Jerry Seinfeld Is Making Peace With Nothing: He’s ‘Post-Show Business’

Many of us have been wondering lately what Jerry Seinfeld, the sitcom character, would be doing in this current era of home quarantines and social distancing: how his extreme fastidiousness, self-centeredness and constant scrutiny of quotidian details (not to mention the hyperbolic traits of his fictional friends and neighbors) would be stretched to hilarious extremes in an environment of isolation and anxiety.

However, the real Jerry Seinfeld — the one who gave up the sitcom long ago to focus on an occasional talk show and a peerless stand-up career — is not the same guy. While he has been sheltering in place with his wife, Jessica, and their three children, he is as devoted as ever to his daily rituals and habits, and still inescapably prone to atomic-level observations of human behavior. But he is also self-conscious in a way that you never see in his act: He cracks jokes and then wonders whether it’s appropriate to do so or if people even want to laugh right now. These are difficult questions to wrestle with when you’re a comedian, and like everyone else, Seinfeld is trying to figure out who he is and what he should do now.

Though he prefers to present himself publicly in the classic stand-up’s attire of a suit and tie, Seinfeld appeared last Wednesday wearing a simple sweatshirt that read “GARAGE,” in a Zoom session from his house in the Hamptons. It was Seinfeld’s 66th birthday, and the video call took a few minutes to activate, requiring an intervention from the comedian’s more tech-savvy daughter, Sascha, who is 19. (“The youth of America,” he said, beaming with fatherly pride.)

Sitting in a room decorated with family photos, books, model cars and a copy of the Allan Sherman comedy album “My Son, the Nut,” Seinfeld talked about his evolving feelings on comedy, its power and its deficiencies during this time. From that perspective, he also contemplated his new stand-up special, “23 Hours to Kill,” which Netflix will release on Tuesday; Seinfeld is aware that its jokes about the minor indignities of public gatherings, internet communication and the Postal Service may now play very differently than when the set was recorded in October at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan.

Seinfeld said he wasn’t sure whether the special would be his farewell to filmed comedy, but he described his overall professional outlook as “post-show business”: “I’m really just into the pure art of it now,” he explained. “Just the bit, the audience and the moment. I’m more interested in that than ever, and I’m less interested in everything else.”