I used to tell people Jerry Seinfeld was a cousin of mine. At one friend’s car-ride-away bat mitzvah, it was one of my talking points. “He took out the “ch” for professional reasons,” I said. “Hollywood stuff.”
Regardless if Jerry is long lost kin, today he took to Reddit to do an Ask Me Anything session where he touched on many subjects–of course the magic of Seinfeld, obsessing over the minutiae, and most excitingly, a new project with his right hand man, Larry David.
On his first time meeting Larry David:
“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.”
On how his white sneaker collection started:
“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.”
On new Larry David project:
“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.”
On why he chose comedy:
“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.”
(Photo by Getty)