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Jerry Seinfeld took questions from the audience. He had just finished doing an hour of stand-up comedy--an hour sharp, because Seinfeld is by his own admission a fastidious guy. In his act, he had complained about reality TV (“Don’t they know we’re in reality . . .?”) and decoded the message a bride and groom send by driving away from the wedding (“Goodbye, we’re going to Barbados to have sex. Enjoy the dry cake and our relatives. . . .”).

Now the audience at the Paramount Theatre, capacity 3,000-plus, a cavernous, 1930s Deco movie house in the heart of downtown Oakland, was getting a little extra: They were getting Seinfeld, who has never seemed altogether comfortable as a public figure, throwing himself open for questions.

Someone asked what he thought of George W. Bush. “I think he’s doing a good job place-holding his occupation,” Seinfeld said mock carefully, to roars from a crowd that seemed thrilled just to be in his airspace. “He doesn’t really seem like a president, but that’s OK.”

“What’s the deal with Corn Nuts?” another person shouted, and Seinfeld relaxed, because as cultural oddities go, he is more comfortable with Corn Nuts than Bushes. Fittingly, the question was phrased in a way that launched the careers of a thousand hack comics in the 1980s (“What’s the deal with . . . “ insert commercial product here). The ‘80s were Seinfeld’s formative years, the decade in which he worked hard and clean and broke through the clutter of observational comedy, proving himself as much as he ever cared to by earning a spot on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” His material was never controversial or overtly personal, nor did it seem to come from any pain. Its rhythms were rooted in the 1980s, when stand-up got branded as a populist form of entertainment, a low-level rage against the machine of consumer culture. Seinfeld was at the top of a class that came to include people like Larry Miller, Paula Poundstone and Jimmy Brogan; the quintessential Seinfeld joke concerned the Tide commercial in which a housewife boasts that the detergent removes bloodstains. “If you get a T-shirt with bloodstains,” went the Seinfeld retort, “maybe laundry is not your problem now.”

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For about a year now, Seinfeld has been working on new material, showing up at clubs in New York or going out to the Improv in, say, Tempe, Ariz. Two weeks ago, he did seven minutes on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” further evidence that Seinfeld, after his post-”Seinfeld” creative hibernation, is reentering the culture as a contemporary artist.

The Letterman spot was his first televised stand-up since he laid the old routines to rest in a 1998 HBO special, “I’m Telling You for the Last Time.” There is talk of his doing a tour, though no dates have been formalized, say those in his camp. In the meantime, Seinfeld is making a film called “Anatomy of a Joke,” which documents, brick by brick, the building of a new act (he is doing the film with Gary Streiner and Christian Charles, who produced his American Express commercials when they were at the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather). Thus the camera crews filming people filing into his show Thursday at the Paramount, a show for which tickets brokers, the Oakland Tribune reported, were getting upward of $700. Seinfeld had picked the venue, he said onstage, because he’d played there before and loved it.

Seinfeld isn’t talking to the media (he declined an interview request for this article). In his act, he compares press interest in his life to a colonoscopy. The analogy fits: Somewhere along the way, between the mega-success of “Seinfeld” and the relationship with then-17-year-old Shoshanna Lonstein and the marriage to Jessica Sklar and the birth of a daughter, Seinfeld ceased to be a voice. He became a gossip magnet, someone in the cross hairs of the paparazzi--a new kind of hell for a guy who’s always kept his personal life carefully detached from his public one.

Not surprisingly, then, the new Seinfeld is like the old Seinfeld, only with more expensive suits and shorter hair. It’s as if the TV show, the fame, the wealth, never happened, and the stage and the mike were only waiting for him to return from his crazy adventures.

Onstage in Oakland, he didn’t much talk about being a father (his daughter was born in November), or a husband or a celebrity; instead, he assessed his Upper West Side neighborhood, with its glut of strollers causing “stroller traffic” and “stroller rage,” and babies being “wheeled around like a president,” with “the FDR blanket.” He picked the Upper West Side and its baby population, Seinfeld said, over the Village and its concentration of gay people--a choice that broke down as follows: “Which is more annoying to me, babies or homosexuals?” (not, Seinfeld hastened to add, that there was anything wrong with being gay).

He’s still examining everyday expressions, but the expressions are new. Married at 46, Seinfeld looks back on 26 years of dating and says, “That is a lot of acting fascinated.” Television, too, remains a source of material--VH-1’s “Behind the Music” and ESPN’s “SportsCenter.” And the phoniness of awards shows, where the message, in effect, is: “We won’t know [who won] until we get you all dressed up and in a room and on TV.” Almost all of the material was new; one joke, about his love of driving, and being “inside and outside, moving and completely still,” appears in his 1993 book “SeinLanguage.”

Regardless, the crowd ate him up. He only had to say, in that Seinfeldian way: “Are we gonna stop with the coffee? Is this thing gonna level off at some point?” Seinfeld will probably never again be challenged by an audience the way good comics (including Seinfeld) want to be. There is also the matter of being worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and what that does to a comedian’s edge. But those close to Seinfeld simply see a guy who is challenging himself again, in the only artistic way that matters to him. Someone who not only turned down God-knows-how-much to do another season of “Seinfeld,” but countless offers since then to haul out old jokes for corporate functions.

“I’m biased; he’s my friend,” says Miller, the comedian and actor who came of age in stand-up alongside Seinfeld. “But objectively it’s very easy to say that there are very few creative people . . . who just keep creating more and more, and doing it the hard way, which is to say the right way. It’s very distilled writing, stand-up.”

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The wrong way, presumably, would have been for Seinfeld to cash in on movie roles, as big-name comedians before him have done, to varying degrees of success. When “Seinfeld” went off the air, the comedian’s longtime managers, Howard West and George Shapiro, made a bet about whether their prize client would star in a movie within two years (Shapiro said he would, West that he wouldn’t).

There is still no movie, though Shapiro says there have been “Jim Carrey-level offers.”

But Seinfeld isn’t Jim Carrey, which is to say he is a comic, through and through. Once, in 1980, he had a small role on the sitcom “Benson,” but he was let go after three episodes. “Stand-up weeds out the weak,” Seinfeld told Vanity Fair in 1998, expanding on his attitude about acting. “You can’t fool it. I was watching ‘As Good as It Gets’ and I thought, Hey, there’s Greg Kinnear. Who is this guy? An ex-stand-up. He should be awful, but he’s terrific. Now, I’m Jack Nicholson and I’ve devoted my life to this craft. This pisher comes on the set and he’s good! That’s why acting is [expletive]. Nobody inexperienced can walk onstage as a comedian and be as good as somebody who knows their craft.”

Indeed, it is worth noting that during nine years on “Seinfeld,” Seinfeld didn’t really have to act. He only had to be Jerry--the same Jerry, more or less, that he’d been onstage for all those years. Seinfeld and co-creator Larry David engineered the show to maximize Seinfeld’s role as comedic superego, imposing his rational wit on the madness around him. In stressing his identity as a stand-up, “Seinfeld” seemed to be tweaking what his peer Garry Shandling had done on his self-referential cable series “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” in which Shandling played a guy named Garry Shandling who had a TV show called “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show.” But Shandling, who has since gone into films, followed up that series with HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show,” playing a nervous, insecure talk show host (is there any other kind?), finding new expression for insecurities he had discussed onstage, as a stand-up comedian.

Seinfeld, by contrast, has never seemed wired for that kind of exploration (or even mock exploration). In those “Seinfeld” episodes that did call for him to step outside his comedian-observer self, you could almost see him about to crack up (when, for instance, he wrestles a loaf of marble rye away from an old woman).

“He’s not comfortable with physical stuff,” says Tom Cherones, who directed 80-some episodes of the “Seinfeld” run, much of them during the early years of the show. “He wasn’t acting as much as he was reacting, and he’s very good at it.” Plus, Cherones and others note, Seinfeld needs a stage, an audience, and the movies don’t provide that.

As “Seinfeld’s” other principal cast members set about reinventing themselves in the marketplace, only Seinfeld gets to remain in character. The comic on the show goes back to being the comic in life--without the suspension of disbelief that will hound Michael Richards, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander. “How’s Elaine?” someone shouted at the end of his Oakland show. Seinfeld waited a beat. “Elaine,” he said, “does not really exist.”

* Jerry Seinfeld’s managers, George Shapiro and Howard West, helped the comedian turn the sitcom that nobody wanted into a $2-billion cash cow. F10