Jerry Seinfeld: I'm Telling You For The Last Time

Jerry Seinfeld recently put on one of the most absurd tours in the history of American comedy: After the conclusion of his billion-dollar sitcom's nine seasons, he announced that he would retire his famous stand-up material after one final round of ludicrously big-ticket shows. People paid hundreds—thousands—of dollars for tickets to see Seinfeld poke fun at such chestnuts as cab drivers ("So, what's the deal with cab drivers and the B.O.") and pharmacists ("Why does that pharmacist have to be two and a half feet higher than everybody else Who the hell is this guy"), much of which has appeared on a hundred million Seinfeld reruns. What's the deal with air travel, anyway The men and the women sure are different, huh As recorded on I'm Telling You For The Last Time, it's almost never bad material, even when the topics are well-worn; you've just heard an awful lot of it before, which doesn't stop a presumably very wealthy audience from laughing and clapping at even the most familiar bits. I'm Telling You compiles 72 minutes of his funniest observational humor, and much of it will, fortunately, be new to most fans because the show's stand-up clips were generally excerpted from larger bits. But every time Seinfeld launches into a familiar riff—say, the way women always pay for everything with checks—he almost seems to be choking on his own redundancy. The title is a fitting epitaph for the material; still, Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before would have been more appropriate.