Seinfeld’s ‘Last Time’ May Be Reality Check

“It’s great to be back here, even though I’ve never been here,” said Jerry Seinfeld minutes into his Broadway stand-up debut, “I’m Telling You for the Last Time.”

Despite the self-kidding words, Seinfeld cozied up so confidently to Wednesday’s opening-night audience that it seemed as if he had played these streets before. The Broadhurst Theatre, at least, was thick with an air of deja vu. This may be because his 55-minute act, pruned and shaped for a live HBO broadcast this Sunday, was intended to close the door on his old routines once and for all.

Or perhaps it was because other comic sprinters had made it to Broadway with this stuff first. When Seinfeld insisted he wasn’t going to try to figure out women (then proceeded to break his promise), maybe it was because someone had informed him that Rob Becker had been going down that road for the better part of two years in “Defending the Cavemen,” right across the street. When he joked about the headless drivers down in the retiree zones of Florida, could he have known that Jackie Mason had spiked that particular ball a couple of years ago just around the corner?

No one, of course, owns this well-trod territory. One thing is certain: Stripped of his slick sitcom trappings, shorn of Kramer & Co., and removed from his kvetching booth at the coffee shop, Seinfeld was a stand-up comic in the most venerable Borscht Belt/”Tonight Show” tradition. In this school of skewed wisdom, you land upon an everyday reality (waiting rooms, little soaps on airplanes, chopsticks), kick it off with some variation of “One Thing I Love” or “Did You Ever Notice How?” then twist it around in a manner that points up just how sick or bizarre are the things we take for granted.

In this fashion, Seinfeld ponders the weird, seemingly arbitrary pairing of activities that compose an Olympic biathlon, then demonstrates with his arms as he suggests that they try combining swimming and strangling. In this fashion, he registers his indifference to the detailed geographic announcements from airline pilots (“Fine. Just end up where it says on the ticket”), then turns the screw one more time for good measure with a resentful “Do I knock on his door? ‘We’re having the peanuts now!’ ”

As stand-ups go, Seinfeld lacks the surreal touch and free-associative lunatic spirit that once upon a time separated Steve Martin and Robert Klein from the pack. What he boasts is quicksilver timing and a seemingly inexhaustible ability to ferret out the comic potential from the mundane.

Neither of these talents can be oversold. One need only spend 15 hyperventilating minutes with Kevin Meany, Seinfeld’s tired warm-up act (“I lost 40 pounds on the Irish liquid diet: Slim Fast and Bailey’s Irish Creme”) to appreciate the assured and relaxed manner with which Seinfeld spins his observations.

Skillful as he was, much of what seemed cutting-edge in the context of Seinfeld’s long-running TV show sounded positively quaint through the lonely vehicle of a microphone. When the 43-year-old comic launches into a riff about how women are always digging for their keys or writing out checks, at least some people may be praying that the title “I’m Telling You This for the Last Time” is not an idle promise.