Jerry Seinfeld is not your average comedian. In these days of rude, crude and stupid, he is a Zen meditator who generally spurns slapstick, profanity and sophomoric humor.
In fact, his club routines and NBC-TV show "Seinfeld" - which from the tone of his official clipping service suggests the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval - have been variously described as idiosyncratic, gently sarcastic, subtly intelligent and . . . a blatant "betrayal of the Conventional Canons of Sitcom," i.e., not mindless.Thousands of comedy-club patrons have voted for him as the funniest male stand-up comic in America. Better yet, he's the highest paid.
"It can be an amazing kind of life, making a living this way," Seinfeld, 37 and single, says in a telephone interview.
When the growth of comedy clubs and would-be standup comics was mentioned, Seinfeld sighs: "It's a career option, all right. They ought to have a booth at high school career days.
"But it's much more difficult than it seems, and it's even harder than that."
By age 8, little Seinfeld was hooked on television comics. His late father, who painted and sold business signs, was also a funny man.
"I knew I would do this when I was young," Seinfeld says, telling about the time he made a childhood friend laugh so hard that he sprayed a mouthful of cookies and milk all over him. "And I liked it."
Brooklyn born, Seinfeld grew up in the Long Island town of Massapequa: "Massapequa is the Indian word for `near the mall."'
Seinfeld was on the dean's list when he graduated from Queens College in Flushing. Two months later, he was selling umbrellas on street corners, then light bulbs over the phone. "There aren't a lot of people sitting home in the dark saying, `I can't hold out much longer,' " he says.
His first time on stage was at the old Golden Lion Pub in New York, and it was memorable in at least one respect. These weren't so much clubs as they were restaurants with a table missing, he said. One night at the Golden Lion, comedian Jackie Mason came up after his show and said to him: "It makes me sick. You're going to be such a big hit."
"His words carried me for the next four years," Seinfeld says.
Mason was too kind, he says. "I was really not very good. Anybody when they start up is really horrible."
From the early days forward, Seinfeld's radar was always scanning for life's absurdities. Of the famous McDonald's sign, Seinfeld asks: "Why are they still counting after 65 billion? What is the goal? Do they want the cows to turn themselves in voluntarily?"
Seinfeld has three comedic inspirations - Jay Leno, David Letterman and Robert Klein.
"In the late '60s, (Klein) was the guy who set the style, the New York idiom," Seinfeld says. "He was the guy I knew growing up around New York. The New York smart aleck - the `what is this nonsense here?' approach."
When the subject of his television show is broached, Seinfeld seems almost embarrassed - as though having a successful TV show is something that is curable.
"The TV show is a sideline," he says, "a passing thing. It's hard to do it well. I'm happy this show has turned out OK.
"We sold them on the show in a few minutes," he adds, meaning that he and producer Larry David made it clear that it would not be a standard sitcom. "They seemed to think I had a future in TV."
But the show "really didn't fit into a category. The final script is pretty much what Larry and I think is funny." (David, who met Seinfeld in 1976, is the model for one of the show's characters, George. )
"But what do you do after you've acted out your life and career on a show? After this, I'm not going to do a sitcom and play Jimmy the limo driver - I just won't do it."
Seinfeld, who got his big break with a hit performance on "The Tonight Show," has made more than 50 appearances on the Carson and David Letterman shows. In that time, he's gathered a lot of fans.
NBC's Bob Costas has known Seinfeld for 10 years.
"A lot of great comics are very, very strange personalities, especially in the modern era," Costas says. "Some of them show a lot of anger. But Jerry comes across perfectly normal, a genial guy, funny, with a quirky way of viewing things."