Yet more often the reader will give a positive answer, especially when one can imagine Seinfeld himself delivering these lines. The question in the title, he explains, is what comedians ask each other when they develop new routines.
Seinfeld has kept all the routines he has written since he began working comedy clubs back in the 1970s. He reproduces them here, decade by decade. The comedian is famous for his commentary on everyday life — parking lots, consumer products, women's pocketbooks, the competition for armrests in movie theaters, etc. Usually he finds gold in these bits. Sometimes not.
One of his worst is about kitchen sponges. What's funny about sponges? Even Jerry Seinfeld doesn't know. Yet he does find the humor when he observes that sports fans basically just root for laundry. Players come and go and are swapped for other players from other teams. The only constant is the uniform — the laundry. Or when he comments that your home is basically a "garbage processing center." Everything that comes in — new phones, new furniture, new clothing, etc. — eventually winds up in a landfill.
Seinfeld's routines, because they cover so many decades, provide both a cultural history of America and an autobiography of the comedian himself. Early routines cover such topics as dating, sex and childhood memories. Later on his jokes move on toward marriage and raising children. His humor is nonpolitical and non-topical, meaning that it has more staying power than most comedy acts.
At the beginning of his book Seinfeld explains the appeal of his chosen career: "I love hearing a laugh that's never existed in the world before." He didn't hear my laughs as I read his book, but they were audibly there just the same.
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