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Better than nothing on a Thursday night

From the idiocy of new communications technology to marriage, children, and other banalities of 21st century life, Jerry Seinfeld shared his famously neurotic wit with 3,900 fans in Red Deer’s Centrium on Thursday.

From the idiocy of new communications technology to marriage, children, and other banalities of 21st century life, Jerry Seinfeld shared his famously neurotic wit with 3,900 fans in Red Deer’s Centrium on Thursday.

For a lot of us, it had been long time, no see — judging by the prolonged applause Seinfeld received on his abrupt, unceremonious entrance on the heels of opening comedian Mario Joyner.

Seinfeld, who stepped onto stage waving at the crowd, stopped entering many of our living rooms when his TV show went off the air in 1998. And according to his opening spiel, this is the first time he’s ever pulled off Hwy 2 into our lovely berg.

“Red Deer . . . Do you know how many years I’ve wanted to come to Red Deer? . . . Zero,” Seinfeld admitted, to peals of laughter.

He followed this up by noting the unusual name of our city, and noticing that there actually are no red deer in Red Deer. “You made it up to make people come here.”

The 57-year-old comedian is known for taking a skeptical look at the mundane things everyone takes for granted, and various absurdities were in his radar — starting with why everyone in the audience paid about $100 a ticket to come down to the Centrium and see him.

“I had nothing to do either . . . ”

He spoke at length about the slim line between the descriptives “Sucks,” “Great” and “Not Bad,” the tyranny of coffee and subsequent need for hydration, unhealthy foods, such as Pop-Tarts and cookies, and the inevitable collective weight problem that results.

“I don’t believe we have a weight problem until we’re all touching each other all the time . . . until the whole country is like a big jar of olives . . . ”

Just when it seemed the comedian had either lost some edge, or was hitting too close to home for many, he switched gears and ramped up the laughs by talking about GPS systems and people’s slavery to iPhones and the call display that allows us to screen calls.

He reminisced about telephone “hostility” starting with the *69 feature that enabled everyone to see the last number that called their line. Referring to the sexual connotation of that particular two-digit number, he wondered why anyone would pick 69 instead of say, 68, or 70.

“I can’t wait to hear what they’ve got for three-way calling.”

Seinfeld ripped many of the new technologies that the characters on his 1990s TV show never had to deal with — such as emails. No one seems to want to see talking faces any more, he noticed. “The gums, the teeth . . . the unshaven spots . . .”

He described Twitter as the opposite of saying a lot of things to a few people. Instead “I can say almost nothing to everyone.”

Facebook was referred to as “the final whoring out of the word ‘book’ . . . It’s as if seeing pictures of Timmy and Tammy drunk in Cabo is the same as reading Moby Dick.”

That joke earned Seinfeld some hearty applause.

As another sign of his crowd’s middle-aged demographic, the comic really hit his stride when he began talking about family life.

The once famously single New Yorker has been married for the last 12 years and has three children — a situation that’s left him resigned and somewhere on the road between contentment and forbearance.

When one of his sons recently asked for a couple of kittens, Seinfeld said he responded with why not? “Marriage is like football. Once you’re down, it doesn’t matter how many people pile on you . . . you can get a mule for all I care. . .”

Apparently, the comedian who went through women on his TV show the way some people go through Doritos, now feels that having a wife is nothing like having a girlfriend. He compared it to the difference between playing paintball, versus “having a rack of real loaded weapons.”

By the time deadline pressure cut my Seinfeld experience short, North America’s most famous comedian was riffing on the “theoretical, hypothetical” questions his wife expects him to answer in the middle of the night, such as “If you faked your death, and I found out about it, what would you say then?”

That topic could surely have filled a whole episode of his old TV show — as well as featured some shrill arguing from the Costanzas. (Bonus).

Joyner started off the show with some sharp observational moments. During an earlier visit to a local mall, he said he met “the seven black people who live in Red Deer . . .

“Coupled with the nine black people who live in Calgary, you are getting to be a real black community,” added Joyner, who later second-guessed himself. “I counted seven. Was that too many?”

lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com

— copyright Red Deer Advocate