Stopping and Starting With Success

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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Greencomb Carmichael. There's not much of a storyline to the online video series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Jerry Seinfeld rides around in a car with another comedian and they stop for coffee. Even with that simple format, the show has been streamed well over 100 million times. And Seinfeld even interviewed President Barack Obama.

Have you ever had one of those? George W. Bush, remember when he couldn't find the door in the wall and he was just looking for the door?

Yeah.

I don't. I believe that publicly. You've had one of those.

I have not had a public moment like that.

You haven't tumbled down a stair? You never leaned over and just started vomiting in Japan?

No. Nothing like that's happened so far.

Nothing. What's your most embarrassing president moment? This may be it.

See.

The web show even earned an Emmy nomination, a TV award that Seinfeld, of course, knew well from his years producing his successful mold breaking sitcom Seinfeld with Fello comedian Larry David. You don't have to be a fan of either of the shows to recognize that Jerry Seinfeld has a great ability to find success in new ways. It's why HBR Senior Editor Dan McGinn interviewed him for our January February 2017 issue. Dan started out by asking him about the critical success of his online series.

A lot of fun. I keep saying to people when we first put this thing out on the Internet, it wouldn't even play. Everybody was complaining that it's always stalling, it doesn't load. You know, it's out of sync. And so it was really fun to go from something that was really crude. I mean, they had just invented the GoPro, and so we were sticking them into the car windshields. And to go from that to today, it's only a few years, but now it's just like, you watch a video, nobody expects a video not to play play anymore on YouTube or anywhere on their phone. That's just like an automatic thing. So I've gotten that ride of a technology that was somewhat crude to now being very polished. And this show was made for that technology. It wasn't made for tv. I guess the Emmys, I don't know, maybe they like the show or maybe they want to seem current, but it was a very nice thing.

The show is Unlike normal talk shows. In much the same way that the original Seinfeld was not really like a sitcom.

Right.

People have attributed that to the fact that you and Larry hadn't worked in sitcoms before and you hadn't even really, as far as I know, watched a lot of sitcoms.

That's right.

How much was your lack of familiarity with the rules the key to your ability to innovate?

You know, it's very important to know what you don't like. It's good to have an idea. But a big part, I find, of a lot of innovation starts with someone saying, you know what I'm really sick of? That's where innovation begins. Like, for me, it's like, I'm really sick of music playing while somebody walks out to a desk, shakes hands, sits down. How are you? How are you? You look great. So do you. It's like, I'm sick of that. I want to hear what's the first funny thing this person said. I'm also sick of people who really. Talking is not their thing on talk shows, but they're there to sell their show, their product. The same thing with my TV show. That's one of the places where I start, what am I really sick of?

There's a book out now called Seinfeldia that looks back at the TV show. And one of the things that comes through very clearly in that is that you and Larry were really writing the show single handedly. You didn't really have a traditional writer's room, and that the fact that you cut the show off when it was so successful was really a result of the fact that you were burned out? Why didn't you try to come up with a more efficient, more sustainable way to make the show? What would McKinsey have said if they came in and said, you know, there's really a better way to do this, guys.

Who's McKinsey?

McKinsey's a big consulting firm that.

Are they funny?

They are not funny. They help people.

I don't need them.

No interest in efficiency or.

No, no. In fact, if you're efficient, you're doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The efficient way is the wrong way. In my field, I can't speak to any other field.

When you stopped the show, you were really focused on the idea that you wanted to sort of quit while you were ahead and not go through that decline that so many other artists go through. You made a good decision in 1997, 1998. How much of the fact that the show remains so well known and so popular today is attributable to that. And did you foresee that in any way?

Well, I would love to know the answer to that question, Dan. It's a great question. I would give anything if I could really get the answer to that. But I do think proportion is a key in everything, meaning what is the size and shape of the item? You know? So you're making this show, you're doing a TV show, and the show gets really popular. You decide we have to stop this at a certain point or it loses that magic that it has. It's like a TV show is kind of like a fun thing, and it's an entertainment thing and it's a business. But then all of a sudden you realize that there's some magic going on. So then it's not like if a deli is doing good business and everybody's coming into the deli, you don't close the deli. Why would you close the deli? People come in here every day to buy things. Nobody would close a deli because it's popular. But this thing had this other quality. And once I recognized that, I realized that I was the steward of that magic and that I had to try and preserve it. And that was exactly what you're describing. It was my guess and my theory. And to be honest, and I'm not comparing myself in any way, shape or form, but the way the Beatles ended when I was a kid, the Beatles ended after nine years. They were together nine years, and there was something about that single digit that once a TV series is on double digits, just felt like, God, is this thing ever going to end? 10 seems so much longer than 9. So I decided that the 9th season should be the last so that the audience would feel like they saw a performance that ended on a high note.

If that show had come around in a time of streaming media, when shows dropped on Netflix or Amazon, they didn't need to be 22 minutes. They didn't come on every Thursday night. You could do as many as you wanted. They dropped all at once. How different do you think it might have been?

No different. Zero. No different.

Those constraints weren't a big piece of it.

No. Irrelevant.

You had unbelievable success at a very early age. You willingly sort of pulled the plug on it, and then you needed to figure out what to do with the rest of your life. That's something that Steve Jobs and successful business people sometimes have to deal with. How did you approach that task?

I never saw it as a task. I never thought I had to do anything. You have to remember, I was a successful professional stand up comedian for many, many years before I got the show. I knew that was going to be my life. The show came along and obviously that was quite a detour. But I never saw myself as anything other than a professional stand up comedian. I did have the access to do many other things, but especially having done the sitcom. See, people do all these things because they all want the ride of being at the top of a thing that is popular and respected. That's the ultimate ride in my business. It's like you're making something that people really like and they also respect you. You know, the critics, you win awards. People don't think it's just some hacky, lowest common denominator junk and they want it to be their thing. So I got all three of those pieces in one shot. I went from being relatively unknown to getting the greatest ride you can possibly get in entertainment and feeling even a certain amount of cultural relevance that people were saying things that you were saying. They were picking up on phrases that you were making up like re gifting and shrinkage and all that stuff. And so I felt very happy, very satisfied. I've never felt like I have to follow this or I have to. I think it would have been a mistake to try and springboard that and build a huge media company of making movies and TV shows. And I don't know, it just didn't interest me. The reason the show was successful is because I micromanaged it. Every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. You know, I micromanaged it and that's my way of life.

Can you teach somebody to be funny?

Nope.

Just born with it.

Yep. You could teach them to be a professional, but you can't teach them to be funny. There are aspects of making it a profession. You know, I talk to comedians, even like somebody like Amy Schumer, and I will sit down and I'll try and give her the benefit of my perspective on what an act is. You know, what I think it should be.

So there are technical pieces that you need to learn to go from being funny to being a comedy.

I call them philosophies. They're philosophies of when I started out, you had to be able to go out in front of a music act for 15, 20 minutes that did not want to hear you at all, doesn't know you, and doesn't particularly even light comedy. And you had to get them rolling as a total unknown, or you just didn't get that job. Now, comedians, they only perform for comedy audiences. So that's a technique that I think is a big. When you have that skill and then Toyota is having their convention and they need a comedian and you can go into some convention center in front of 5,000 people and perform for them and make them laugh. That's a great part of this profession because these companies need that and that's what's great about stand up. So I don't know. So I believe in this thing of having an act that like, is one of an act is a thing that works no matter where you are.

In your interview with Obama, he came across as really quick and funny.

Yeah.

How effective do you think that is as a leader, as a business person, as somebody who's not doing standup but just trying to get by as a professional? How much of an advantage is it to be naturally funny?

Being funny? It might even compete with being really good looking as one of the ultimate weapons that a person can have in human society.

And is it genetic? Are your children funny?

I didn't realize how genetic it was until I saw my daughter and I just couldn't believe how funny she was. And I know I didn't teach her to be that funny and I know my dad was funny. And so I see now that, yeah, there's a huge genetic component to this. You just kind of pop out with this thing.

In Comedian, the documentary that you did a while ago, there's a scene of you before a show and it's striking how nervous you seem, even though you've had so much preparation, so much success. What do you do before a show in the last 10 minutes to be mentally prepared? How do you manage your nerves and get yourself psyched up to perform?

Well, you don't have to get psyched up. The audience will take care of that. You walk out in front of 3,000 people that have paid 75 to $100, and they're sitting there saying, we want to laugh right now. You feel that when you walk out on that stage. So you don't need to get psyched up. But every comedian, like every athlete, has a little routine. My routine is to look at notes until it's five minutes before the show. And then I don't put on my jacket until I'm going to walk out. So when my tour producer says five minutes, it's like I put on the jacket. When the jacket goes on, it's like my body knows, okay, now we got to do our trick. And then I stand and I Like to just walk back and forth and then I just. That's it. But that's my little pre show routine that I never vary it and that seems to just kind of signal everything. And I don't know, it just feels.

Comfortable now after a show it seems like you really obsess over every moment. What worked, what didn't, what you need to do to get better. Tell me a little bit about that after action process.

You have to be harshly critical of yourself to succeed at this because the audience is. The comedian is the most judged human on the planet. Even an athlete is not judged. Every 6 seconds or 12 seconds you get a rating. So you must be harshly critical. In the same way you have to be incredibly nurturing and kind of affirmative with yourself. Encouraging. You have to be very encouraging and affirmative. When you're trying to write, create new things. After you create them, you have to be harshly critical of them. So you have to have that band of how to encourage yourself to be confident and be courageous and also how to be critical and go, that's good, but it's not good enough. Take it out. So I don't like to be so critical that I get depressed, but I get close to that. And managing that is the toughest part, I think, of the profession. You want to be self critical, but you don't want to take yourself to the point that you're really depressed and overly harsh. Most comedians are. Most comedians come off stage and you say, how was that? And they'll just go, I hate myself.

Who haven't you had in your car and for coffee yet? Has anybody said no? And does the format, the fact that you're not having people on simply to shill for their next project, do you risk running out of people? And does this have sort of a limited shelf life?

My feeling now is that I want to start having some people on again that I like. I don't want to keep digging down the barrel of comedians so that I always have new people. I feel like I want to see Alec Baldwin again and Larry David again and Sarah Silverman again. You know, 12 minutes of Alec Baldwin is not enough for me. And I assume the same of the audience. So I'm kind of looking at the show now the way the old Tonight show was where you would have these people like Charles Nelson Riley who didn't have anything to promote, but they were just great on a talk show and so they would come on all the time and you were always happy to see them. So I think I'm more looking at the show now as something that I'll maintain the standard as opposed to the variety.

Corporate leaders. You've spent a lot of time with these people in your show business career. Is there anything from your career that you think or anything you've seen along the way that you think would be very useful for these people to know?

So, in other words, could I help you do your job?

I asked some decent questions. My goal here was to be a better interviewer than Judd Apatow at 15.

You did a very good job. Really good job.

Well, I'll still hate myself when I go out of here.

Right? That's good. That's good. Then you will advance.

That's Jerry Seinfeld, comedian and host of the web series Comedians and Cars Getting Coffee. He was interviewed by HBR senior editor Dan McGinn. You can follow HBR on Twitter harvardbiz or connect with us on Facebook and LinkedIn as well. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast.