Jerry Seinfeld (2013)

Very good observation and analysis on your part, Baxter. You are truly exhibiting a good comedic eye. The reason I would play straight was it was funnier for the scene. And very few people have ever remarked on this, because it was a conscious choice of mine, only because I knew it would make the show better, and I didn't care who was funny as long as somebody was funny and that the show was funny. So you have hit upon one of the great secret weapons of the Seinfeld series, was that I had no issue with that.

That's an excellent choice, the one that you mentioned, because I can still remember how brutally funny that was to me. The thing about the show is that you have to realize that I had to look into the faces of those people, six inches away, so if you think Kramer is funny on TV, imagine his real face six inches from your nose, how funny that is. You can't imagine. It's impossible not to laugh. So I would.

That's funny.

FINALLY I have met someone that understands the show. Thank you for your rare and perceptive analysis.

This was something we struggled with quite often on Seinfeld. Because we had real laughs on the scenes that were shot in front of an audience, but then we would shoot other scenes that were not in front of the audience (which didn't have any laughs) and then it felt like a bit of a mismatch, so we tried to compromise and put in a subtle laugh track. I think that one of the fun things of a sitcom is feeling like you're in an audience even though you're home, watching it by yourself. I have to say I like some sitcoms with them and some without. Depends on the show.

WOW. First of all, GREAT question.

That I get to do on a daily basis? Probably walk to work. I think that's about the coolest thing that there is. Or take my bike. If you can walk to work or take your bike on a daily basis, I think that's just about the coolest thing that there is. Every morning I listen to the traffic on the radio, and they talk about how they are jammed and I just laugh. I love traffic. I love traffic reports because I'm not in any of them.

Very very well observed, first of all, let me compliment you on that. That moment, which I remember crystal clearly, is the enormous talent of an actor like Wayne Knight. And the script said "Newman looks in the bag, and says Jambalaya" but the delivery and the dance was all his.

Oh this is a very painful subject. As you can probably imagine, over the 9 years of doing the show, Larry David and I sat through hundreds of ideas that people wanted to do on the show. And most of the ideas are not good. Which I saw Larry say the other day on some show, somebody asked him the same question and he said "I know you think it's funny, but it's really hard." The ideas that Larry and I would respond to, I don't even know, they just need to be very unique. It's just a lot harder than it seems to come up with. And particularly for that show, where we tried to do things that were unusual, and you had to go through a lot of ideas to find the ones you like.

Very early on in my career, I hit upon this idea of being the Heckle Therapist. So that when people would say something nasty, I would immediately become very sympathetic to them and try to help them with their problem and try to work out what was upsetting them, and try to be very understanding with their anger. It opened up this whole fun avenue for me as a comedian, and no one had ever seen that before. Some of my comedian friends used to call me - what did they say? - that I would counsel the heckler instead of fighting them. Instead of fighting them, I would say "You seem so upset, and I know that's not what you wanted to have happen tonight. Let's talk about your problem" and the audience would find it funny and it would really discombobulate the heckler too, because I wouldn't go against them, I would take their side.

The first time I met him, that's a long story... I actually was eavesdropping on him talking to another comedian, and I wasn't even in comedy yet. But he was leaning on my car in front of the Improv on 9th Ave and 44th Street, and this would be probably 1975. That was the first time I ever saw him. But we didn't talk. But him and this other comedian were leaning on the fender of my car, and I knew that they were real comedians and I was still just flirting with it. So I don't know if that answers the question.

Then when we finally did talk in the bar Catch a Rising Star on 1st Ave and 78th Street 2 or 3 years after that, we couldn't stop talking. We were both obsessed with the smallest possible issue.

You know what's funny? He doesn't even know that story.

My car was a 1973 Fiat 128 SL.

Is this my coffee or yours?

Die.

WOW. P_ro, you are DEEP. And super-observant. Thank you for understanding that I was busy and not being an a.h. I would say that I am 90% serious in my day. Comedy is no joke.

Yes. There was one episode where Jerry bought a handgun. And we started making it and stopped in the middle and said "this doesn't work." We did the read-through and then cancelled it. A lot of other stuff happened, but trying to make that funny ended up being no fun.

It would be you. And I would say "That's it!" and that's the end of high-fiving forever.

I did own that car at one time. Isn't it beautiful? I sold it because I had something that was a little similar, a 907, and I don't like to have too much of the same thing.

You're absolutely 1000% right. In fact I would go so far as to say that was the key to the entire show, was that we really felt like together we were funny, and then the audience felt it, and that's how you can somehow catch lightning in a bottle.

The composer was Jonathan Wolff, and we were trying to come up with something that would not interfere with the standup portion in the beginning of the show. We didn't know how iconic it was going to be.

That's where that phrase comes from!

Well, I'll give you two. One was the The Rye, because we got to shoot that at Paramount Studios in LA which was the first time that we thought "wow this is almost like a real TV show." We hadn't felt like a real TV show, the early years of the TV show were not successful. We had this idea of a Marble Rye and we had to shoot it in an outdoor set, and this was a very expensive thing to do, it's like a movie place there at Paramount in LA. Their standing set for New York looks exactly like it, and we thought "this is where the ADULT shows are, the REAL shows like Murphy Brown." We felt like we were a weird little orphan show. So that was a big deal for us.

And that was very exciting, we were up all night shooting it on the set of paramount and it was very exciting.

The other one that was really fun was in the episode The Pothole, Newman drives his mailtruck over a sewing machine and his mail truck burst into flames. It was really fun to shoot, and it was fun to set Newman on fire. And he screamed "oh the humanity" like from the Hindenberg disaster. It's one of my favorites.

Great, great question. Wow. I probably would have to say Charlie Chaplin in a Duesenberg.

One time, a friend of mine and I decided to drive a 1967 VW Bug from Albuquerque to the Hamptons. I bought the car on eBay for $5,000 and flew to Albuquerque and my friend flew from LA, and we decided to do that for something fun to do (this, by the way, is the actual original inspiration for Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, the year was 2000 and I did this with my friend Barry Marder, who you may know as the author of "Letters From a Nut" by Ted L. Nancy).

ANYWAY, so one time we stopped in this tiny town and somewhere in the Midwest whose name escapes me at the moment, and the town was honestly no more than 2 blocks long, and we are walking on this little sidewalk that they had, and there was a guy there, walking past us, and I was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, and the guy says as we walk by "Hey Jerry" and kept walking.

And that, to this day, so blows my mind that not only was he NOT SURPRISED that i was in this town, population 115, but that I just walked by him, he recognized me and he felt the need to say anything more than "hi." Not "what the hell are you doing here." I'm sure that guy is out there, somewhere. Probably on reddit.

Where'd the name come from? Something like "you seen this? I already read it."

The pitch for the show, the real pitch, when Larry and I went to NBC in 1988, was we want to show how a comedian gets his material. The show about nothing was just a joke in an episode many years later, and Larry and I to this day are surprised that it caught on as a way that people describe the show, because to us it's the opposite of that.

I work down the street from where I live. In New York City. See ya there.

The only line I quote from the show (and I'll be very impressed if anybody out tehre remembers this line) is "If you're one of us, you'll take a bite."

I find myself saying that to my kids a lot. It's a very obscure line, but George was working at some company where they all had lunch together, and he wasn't trying the apple pie, and the boss finally says "If you're one of us, you'll take a bite." A lot of times kids won't want to try certain foods, and so I'll use that line. Sometimes I'll quote Newman in flames screaming "Oh the humanity."

We never obsess over anything that isn't mundane. Most recent was intentional mumbling. We wrote this script for this thing that you will eventually see but I can't reveal what it is at this time. All I can do is tell you is that it's big, huge, gigantic. Even bigger than that Amazon package.

I know I should tweet more, but sometimes I just can't think of a tweet.

It started with wanting to be Joe Namath of the 1969 New York jets, who at that time was one of the only football players to wear white shoes. And I wanted to be like him, so I always wore white sneakers. Also, Bill Cosby on I SPY always wore white sneakers. And they were my fashion icons.

That really was one of the funniest things we ever did was that voicemail message. And I think I remember whose bit it was, but I'm not sure so I'm not going to say. The shrug of "Where could I be" may be the quintessence of the George character.

Well when I started out in comedy in the 70s, if you didn't do clean humor you weren't getting on TV, so I started doing that so I could be on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And then when I saw what other people were doing, I just always wanted to be a little different.

I chose comedy because I thought it seemed much easier than work. And more fun than work. It turned out to be much harder than work, and not easy at all. But you still don't have to ever really grow up. And that's the best thing of all.

How minor?

We had a GREAT bench of semi-regulars. Newman, Frank Costanza, Jay Peterman - do you consider those minor characters? Because I don't. My favorite minor character was the guy who ran the parking lot who when you went to get your car, he said "we can't do it, we can't get your car."

I don't remember. A lot of the shows were written by lots of people, different ideas were thrown in by different people every step along the way. So there's a writer listed for that episode, but in many cases they are only responsible for 20% of it because we had a huge writing staff and everybody would help everybody every week because it was very challenging.

Thank you Tashi. I am burned out. And you may have noticed that I tend to quit things soon after doing them, like TV series, animated movies, book writing, broadway plays. I do feel very strongly in stopping the second I feel like I'm not excited anymore, whatever I'm doing.

Newman would be my favorite supporting character. I mean, when I got to have a real evil nemesis like Superman would have, that was a dream come true for me. There's no superhero that doesn't have an evil nemesis, and I got to have one. And I love that nobody ever asks "Why didn't you like Newman?"

No one ever asks me that, and no one ever questions it. There was no reason, but it was just fun.

I was happy with the Seinfeld finale because we didn't want to do another episode as much as we wanted to have everybody come back to the show we had so much fun with. It was a way to thank all of the people who worked on the show over the years that we thought made the show work. I don't believe in trying to change the past but I'm very happy with it.

Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work.

Oh no. Patrick is one of the silliest, funniest, most entertaining people I ever had the privilege of working with. He's the most difficult actor to work with in Bee movie, because every time he would come in to read, I would end up lying on the floor weeping with laughter.

It's usually, the kids and I will go get bagels and lox on a weekend. And then we'll come home and eat them.

I don't know if people were surprised, I would have to see all of their eyebrows to see if they go up. But meditation helps because it's the ultimate way to rest when you're working. It's just as simple as that.

I would say, when I heard that they were going to do a sitcom with a secret agent who was funny, that it was going to be a comedy secret agent TV show, and it was going to be called "Get Smart," the back of my head blew off. So that was really my favorite show when I was a kid. Also Laugh-In and Batman.