# The Scholar of Comedy | the New Yorker  ## Metadata - Author: [[David Remnick]] - Full Title: The Scholar of Comedy | the New Yorker - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Jerry Seinfeld shares insights on comedy, writing jokes, and the creative process in a conversation. He discusses the challenge of maintaining originality and freshness in comedy. Seinfeld emphasizes the importance of authenticity and audience connection in comedy performance. - URL: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/the-scholar-of-comedy?utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter&utm_brand=tny&utm_medium=social&mbid=social_twitter&s=09 - Source File: web-only ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > **So, he’s a great writer, and he’s invented this character, which is himself times eleven, I guess. How did you invent how you wanted to be onstage—the persona?** > It’s like sculpting. Sculpting is removing everything that isn’t the sculpture you want to make. You’re not adding; you’re removing. Stone sculpture, not clay. So, when you do a joke and it gets a laugh and something inside you doesn’t feel quite right, you don’t do that joke. You do the jokes that you feel connect to your anger, your attitude, your personality. Success in comedy is very much a—conducting. So, the face, the voice, the body, the joke—when all of that is working together, it hits. Bang. You just feel it. You feel it like hitting a baseball on the button. And, when one of them is a little off, it’s not there ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hwjn8b8gfsmfxyejd6behcpw)) > **When you say you don’t like old men, do you mean that in a kind of Friars Club sort of way?** > No, I don’t like old people. Period. > **[*Laughs*.]** > They don’t look good. Everything’s going. Everything’s deteriorating. I don’t want to see this. If you want to hang around, fine, but we’re moving on to younger people. I’m with you up to about thirty-eight. If you want to stay, you can stay, but I’m moving on. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hwjnet076m5d2csrzdvfjfr3)) > Nothing really affects comedy. People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it. It used to be, you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, “Oh, ‘Cheers’ is on. Oh, ‘*M*A*S*H*’ is on. Oh, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is on. ‘All in the Family’ is on.” You just expected, There’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well, guess what—where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people. Now they’re going to see standup comics because we are not policed by anyone. The audience polices us. We know when we’re off track. We know instantly and we adjust to it instantly. But when you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups—“Here’s our thought about this joke.” Well, that’s the end of your comedy. > **Isn’t that what “Curb” is all about?** > Yeah. Larry was grandfathered in. He’s old enough so that—“I don’t have to observe those rules, because I started before you made those rules.” We did an episode of the series in the nineties where Kramer decides to start a business of having homeless people pull rickshaws because, as he says, “They’re outside anyway.” Do you think I could get that episode on the air today ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hwjnhn0t52zpew0y5n5b737x)) > **But you think Larry got grandfathered in and there could be no thirty-five-year-old version of—** > Right, right. If Larry was thirty-five, he couldn’t get away with the watermelon stuff and Palestinian chicken . . . and HBO knows that’s what people come here for, but they’re not smart enough to figure out, How do we do this now? Do we take the heat, or just not be funny? And what they’ve decided to be is, Well, we’re not going to do comedies anymore. There were no sitcoms picked up on the fall season of all four networks. Not one. No new sitcoms. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hwjnprvt76tnkn0t2mbx3ew5)) > Yeah, I go all the time. I don’t go and sit there and pay for two drinks and watch and go, “This guy’s fantastic.” I go to work out my own stuff. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hwjnngwjrb440cmjvqjz460z))