Seinfeld still develops plenty of great material from "nothing"

You would think that, eventually Jerry Seinfeld would run out of material, as he’s made his long and brilliant career based on commentary about the minutia of daily life. How much is there left to say about the mundane and the trivial, about, as his eponymous show wryly noted, nothing? But his new (and last?, or so he’s hinted) hour-long comedy special on Netflix, 23 Hours to Kill, shows that he continue to work miracles. He doesn’t rely on shtick or insult or the day’s news, and he still finds plenty of great material in the mundane. Who would think he could have side-splitting routines about the U.S. Postal Service, about cell phones, about text messages, about cars w/ dual climate control? But there it is, terrific stuff coming from field that you’d think were dry as deserts. He also has plenty to say about marriage, and if at times he nears the brink of sexism in his stereotyping of irascible women, he more than makes up for that w/ his commentary on men in general and husbands in particular. And his routine opening about friendship, entertainment, dining out, and our cultural sense of time (nobody wants to be where they are, we always want to “get somewhere else,” home or to the office or to the show or off the airplane) – any way, he makes it work. The only down spot on this routine is through no fault of JS, but the segment on hospitals and dying, obviously developed some months ago, feels a little scary and in bad taste today – a shame and a caution, but it shouldn’t steer anyone away from this show.