Is This Anything?

by Jerry Seinfeld

Public Speaking I saw a study that said, the number one fear of the average person is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two! How in the world is that? That means to most people, if you have to go to a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy.

“Wait, I got to fix it. Wait up for me.” Kids don’t want other kids to wait. They want them to “wait up.” Because when you’re little, your life is up, the future is up, everything you want is up. “Wait up. Hold up. Shut up. Mom, I’ll clean up. Just let me stay UP.” For parents everything is down. “Calm down. Slow down. Come down here. Sit down. Put that down. You are GROUNDED.”

Biathlon The Biathlon is a favorite of mine. Biathlon combines skiing and shooting a gun. How many alpine snipers are into this? Seems like two totally unrelated things. It’s like combining swimming and strangle a guy. You swim a lap, throttle a guy, kick turn, back across the pool.

Shower Radio Someone gave me a shower radio as a present. Great gift. What better place to dance than naked, on a slick surface, next to a glass door? The whole point of the shower is nothing matters when you’re in there. Unless someone flushes a toilet, that matters a great deal. You ever do that? There’s a sense of power. You move this little handle and down the hall 30 feet away, in another room someone screams like they’re in an electric chair. It’s like voodoo. You call people in, “You know Ed’s in the shower, right? Watch this, we can control his whole life right from here.” (pushes handle) “Aaaaaahh!” (pushes handle just a little) “Aa” It’s a very sensitive control.

Whichever side of marriage you’re on You don’t get what the other people are doing. I can’t hang out with single guys. If you don’t have a wife, we have nothing to talk about. You have a girlfriend? That’s Wiffle ball, my friend. You’re playing Paintball War. I’m in Afghanistan with real loaded weapons. Married guys play with full clips and live rounds. “This is not a drill.” Single guy is sitting on a merry-go-round, blowing on a pinwheel. I’m driving a truckful of nitro down a dirt road. You single guys here tonight, looking at me… “Hey, Jerry, what if I want to be a married guy like you? What do I got to have if I want to be a married guy?” I’ll tell you what you got to have. You better have some answers, buddy… You better have some answers for that woman. Women have a lot of questions. Their brains are strong. Active. And on high alert at all times. You’re sleeping, she’s researching. (flipping book pages quickly) The female brain is cooking all the time. The female brain is one of the most competent and capable organs in all of the biological universe. Girl Power. There is nothing the female brain cannot do. It will solve all problems of Earth and Life. Having done that, it will move on to the hypothetical. Theoretical situations. That may or may not occur. The female needs to know How you MIGHT respond. “If you faked your own death, and I found out about it, what would you say THEN…?” “What are we talking about now?” “Oh, I dreamt the whole thing last night, so don’t...

I like when people go, “What was I saying…? What was I saying…?” Oh. So, even you’re not paying attention to this? And I’m supposed to be taking notes?

The key to marriage of course, is to make the other person happy. That’s what I tell all my guy friends. “Make your woman happy.” You? You’re not going to be happy and that’s good. Because that cuts your work in half. Now we’re down to one person that we have to worry about keeping so god damn happy.

A man wants the same thing from a woman that he wants from his underwear. Certain amount of support and a certain amount of freedom.

When I’m with my wife, who I love so dearly, and a thought enters my head, the first thing I think is, “Well, I know I can’t say that.” Maybe I could say I heard someone else say it. And then she and I can share a warm moment together, agreeing on what an idiot that person must be.

I’m just asking if you think this makes me look fat?” “No, I don’t. Because you are not fat, so that would be impossible.” “But if it did make me look fat, would you consider lying to not hurt my feelings?” … “Well, I would never want to hurt your feelings.” “Then you might be lying. I could look fat.” That’s it. Game over. You lose again. “Would you like to play ‘Do you think my friend is pretty’ roulette?” And that’s not even Russian Roulette. There’s a bullet in every chamber of that game.

dual zone separate buttons on each side climate control systems. Gee, I wonder if it was a married person that thought of that? Thought this could possibly come in handy, if you are with a certain person that you are perchance legally bound to for the rest of your life, and you need them to shut the hell up about the temperature. “I’m freezing. I’m roasting. I’m boiling. It’s blowing on me.” When my wife says, “The air is on me.” It’s the equivalent of a normal person saying, “A bear is on me.” That is the emergency level we are at. And I respond at that level too. “Oh my god, an evil breeze from a hostile vent is attacking my mate and life partner. Who, incidentally, bore me three children without anesthesia. Probably could have caught the babies herself if no one else was around… But cannot survive a waft of air, three degrees off her optimum desired temperature.”

All fathers essentially dress in the clothing style of the last good year of their lives. Whatever a man was wearing, around the time he got married, he freezes that moment in fashion history and just rides it out to the end. You see fathers on the street, “… ’05… ’91… ’83…” And it’s fine. It’s all fine… Nobody’s really looking at Dad anyway.

We had Shredded Wheat. It was like wrapping your lips around a wood chipper. You’d have breakfast, you had to take two days off for the scars to heal so you could speak again.

The opposite of The Buffet is a Swanson “Hungry-Man” TV dinner. Little taste of prison right there in your own home.

It was probably a janitor going by with a broom that went, (walking by sweeping, then stops) “Just put some chocolate on it, you morons. Stop punishing people. I work here and I prefer Raisinets myself. I like the little ‘shuka-shuka’ sound they make when you shake the box, because they’re not all stuck together inside. So I don’t have to crook my finger like the Wicked Witch of the West to get them out. It’s just chocolate. It’s not heroin. No one’s going to have an issue with it. Just melt it. Dip it. Sell it.” And that is how a humble custodial worker became the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Sun-Maid raisin company.

In the City, On the Island I was born in Brooklyn. We lived in the city. Then my parents decided they wanted to move out of the city and live on Long Island. You live IN the city. But if you decide to move out, you will be ON Long Island. You don’t live IN Long Island. You can’t get IN it. You just stay ON it. If you go to Jersey, you’ll say, “We’re OUT in Jersey. We’re OUT. We couldn’t make it in the city. Sometimes we go DOWN the shore. We’re DOWN and OUT.” My mother would say, “Jerry, get ready. We’re going IN the city today. We’re going IN. We’re going to get ON a train. And we’re going IN the city.” You don’t get IN the train. You get ON it. Even though, you see trains… There’s nobody on the trains. They’re inside the trains. But in New York we don’t talk like that. We get ON the train. Why do we get ON the train? So we can get OFF it. “Get OFF the train. This is our stop. This is where we get OFF. We’ve got to get OFF. So that we can get IN the cab.” We got ON the train. But we get IN the cab. We do not get ON the cab. Why do we get IN the cab? So we can get OUT. “Get OUT of the cab. We’re here. Get OUT.” Now we have UBER, that’s the new thing. What do we do with that? We don’t get ON it. We don’t get OFF it. We don’t get IN it. What do we do? We TAKE it. We TAKE UBER. Because there’s no money. Nobody understands how it works. People ask you, “How did you get here?” “I don’t know. We just TOOK an UBER…” It’s like M&M’s in a bowl. You just take them. “There was a litt...

In My 60s I love being in my 60s. I want to be clear about that. It’s my favorite decade of human life so far. When you’re in your 60s, and someone asks you to do something, you just say, “No.” No reason. No excuse. No explanation. I can’t wait for my 70s. I don’t even think I’ll answer. I think you just wave when you’re in your 70s. That’s what I’ve seen those people do… “Hey, you want to check out that flea market…?” (Walks away and just “waves it off” without looking back…) I like this time. I don’t want to change, grow, improve myself, expand my interests, meet anyone or learn anything I don’t already know. I don’t lie in restaurants anymore. “How is everything?” “I don’t like it here.” “Would you like the check?” “No. I intend to press charges actually. This is outrageous. You must be shut down. Don’t touch these plates. This is a crime scene. I’m going to put some yellow tape around it.”