Having just turned sixty, I’ve become accustomed to seeing older crowds at events with the artists I prefer. I anticipated that possibility when I went to see Jerry Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan at the Chase Center in San Francisco last Friday, but the crowd turned out to be a mix of ages, with a number of twenty and thirty-somethings mingled among the older folks like myself. The demographics of both Seinfeld’s and Gaffigan’s material skewed toward my generation, however, leaning heavily on the travails of marriages and child-rearing. I was fine with that–nothing like feeling seen.
I read a few days ago that Matthew Perry, RIP, made something like $20 million a year from residuals from his career on Friends. That would seem a low estimate of what Seinfeld likely continues to make from his namesake series, given how central he was to it and how long it’s stayed on reruns and streaming. It made me wonder what possesses him at this point in his life to go through the rigors of a nationwide arena tour, with 2-3 shows per week in cities all around the country. Watching him do a surprisingly physical style of stand-up comedy, though, with lots of exaggerated gestures and wandering around the stage, it seemed to me that ultimately he still likes performing and knows that he’s as good at it as ever. The Chase Center holds just shy of twenty thousand seats for concerts, and he filled the place. Not bad for someone a few months shy of 70.
