Jerry Seinfeld’s Bland Ambition

Will America's slowest fast-rising comedian finally hit it big?

- STEPHEN RANDALL

Jerry Seinfeld is one happy stand-up comic. In front of him, filling the cavernous Bren Events Center at the University of California at Irvine, are 1,746 people who have paid to see Seinfeld and only Seinfeld. That’s a lot of people for a stand-up comic—more, for instance, than Bob Hope drew when he played Irvine—and it’s doubly impressive when you consider that this is a Sunday in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend when most sensible students are off skiing or getting their laundry done at Mom’s.

“Here we are in the gym,” jokes Seinfeld. “We’re in the gym and we’re going to pretend it’s a night club. We won’t notice the scoreboard, we’ll just pretend it’s a little intimate cabaret somewhere on campus.”

This isn’t Seinfeld’s first trip to Irvine, a conservative Orange County community about an hour south of Los Angeles. But last time—a mere 10 months ago—he wasn’t headlining at the gigantic school gym, he was doing what he had always done, playing a small comedy club just off campus. For 14 years, the 36-year-old comic has appeared at clubs, opened for big-name acts and done frequent guest shots on Carson and Letterman, but during the past year, there has been a measurable spurt in his career. He sold out New York’s Town Hall, which seats 1,500, found himself courted by NBC for a sitcom and was booked by Letterman as the only legit guest for his seventh-anniversary show. Suddenly, there is a buzz around him, a certain understanding that after 14 long years of paying dues, Jerry Seinfeld is on the cusp of being the Next Big Deal in comedy.