Is This Anything? | Jerry Seinfeld

This episode of Books for Men features Is This Anything? by Jerry Seinfeld. A book that comprises the comedian's best material (self-selected) over five decades—70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s. Pretty cool. It's a love letter to the lifelong commitment to process, craft, and comedy. Listen for more!

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Welcome back, the Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So this week I have a pretty interesting book to share with you. I'm not sure if you would classify it as a memoir, it's definitely a comedy, but it's unique, very unique. And it's called, Is This Anything? by Jerry Seinfeld. So if you don't know who Seinfeld is, you're probably living under a rock. I do understand that he is an acquired taste, but whether you like him or not, one of the things that sort of can't be denied is his commitment to the craft of being a comic and the craft of telling jokes. It's sort of just what he's devoted his life to really. And even though he had a hit show in the nineties called Seinfeld, I'm sure you've heard of it, it was probably one of the biggest shows of all time.

(01:06)

He never wavered from the thing that he really wanted to do, which was to be a comic and tell jokes on stage. And that's a pretty similar story for a lot of comedians, I would say. But why this book is so special because he documents 50 years’ worth of material. So all of his jokes from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and 2010s, and that's how the book is actually broken up. He writes down all of his material or most of his material anyway, or at least the material that actually made it on stage. And I can honestly say that the book is just as funny as any time that I've ever seen him do a special or seen him live. And that's really just a testament to how strong I think these jokes actually are because they're not reliant totally on the performance as they are on the structure and the wit and the logic that is behind them.

(02:12)

So to be able to read them and hear his voice and laugh and sometimes even crack up while you're reading it, that's a really strong testament to the overall quality I feel of the work. But I don't want to make this episode too much about Seinfeld's greatness, and I'm using air quotes because greatness to me is a highly subjective thing, especially when you're talking about art and comedy more than anything really so subjective. You have clean comics, you have edgy comics, and that's really just more of a stylistic choice. And people can argue about who's better and who's worse. But the big thing that I do want to hone in on here because we have the ability now to look back because Seinfeld has done it for such a long period of time, is that this is a great example of doing the work, right?

(03:11)

This is something that you've heard me talk about in previous episodes, more specifically in the most recent bad advice episode on shortcuts. And so I thought this was a great example and book really to feature as a building block off of that same theme and showcase that you don't have to be a Marine or a marathon runner or someone who's doing grueling work to put in the work every day. This is a different kind of work. And Seinfeld's kind of notorious for, or at least he's open about the fact that he writes jokes every single day and he has for 50 years or whatever, however long he's been doing it. And he has a notepad that he writes in every day. And so I like to look sometimes at the artist, even if you don't enjoy their work, there's a lot you can appreciate in the way artists or a creative person or someone doing anything goes about how they work.

(04:26)

And you can pull those things for your own life or draw inspiration from those things for your own life. And I think just as a general rule, not even specifically with Seinfeld, all standup is extremely difficult. And these comedians, the great ones specifically, they make it look so effortless, but it's the farthest thing from it. It's such an incredibly demanding craft, and there's so much to learn just from any comedian or any comic who puts in the work and gets on stage and writes jokes and bombs and does it all over again and continues to just build the craft over and over and over and over again. It's just something that to me is a great learning experience for any creative person because they are doing it in a very performative way and in the face of failure in a very direct way. Look, as a writer, you don't have that direct performative feedback.

(05:38)

You could fail and believe me there are a lot of failures and a lot of rejection, but you are not doing it in front of people. You're not being booed, you're not bombing, you're not getting, it's like it's a whole different thing. And so building up the craft and being able to do it, it's such a demanding thing, and I just find it so remarkable, especially when you look at the great ones like Seinfeld who really has just perfected the thing that he does. And one of his knocks is, well, he's just doing the Seinfeld thing, or he does observational comedy. But to me, that's just like a dumb thing to say because if you're any artist doing anything, really all you're trying to do is find your voice and be able to deliver it consistently over and over again. And so for someone to just bucket that into a thing, it strikes me as someone being flippant about the quality and the consistency of an individual who clearly knows what he does extremely well and can do it on command.

(06:50)

But the funniest part about him is when you listen to Seinfeld in an interview, and I've listened to tons of interviews with him, he sounds like the same person that you hear on stage. So he's either always in character or he's just really found his voice super well, and he's able to deliver it, like I said, on this consistent, consistent basis. But you see the same thing with other comedians who do it with a different style. You know, look at Chappelle or Chris Rock, both of who I love, by the way. They do the same thing. They have their own voice and they consistently push boundaries and give it to you in a hilarious way that makes you almost pee your pants. So it's just the nature of being an artist. You might agree with the stylistic choice, or you might not, but you can't knock someone for just doing the Seinfeld thing or just doing the Chris Rock thing.

(07:49)

They took years to be able to just do that thing and get paid for it and entertain people with it and be consistently great with it. And so that knock to me is, it's a little bit ignorant in a way, at least in my mind. And so one of the things that I really just love about Seinfeld more than anything is this process piece and the way that he thinks about the craft. I heard him say recently when people come up to him and ask them or tell him that they really want to be a comedian, he always says, “Don't do it.” And most people look at that and say, well, why would you say that? Because you've had such a great career in this thing. And what he always says is the people that really want to do it are going to do it anyway.

(08:34)

And if you're going to be deterred by me telling you not to do it, then you weren't going to make it anyway. And I always thought that that was a great way to look at it. And in the book, he actually has a great quote where he says, “I wish I could recommend it to you as an experience you should have (and of course, he's talking about standup) but it's like recommending that someone become an iguana. If you don't have those crazy eyes leathery skin and the long tongue, it's tough to get there.” I just thought that that was a funny quote. He has so many great ones actually in this book. Another one that he says is, in the beginning, “To just put yourself into what it is. Let's face it, that fairly untenable position. You have to love it badly, madly, maybe even, sadly.”

(09:20)

And I just find it to be so true and so common amongst a lot of these stories that you read with artists in that they are sadly committed to the thing that they're doing. And maybe that is what you need. I think that all in all, the one thing that you can sum up Seinfeld with is his utter trust in the process. He has such a commitment to the process. In the show, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee on Netflix, one of his other famous shows aside from Seinfeld, which is another testament to his genius really, but he said to, I think it was Trevor Noah when he had him on there. He said, “Everything you need to know, you'll learn when you need to know it.” And I found that as just an utter belief in the process. And that is something that I feel is super hard to learn.

(10:20)

And every day you need to be reminded that you're on a journey and you're in the process and you need to just trust it. And when you need to know it, you're going to be presented with that information. And I just found that to be so helpful in so many ways. And there's just tons and tons of this stuff. If you dive in and try to listen to some of his interviews and stuff that he talks about when he is talking about process, you could really pick up a lot. I think he's someone who I've found to be pretty admirable, at least in that aspect of his life. And I'm sure that he wouldn't want people to think of him in this way, but he's someone who has surely traded off a lot in his life to be a comic for many, many years.

(11:15)

I mean, I don't even think he got married until his mid-forties, so I'm not going to analyze his personal life, but you could tell that he put a lot into the craft above everything else. And just one other thing I will say about him is that I think what he defines as comedy is it should look like something that is thrown together, but you spent years on it and you never reveal that. And I think that that is the true mark of a craftsman really having the confidence to just deliver that product and work on it and get it to the point where it is so good that it looks like it was just thrown together, but it wasn't. And in an effort to not keep this going on much longer than it needs to, I will start to wrap this up and just say that as far as all those quotes and different maxims and excerpts from not just this book, but different interviews and other things I've picked up along the way, I will feature those in this month's newsletter.

(12:27)

But I will finish with just this thought and that is considering what the title is, Is This Anything? And I know I talked a lot about process, and it's probably getting a bit repetitive at this point, but I think that the book title itself is a testament to process. Is this anything? It's a question that he's asked over and over in his life as he comes up with new ideas and tests, new jokes, and delivers those new jokes to an audience and they fail. And then you get back up and you do it again, and you ask yourself, is this anything? And to me, that's really what, not only his life, but this book is all about, at least from my perspective. So if you're interested at all, I'd definitely check it out. All right, that's all I've got. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, as always, please share it with family members, friends, and other people that you think might like it.

(13:27)

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