GRIP STRENGTH

Last night I watched a documentary called “Comedian”. It follows Jerry Seinfeld four years off his TV show. He is now

extremely rich and extremely famous and has just released an HBO special that encompassed the set he had been honing for the past twenty one years. Fifty minutes honed over two decades. Now he has got nothing and is trying to put together a new set to gain back his own identity as a “comedian”.

The film is full of delights. He has just traded his seventeen year old girlfriend for a new wife that he casually approached at the gym and proceeded to steal from a New York scion fresh off their honeymoon. He races from set to set in a brand new 911 and commutes between his place in the Beresford and the thirty two million dollar Hamptons house he bought off Billy Joel. When he rolls up to the clubs and walks on stage he is greeted with a standing ovation (this never happens) while all the other broke late thirties comedians with roommates stare at him in a rage. And yet, quickly thereafter the glow wears off and he begins to bomb in a way that is viscerally painful to even the viewer. Before long the audience is heckling him.

The documentary also follows a twenty nine year old comedian on the come up named Orny Adams (doomed from the start) that is perpetually on the brink of making it; he’s just been signed by Jerry’s manager and is scheduled for his debut on Letterman (a major milestone to becoming a famous comedian). At one point Orny is bemoaning to Seinfeld that he has to make it soon or he is going to kill himself. He spends a solid five minutes talking about how he has been doing comedy for over a decade while all his friends from high school have gone on to get rich on Wall Street, etc. Orny declares that if he doesn’t blow up and get famous soon he will be a complete and total failure and lists a thousand reasons why he should get put on but is being blocked or inhibited.

This is the most important moment of the documentary. As Adams is delivering this angsty soliloquy, you can see Jerry get a look on his face like Orny is speaking Japanese to him. He quite literally cannot understand what Adams is saying and keeps repeating “what” over and over. The idea that one of his friends making money on Wall Street could relate to Adams doing comedy is quite literally incoherent to Seinfeld. He sincerely cannot fathom how these things are related.

Later in the film, as Seinfeld is taking off in his plane to do one of the weekly multiple dates he’s booked himself in some middle of nowhere club to rehearse his new set, he talks about how to him there is only one criterion for success: “are you still working?”. If you are, you’ve made it. If you have stopped, you’re a failure.

This was twenty years ago. You have never heard of Orny Adams.

What is so interesting about the doc is just how fucking badly Orny wants it, just how much he believes he is destined for it and how tightly he’s holding on to it and how little he gets in return for it. At one point, Orny has just finished taping Letterman and is upset with his performance. He says that he’s never been closer to getting what he’s wanted since he was a child but he’s never been more miserable.

Meanwhile, Seinfeld, who has just bought an entire warehouse on the Upper West Side to store his Porsche collection. He believes in nothing other than the virtue of his work. At one point another comedian is talking about some major CEO he has just met with and Seinfeld looks at him and says “what we do is so much more important. we make people laugh, no one else can do that”.

At the risk of taking this essay in a bit of a Gladwellian direction, there are many areas of my life where I am Orny and not Seinfeld. Where my actions are dictated by an outcome I am owed. Where what someone else does somehow threatens the way in which I conduct my own affairs.

I know I am rehashing this point over and over, but I think it is something of a fucking miracle that graspingness is not causative to greatness. It’s somewhat incredible that the top 10% in the world have to completely white knuckle it at the cost of their well-being and sanity but the very best are totally effortless. Orny Adams spent a life trying incredibly hard, grasping to something he was owed with all his might, got pretty good but not great, and ended up with nothing but misery and empty pockets.

Meanwhile, the only thing Jerry’s ever held with a tight grip is the wheel of his 911 as he races around Manhattan.