“There is a great premium on originality. And being funny is not just enough for the taste of audiences today. They really want to get comedy and a person. A uniqueness. And no one can write that for you so you have to create that…Everyone’s funny in a different way.”
Jerry Seinfeld
So let’s review the bidding on entertainer extraordinaire Jerry Seinfeld:
1) At 8-years old he makes a friend laugh hard enough to spit his milk out and thinks, “I would like to do this professionally.”
2) Graduates from college with honors in 1976 and does his first open mic night.
3) Works on his craft by writing jokes and performing every night for free— for years.
4) In 1981, after some success in stand-up he does his first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
His fame and popularity would continue to rise as a stand-up comedian throughout the 80s, but his off-the-chart success would come in the creation in 1989, along with Larry David , of the sitcom Seinfeld. Not much needs to be said of the top rated show which ran for ten years and is the number one rated syndicated television show of all time (yes, ahead of I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and All in the Family).
The show is his Mount Everest. It would be hard to imagine a scenario in which he could top that kind of iconic success. Success that paid him enough to buy Billy Joel’s Long Island estate in 2000 for $32 million to go along with his Porsche collection (and homes in Manhattan, California and Colorardo) . Here we are ten years removed from when Seinfeld stopped taping and he made $70 million dollars last year. In 2011, Forbes listed him at number 40 on its list of The World’s Most Powerful Celebrities. Which is amusing in light of the quote in yesterday’s post where he said he did not care about money, only that he cared about being funny.
Few will ever reach Seinfeld’s measure of success, but those that do will more than likely follow a time test pattern. He was passionate about developing his craft and worked hard and writing original material. It’s safe to say that he got in his 10,000 hours between 1976 and 1989 when he launched his TV program.
Link to The Tonight Show interview in 1990 at the launch of the Seinfeld TV program.
Kickstarter launch in 2 days, July 25.
Screenwriting from Iowa 
[…] So let’s review the bidding on entertainer extraordinaire Jerry Seinfeld: 1) At 8-years old he makes a friend laugh hard enough to spit his milk out and thinks, “I would like to do this professionally.” 2) Graduates from college with honors in 1976 and does his first open mic night. 3) Works on his craft […] Original Source… […]