him mid-fame, playing the version of himself that is faintly irritated by fame.
The films are the weakest seam. Bee Movie has a strange afterlife as an internet artifact and a thin one as a film, and Unfrosted is an expensive shaggy-dog joke.