Posted 4:12 AM by Blah blah

Comedian (Jerry Seinfeld)

This week I ran to see Comedian, a documentary (not movie) about 18 months in the life of comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Made by the same guys who brought you Seinfeld's TV commercials for Visa, this film really inspired, intrigued, and entertained me. GO SEE IT!

Unless you've lived in a bedroom closet for the last 10 years, you've heard of Seinfeld. He created and starred in one of the most watched TV shows of the 1990s (nine seasons on NBC). At the height of his popularity, he walked away from the show, despite NBC's reported offer to pay him an unheard of $5 million per episode.

From Forbes (1998): "Consider this: In just nine years as a property, the sitcom Seinfeld has netted close to $1.7 billion in profits. Cha-ching! The most profitable single piece of entertainment in history---far more profitable than Cosby, a predecessor hit from the 1980s. More profitable than Jurassic Park. More profitable, even, than Titanic, the biggest-grossing movie of all time.

And where does all that booty go? Castle Rock Entertainment, the show's producer, and Columbia TriStar, the distributor, will share close to $1 billion. No one says the studios can't still be collection machines. But creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, who took no financial risk at all on the show, will walk off with about $500 million total. And that's after earning more than $100 million in fees during nine seasons of network production. The rest goes to the various managers who helped form the show in its early days."

Seinfeld wanted to return to his standup comedy days as a struggling unknown performer. After giving a sold-out tour that was shown as an HBO special, he retired all of his old comedy material. He returned to the cramped, beer-filled comedy clubs in 1999 and only used jokes he had newly wrote. Comedian tells the tale of his painstaking attempts to create a new act, openingly showing his insecurities, mistakes, and great discipline behind the scenes. You see him talking shop with other masters, like Jay Leno, Chris Rock, Robert Klein, and his idol, Bill Cosby. It shows his kindly old manager, George Shapiro, who has dealt with many of the great comedians. (Shapiro reminded me a bit of Jay Leno's old executive producer for the Tonight Show, Fred De Cordova. I've been to Burbank, California to see the Tonight Show and saw Cordova's fatherly relationship with Leno and the other staff members.)

I wrote this user review on Yahoo! Movies: "To really get a sense of the comedian's standup life, run and see this! I loved it. In contrasting the cool professionalism and modesty of Seinfeld with the whiny brattiness of Orny Adams, this film speaks volumes about how to handle success gracefully." The film contrasts suave Seinfeld with Adams, a rising 29-year-old comedian on the brink of entering the national spotlight. Adams is a man who always seems miserable. The more successful he gets, the more miserable he becomes. He sports a room full of meters of filing cabinets, crammed with alphabetized jokes for every possible situation. Lesbian jokes, ethnic jokes, classic jokes. He speaks in a brusque, uptight way, and you can see the stomach ulcers written on his face.

Near the end of the film, Seinfeld returns to TV for a brief appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. You may actually watch his whole performance on the Net: go here to March 21, 2001.

Read the collection of reviews of Comedian on Metacritic. Metacritic is now my favorite place (after Yahoo! Movies) to check out new movies and instantly find reviews. It's fantastic.

Bottom line: Comedian is well worth your time. It's not only entertaining but enlightening. It teaches us lessons about not only how to become a success, but how to deal with life after it. It shows a select group of folks who bow at the altar of their demanding craft.