Jerry Seinfeld is obsessed with creating the perfect joke, said Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian (U.K.). Once or twice a week, the comedian will head out to a small stand-up club in New York or New Jersey, and insert himself into the lineup. Seinfeld, a very wealthy man who earns at least $32 million a year from the syndication of his self-titled 1990s sitcom, doesn’t need the work. But he feels compelled to keep honing and testing his jokes on audiences. “I think of myself more as a sportsman than an artist,” says Seinfeld, 59, which explains his bemusement when he’s asked, as he often is, whether he’d like to act in films. “It’s hilarious that anyone would think I’d have the slightest interest in it. Baseball players don’t think, ‘I gotta get into soccer!’ They think, ‘I gotta hit that ball today. That’s my life.’” Keeping his act free of sex and swearing, and making gags about the minutiae of everyday life, is part of this athletic challenge, since it denies him easy laughs. “I do a lot of material about the chair. I find the chair very funny. No one’s interested in that, but I’m going to get you interested! That is a fun game to play. And it’s the basis of my career.”
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