Jerry Seinfeld does not coast. Not on reputation, not on nostalgia, and certainly not on the gravitational pull of Seinfeld, the sitcom that was about nothing but was actually quite something: It was named the greatest television show of all time by TV Guide and made its star a billionaire. The comedian works constantly, methodically, obsessively, because for him, stand-up is not a job you master once and then sleep on. It’s an evolving skill that you constantly hone, no matter how old or how successful you are.
In an interview with The New Yorker magazine last year, Seinfeld spoke about working on his craft in Zen Buddhist terms: “Pursue mastery,” he said. “That will fulfill your life. You will feel good. I know a lot of rich people ... They don’t feel good, as you think they should and would. They’re miserable. Because, if they don’t master a skill, life is unfulfilling. So I work because if you don’t, in stand-up comedy, if you don’t do it a lot, you stink.”
It’s that philosophy that has kept him a headliner at The Colosseum since 2003, making him one of the longest-running headliners in the history of Las Vegas. In September 2024, he performed his 100th show at the iconic resort. He is currently in the middle of a six-date run this year, with additional dates scheduled for Oct. 10–11. For Seinfeld, these shows are part of the ongoing grind of a comic who never seems to find an end to life’s comedic absurdities.
Onstage, Seinfeld is a craftsman who knows perfection is theoretical. The Vegas audience may not see the hours of writing, rewriting, testing and discarding behind each seemingly casual observation. But his discipline is visible in the economy of his material—no fat, no filler, just setups and payoffs that arrive with precision. Offstage, his résumé reads like someone who has never taken his foot off the gas, even after Seinfeld’s incredible success: best-selling books (Is This Anything?, Seinlanguage), hosting the series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, producing and starring in Bee Movie, directing on Broadway and creating and starring in Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story for Netflix.
But all of it radiates from the same principle: Stay in motion, keep refining. Seinfeld turned 71 this year, and yet he seems to be just scratching the surface of the funny side of life. Luckily for us, the comedian has said that he wants to do stand-up well into his 80s and beyond—to the very end, in fact.
“People ask me about slowing down, and I go, ‘The work part of my life is not stand-up. It’s all the other things,’” Seinfeld told the Associated Press in an interview last year. “Stand-up is an incredible, pure experience. Surfing is the great regret of my life, that I never really got good at it. I did it for two weeks one time, many years ago. But if you were a surfer, you would never stop doing it. That’s what stand-up is for me. Feeling that energy, that natural life-force energy under you and around you—I never get tired of that.”
In his Colosseum shows, you see a man relentlessly honing his skill in an unending pursuit of getting the joke exactly right. Watch a master at work, and laugh.
Caesars Palace. 8 p.m. Sept. 5-6, starting at $84 plus tax and fee. caesars.com
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