Transcript of Jerry Seinfeld Interview

Transcript of Jerry Seinfeld Interview

Jerry Seinfeld: I know you think people are going to be interested in this, but they’re not.

I’ve probably been working on this for two years. Two years? I mean, usually I write a bit in a couple days. It’s a long time to spend on something that means absolutely nothing. But that’s what I do. That’s what people want me to do, is spend a lot of time wastefully. So that I can then waste their time.

Comedy writing is something you don’t see people doing. It’s a secretive thing. I’ve never shown anybody this stuff. I feel a little funny about it, right now, to tell you the truth.

In comedy, what you do is you think of something that you think is funny, and then you go from there. It’s a fun thing to say, Pop Tart. I like the first line to be funny right away. When I was a kid and they invented the Pop Tart, the back of my head blew right off. And that, that got the whole thing started. That specific part of my head blew off, not just my head, but just the back.

It was the ’60s, and we had toast. We had orange juice that was frozen years in advance that you had to hack away at with a knife to get a couple of drops. It felt like you were committing a murder before you got on your school bus.

Then I talk about shredded wheat, which was like wrapping your lips around a wood chipper. You had breakfast, and then you had to take two days off for the scars to heal so that you could speak again.

Interviewer: Do you always write on…[yellow pads]?

Jerry Seinfeld: Always, yeah.

Interviewer: Have you ever tried to—?

Jerry Seinfeld: No.

I don’t like that cursor flashing, looking at me like, “So? What have you got?”

Interviewer: Do you have a special pen?

Jerry Seinfeld: Mm-hmm, yes, the Bic, clear barrel, blue. I wrote every episode ofSeinfeld, the TV series, with that pen. Larry and I used to write them longhand.

[to interviewer, who presumably said something not recorded] Oh, because you can’t be in this? Oh, that’s a drag. That was good timing.

So in the midst of that dark and hopeless moment, the Pop Tart suddenly appeared in the supermarket. And we just stared at it like an alien spacecraft, and we were like, chimps in the dirt playing with sticks. What makes that joke is you got chimps, dirt, playing, and sticks. In seven words, four of them are funny. Chimps. Chimps are funny. Then there’s trying to figure out as a kid, how did they know that there would be a need for a frosted fruit-filled heatable rectangle in the same shape as the box it comes in and with the same nutrition as the box it comes in? In the midst of that darkness and hopelessness, the Kellogg’s Pop Tart appears. And they always laugh there, because that indicates, oh, he’s telling us a story.

And my next joke that I want to get to is chimps in the dirt with sticks. So now I’m looking for the connective tissue that gives me that really tight, smooth link like a jigsaw puzzle link. And if it’s too long, if it’s just a split second too long, you will shave letters off of words. You will count syllables, you know, to get it just—It’s more like songwriting.

Then I had to figure out how to end the thing. And that’s the hardest part if you have a long bit. The biggest laugh has to be at the end. It has to be. It can’t be in the middle or the beginning. And this was very daunting. Once this Pop Tart had come into the world, I didn’t understand why we were still eating other kinds of food. Because this seemed to be definitely the new way.Two in the packet, and two slots in the toaster. Why two? One’s not enough, three’s too many. And they can’t go stale because they were never fresh.

They can’t go stale because they were never fresh. That took a long time. And I know it sounds like nothing, and it is nothing. You know, in my world, the wronger something feels, the righter it is. So to waste this much time on something this stupid. That felt good to me.

It’s the exact opposite of what we do here at theTimes. It’s just, we spend appropriate amounts of time on deserving subjects. So I’m the exact opposite of that. Inappropriate and undeserving subjects.