Comedian Jerry Seinfeld to perform in all five boroughs

Photo credit: Jerry Seinfeld (Getty Images)

New Yorkers who miss their Thursday night "Seinfeld" show will have a chance to spend a Thursday night with the city's most famous stand up comedian in person.

Jerry Seinfeld has announced he will do one 8 p.m. stand up comedy show in each of the five boroughs on Thursday nights in October and November.

The last theatrical show Jerry Seinfeld did in NYC was in 1998 and titled "I'm Telling You for the Last Time." Apparently, he has a coda.

Tickets for his show at The Beacon, on Oct. 4, which kicks off the tour, will be $76 to $89. Seinfeld will appear Lehman Concert Hall in the Bronx on Oct. 11, The Colden Auditorium at Queens College Oct. 18, the St. George Theater in Staten Island Nov. 1 and the Walt Whitman Theatre at Brooklyn College Nov. 8. Tickets go on sale Monday.

"I was born in Brooklyn, went to school in Queens and started out as a comedian in Manhattan. I feel like New York City taught me how to be funny," Seinfeld said in a statement.

"Welcome back, poppa!" exclaimed Williamsburg comedian Kate Berlant, when she heard the news. Seinfeld is a hero to stand up comedians not only because of his enormous success, but because he mainstreamed the performance art by using bits of his stand-up act in the first several seasons of his eponymous TV show, which ran from 1989-1998, said Berlant: "He essentially injected stand up comedy into the popular consciousness." Making sure none of the boroughs are slighted "is his way of expressing his love for New York," she said.

Roger Hailes, a comedian from the East Village, said the Big Apple tour demonstrates a need Seinfeld has to reconnect with his roots and to re-experience "the best feeling in the world" of having a set go well. "He doesn't need the money," Hailes observed.

But can a man worth an estimated $800 million still mine the quotidian minutiae that plagues the every man for maximum laughs?

"You can become rich but you don't stop being human. No matter how rich you get, you still get gas -- and hang nails," said Hailes, who hazarded that Seinfeld's set will probably be "70% new material." A person who can sit through a Seinfeld set and not laugh is "dead inside," Hailes decreed.

Greenpoint comedian and Seinfeld fan Mike Recine postulated that it could be amusing if Seinfeld's act was built on "little observations about having more money than everybody else."

Seinfeld, famously identified with the Upper West Side, could customize his stand-up act to each borough, Recine suggested: "Like for the Bronx, saying, 'don't you hate it when your pit bull attacks the mail man?' and in Brooklyn saying, 'don't you hate it when they don't cold brew your iced coffee?'"

Both Berlant and Recine predicted the shows would sell out. "He's not going to have the problem the rest of us have where they cancel the show because only four people are in the audience," said Recine. "He's not going to stand on stage and say, 'let's wait 15 minutes: Maybe more people will show up!

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Jerry's NYC
-- Seinfeld went to SUNY Oswego in Upstate New York before transferring to study Theater at Querns College and graduating in 1976.
-- Is a die-hard Mets fan
-- Did stand-up in his early days at Catch a Rising Star (formerly on the UES) in 1976.
-- Invited to create a sitcom for NBC in 1989 with stand-up colleague and fellow Brooklynite Larry David.
-- Started the Seinfeld Scholarship Program in 2000 to help public high school graduating seniors from one borough of NYC.
-- Wrote the forward to "Peanut Butter & Co. Cookbook", a shop he frequents in Greenwich Village.
-- Directed the Off-Broadway play, "Long Short Story" until last January.
(Ariam Frezghi) 

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