Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee

This is a 1966 MGB Roadster in tartan red with a black leather interior.

It has a four-cylinder, 1.8-liter engine putting out 89 horsepower.

To me, this car is the most purely classical expression of sports car-ness ever.

The size, the lines, the cozy cockpit, the nice little exhaust burble.

When I saw this on the road at the age of nine or ten, among the giant Buicks and

Ford station wagons my parents and their friends drove, I thought, hey,

wait a minute, maybe the world could be a fun place.

Hello?

Todd?

Yeah.

Jerry Seinfeld.

Oh, hey, how's it going?

Remember we had talked about getting together to have coffee?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I happen to be in the East Village.

I happen to have a vintage sports car.

Everything I asked for.

All right, let's do this.

I'm Jerry Seinfeld, and this is Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

Today my guest is Todd Barry.

Todd's a very dry stand-up comedian.

I love dry guys.

Todd has been on many TV shows, including Dr. Katz and Louie.

He also had a featured role in the Academy Award-nominated film The Wrestler.

Todd told me he's never been in a sports car in his life, so I wanted to start him off in the classic.

What's up?

How you doing?

That's a beauty.

So tell me what this neighborhood is about.

Why are you here?

Because it's fun.

It's a lot of... There's that guy.

This is a guy who has no interest in consonants, just vowels.

I love that you've never been in a sports car.

I know.

It's like a guy who never had chocolate or never saw the sun.

So the whole idea of this thing is you want to look stylish.

You want to feel fun-loving so that other people are attracted to you as a vivacious individual.

So this could save me.

It couldn't hurt.

Isn't this fantastic?

Aren't you realizing that you've been missing something now?

I know.

The first thing I want to do is get you to understand why this is a thing.

Why if you had this, it would be a thing that you could get something out of in your life.

You're not going to go skiing.

You're not going hiking.

You're not going hot air ballooning.

All these fun things are mostly a giant pain in the ass, right?

Right.

Now here's a thing that really embodies all of those things,

and we can park it right down the block from your house.

I started comedy in Florida.

That was the late 80s.

It's just one of those things where they had open mic night during the regular show.

So you can call them up and go, hey, I want to start being a comedian tomorrow.

And they'll go, okay.

Look at this guy.

What era is he in?

I see that guy on my way to get coffee in the morning.

I turn around, my day's ruined.

I don't want to be in the same world as that guy.

Comedians have such an intense allergy to pretension.

Comedians should be shooting down pretension.

Right.

But maybe I sound pretentious as I'm saying this.

A little.

I was just doing that to prove my own point.

How long did it take you to find your place?

I lived there for like 19 years and I just kept not moving.

Like, just because it's just so easy to not move.

That is the New York real estate experience.

And the unbeatable example of it is Yoko Ono.

Your husband's murdered in cold blood.

Let's move.

We got a view of the park.

Where am I going?

What does it take to get you to move out of a great apartment in New York?

Apparently.

Nothing will make you move.

It seems to me like your life is going great.

Are you serious?

Yeah.

Why do you say that?

You're a working professional stand-up comedian.

I have to remind myself sometimes.

I look at you and I see a guy, I was thinking, boy, if I was him, I would be so happy.

You want to trade for a while?

I was very unhappy yesterday.

I started to think, am I doing what I should be doing?

I could make an argument, and so could my agent, that I should be doing something other than this.

His eyes didn't light up when you said web series?

You should start a podcast now.

What do you want to do?

I don't want to do anything.

That's the other problem.

Well, we're doing it.

What joke do you do for yourself that doesn't get anything?

I used to do this joke about, basically I just said that I don't like fruit,

but I love orange juice.

And I'm just baffled as how something as delicious as

orange juice could come from something as evil as an orange.

And it's one of those jokes like 20% of the time it got what I thought it should get.

Yeah.

But it's also like one of the jokes that people will come

up to me and joke, like more than the jokes that do well.

I think you need to tell me why you see fruit as bad.

I've never been in a tunnel in a convertible before.

Feels great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Could you hold the steering wheel for a second?

Sure.

Thanks.

Okay.

Throw up a sports car.

That was your first time.

Yeah, that felt great.

Did you see Captain Phillips?

No.

The best part about Captain Phillips is he goes through this Somali hijacking,

you know, a very bad experience, and then he's saved in the

end and a year later he's back out doing the same thing.

Did you just ruin the movie for me, man?

Yeah.

You did?

That's what I got out of the movie.

People do what they do, and they're going to do it.

If you got kidnapped by a Somali pirate in the middle of a stand-up set, and they

hauled you off, kept you in a dressing room, and just beat you in the dressing

room, and eventually you were saved at gunpoint, and there was bloodshed,

and they took you to the emergency room, and you started crying in front of the

nurse, you are not going to say, I am finished doing comedy.

I hate it.

These Somali pirates have ruined it.

Oh yeah, I would probably say that was a fluke thing.

But you'll be back.

Right.

I would tell the club, you've got to hire at least two more bouncers.

Yeah.

Now let's go back to the orange joke.

But you know, the joke's like 15 years old, and it's dead.

What's that got to do with it?

You think I should bring it back?

Well, it's not like it's so timely that you can't do it now.

It's a time since the oranges are no longer in existence.

In the stores, you go up to it, and it's like a bunch of, and there's bad ones in there, but you don't know.

It's kept secret from you, okay?

This is the evil of fruit.

Why are you hiding the bad ones from me?

Is the fruit all in this together, in this little thing of we can all get bought if everybody just shuts up?

Bananas are kind of a dicey proposition.

No, the banana's the only one that's honest.

That's true, but the banana lets you know.

The only one that even an amateur can decode.

To me, your delivery, the closest I could think of would be Bing Crosby.

You sound like that little animated sugar crisp bear.

Well, you're all over the map with your influences.

But he was imitating Bing Crosby.

We're going to get a little bowl of sugar crisps.

I got to say, walking by here, I wouldn't go.

Bless you.