Jerry Seinfeld interview: 'Stand-up is the purest thing – it's also the hardest'

There is one big question I want to ask Jerry Seinfeld when I am granted a rare interview. Why is this legendary comic doing four stand-up shows in London next month? Or, to reframe it, why is he doing stand-up at all? He most definitely does not need the cash. In 2017 he was reported to be worth over $900 million (which makes him the world’s richest comedian), thanks largely to the global success of his acclaimed, self-named sitcom “about nothing”.

The answer is that he is simply compelled. “I think it’s the purest thing as well as the hardest.” At 65 he is touring and also performing regularly at New York’s Beacon Theatre. “I like the life and I like the kind of people that do it. I feel more comfortable around comedians than around anybody else. You’re kind of outside showbusiness. You’re not really in the mainstream. You’re in your own little world.”

These are difficult times to be a comic. When the trim, Brooklyn-born per-former started in the late Seventies it was a different world. No scandals over inappropriate jokes, no potentially career-ending Twitter storms. In 2015 Seinfeld said political correctness would destroy comedy. He now qualifies his comment and suggests that maybe more scrutiny is not always detrimental.

“It’s just made it more complicated. I don’t think it’s good for comedy to be too easy. I think it’s fine that the culture changes around us and it gets frustrating for the comedians. I think what people expect from us is a mental agility to deal with whatever we have to deal with. There’s something fun in everything, it’s a matter of you keeping your sense of fun about it.”

He does, however, agree that comedy is policed in a way it never was before: “Yes, there definitely is comedy police, but they have no real power. They have no jails.” We are talking shortly after Jo Brand found herself in the firing line for a remark on BBC Radio 4 about throwing battery acid rather than milkshakes. I tell Seinfeld about the furore and how the police assessed the incident and there were calls for Brand to face charges. He is shocked: “Oh my God.”

Seinfeld’s world-beating comedic style has never been likely to attract police attention. He is more interested in life’s quirky minutiae than current affairs. He pretty much singlehandedly popularised the “what’s the deal with?” observational comedy that has served stars from Michael McIntyre to Micky Flanagan so well. A typical routine is asking why women use so many cotton balls: “The only time I ever see them is in the waste basket… there’s too or three that look like they’ve been through some horrible experience.”

When he does tell a rare political joke he nails it. In his 2018 Netflix special, Jerry Before Seinfeld, he says you’d have to be crazy to want to be President: “‘I should be the President’ to me is like ‘I should be Thor.’” It sounds like the ultimate barb aimed at Donald Trump but it isn’t. “That was one of the jokes I wrote that got me from living with my parents to being on TV. That was actually written in the Seventies.” He doesn’t think he has the temperament for satire. “I’ve never been able to come up with stuff around politics.

“I like to take so long, and with politics you have to be very quick. I tend to obsess over small details. I feel like I’m making little bits of jewellery. I don’t care about how slow I work, I just like to get every word the way I want it. It’s really about obsession.” He prefers to home in on relationship humour: “A date is a job interview that lasts all night.”

His personal life — he is married with three children — seems to run as smoothly as one of his riffs. Mean-while, one of America’s stand-up greats who followed his trail, Louis CK, admitted to sexual misconduct in 2017 and has gone from major tours to club gigs. In May CK planned to perform in Leeds. The gigs were quickly cancelled due to the outcry. Does Seinfeld think CK will ever be able to come back? “I don’t know. I think he’s in new territory that’s very hard to navigate.”

This is Seinfeld’s first UK visit for eight years. His humour is so universal he barely needs to change a word to make it work on this side of the Atlantic. Though he does check one thing: “Do you have Pop Tarts?” He gets some advice from British friends such as Ricky Gervais and is planning a couple of warm-ups when he arrives — he doesn’t know where, but in 2011 he popped up at the Comedy Store so there could be a surprise gig there.

Another surprise is that the co-creator (with Larry David) of one of the most successful sitcoms ever is not actually a sitcom fan: “I don’t really like sitcoms. The show that really was very influential was Monty Python, the absolute essence of the kind of comedy I like. Those guys, their attitude and that love of silly little things and just having fun, that completely spun my brain around. Monty Python and Pop Tarts really affected me more than anything else as a child.”

Another series of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee comes to Netflix on July 19, in which he drives and chats with chums such as Gervais, Eddie Murphy and Seth Rogen. He’s so powerful he writes his own rules. While stars like Kevin Hart and Dave Chappelle have banned phones from live shows he has a different take: “I don’t like to inconvenience people.” Does he worry fans will have seen material on YouTube before the gig? “I don’t care. People want to see things that they’ve seen before. I mean, if it’s a good piece of work, it’s a good piece of work.”

Reviews of his Beacon Theatre run suggest he is on top form. He seems easy-going, a throwback to a simpler, more innocent age in conversation, but onstage he can whinge for America. Is he becoming a grumpy old man? “I think I’ve always been like that. I’ve always been extremely irritated by nonsensical things.”

Jerry Seinfeld plays the Eventim Apollo, W6, on July 12-13 (020 8563 3800, eventimapollo.com)