Recap Jerry Seinfeld at Riverside Theater

There are two Jerry Seinfelds, and the one that still owns a sizeable chunk of pop-culture real estate was not the Jerry that visited Riverside Theater Friday. That Jerry—the big-haired, single-guy misanthrope that can still be seen several times a day via syndicated Seinfeld re-runs—hasn’t aged a day since the late ’90s. This Jerry, on the other hand, has aged a lot—he’s now a fiftysomething married gazillionaire who was last seen cramming the mediocre 2007 kiddie flick Bee Movie down our throats via every promotional avenue known to man.

Most Seinfeld fans love that Jerry, and not just because Larry David wrote his best lines. There isn’t anything wrong with this Jerry, but we don’t really know this seemingly nice enough rich dude who claims against logic that he still takes out the garbage, just like you ’n’ me. But since this Jerry is the only one who actually exists, he’s the one that was treated to thunderous standing ovations before and after his stand-up act Friday night, even if the material didn’t really warrant it. Seinfeld is still an amusing comic, but he’s reached the point in his career where people will laugh as soon as he walks onstage. And it’s pretty much impossible to stay on your game as a comic when your celebrity trumps the quality of your jokes.

This was evident throughout Seinfeld’s set, which dealt mainly with the life of this Jerry, which barely resembles the televised misadventures of the self-absorbed womanizer we know as that Jerry. A married man of 10 years with three kids, Seinfeld eased not so comfortably into the usual stock jokes about domestic life. Have you heard the one about your wife asking if she looks fat in those jeans? How about the one about how your wife won’t have sex with you anymore? Nothing against marriage humor, but there must be other bits of gold to be found in one of our oldest societal institutions beyond tired “Take my wife, please!” jokes that belong to an era of comedy that Seinfeld supposedly ushered us out of.

Seinfeld showed flashes of the old genius, believe it or not, when he talked about taking out the garbage. Seinfeld’s greatest strength has always been his ability to take something that’s universally accepted and fundamentally mundane and reveal how absurd it is, and he hit the mark while examining how “everything is in the process of becoming garbage.” You buy something, you enjoy it for a while, and then you gradually move it out of the house and toward the trash heap. “No object has successfully made a transition from the garage back to the house,” Seinfeld observed. “Garage even sounds like a form of the word garbage.” It wasn’t an earth-shattering bit, but for a guy who built his career on not-earth-shattering bits, it was a gem. That Jerry would have been proud.