by It took four months for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to book a stand-up comedian performing stand-up comedy, and who knows how much longer we might have had to wait if not for Jerry Seinfeld’s appearance Monday night — since Seinfeld insists upon performing stand-up as a prerequisite to the late-night TV panel chat.
In fact, Seinfeld acted surprised to hear Colbert tell him he was the show’s first stand-up. “Really?”
His stand-up certainly had a different framing in terms of cinematography than we’ve seen in quite some time in late-night — the camera off to the side, but in close-up so we don’t have a sense of the stage or the audience. That was an interesting surprise.
And I was surprised to hear Seinfeld use the Swanson frozen dinners as the premise for his closing bit, since the Swanson line hasn’t been sold in American stores since Pinnacle Foods discontinued the line in 2009 (they still sell the spin-off Hungry-Man dinners) (and someone on Twitter wanted to argue this point because of chicken pot pies, but if you told anyone you were bringing home frozen dinners and showed up with a tiny chicken pot pie, your friends would never trust you again). At any rate. Seinfeld also has some thoughts on the naming of doughnut holes.
Roll the clip!
Seinfeld’s promoting not only his new season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (which featured Colbert as a past passenger guest), but also his yearlong monthly residency at The Beacon Theatre in New York City. Which he talks about here. “I know what I’m going to do, once a month for a year!” he said.
