Watch him grow up (a little)

“A stand-up has to morph to survive,” said Jerry Seinfeld, sitting in his nondescript office on the DreamWorks campus in Glendale a little more than a week ago. “You can’t just do the one thing. Unless you’re really a mad genius like, maybe -- I think even [George] Carlin got frustrated after a while. Even Rodney [Dangerfield] morphed, he became a movie star, you know? You gotta get out there in some other formulas, just to keep the audience interested in you, to give the career some texture and some depth. And you should be able to.”

The night before, Seinfeld -- who at 53 still looks uncannily just like Seinfeld, save for the slow receding of his hairline -- had watched his heavily promoted “Bee Movie” at the Orpheum Theatre downtown, where it was screened for an audience made up of DreamWorks staff and their various plus-ones.

“My wife said that she doesn’t remember the last time she heard laughs like that in a movie theater,” Seinfeld said. “. . . I said, ‘Well, “Knocked Up” got great laughs.’ But that has sexual edge and profanity, so it’s not really the same sport. It’s a different sport. This is a family movie, you can take your grandmother and your 4-year-old.”

It’s a bit disconcerting, you suppose, to hear Seinfeld talking like P.T. Barnum about fun for the whole family. On “Seinfeld,” the unsentimental, anti-sitcom edict was “No hugging, no learning.” The sitcom was a celebration of antisocial behavior -- witty, cynical and totally opposed to the idea that the audience wants to see characters grow.

A decade after he closed the book on his megahit, Seinfeld is a father of three, still first and foremost a working stand-up but now the voice of a cartoon character, the bee Barry B. Benson, who in “Bee Movie” leaves the hive and learns valuable lessons.

What’s this? He grows? If, as Seinfeld says, all comedians have to morph, has he chosen to morph into a plush toy?

Seinfeld doesn’t think so. Nor does he regard “Bee Movie,” which lands in theaters Friday, as something that could have come only from Seinfeld the dad.

“When I started doing this, we had a 2-year-old and a newborn, so I wasn’t thinking, ‘Hey, I gotta get some entertainment so these kids have something to do for an hour and a half four years from now.’ ”

In his act, Seinfeld has long been anthropomorphizing. “I like the fact that we’re attempting to blame it on the cows,” he said of mad cow disease on “Letterman” in 2001. “ ‘They are crazy. They are nuts. These cows are out of their minds.’ Of course the cows are thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re drinking me, you’re wearing me, you’re sneaking up on me and tipping me over. And I’m a little off mentally?’ ”

This is basically what “Bee Movie” is -- a Seinfeld-ian riff but about bees, with all the toys and imaginative expertise that DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg could offer him to illustrate their world, and Seinfeld’s judgment on every aspect of the production.

“There wasn’t one thing that I didn’t, you know, put a check mark next to and say, ‘OK, that’s good to go,’ ” Seinfeld said.

A bee wises up

But if Katzenberg offered a golden ticket into a Wonka world, Seinfeld still needed the confidence of a good premise. The plot of “Bee Movie” -- bee finds out humans are co-opting and selling honey behind the bee world’s back -- is not totally unlike an episode from the last season of “Seinfeld” in which George argues that pigeons are breaking their social contract with humans by not getting out of his way.

“To me it’s one of those Seinfeld-ian observations,” said Fox late-night talk show host Spike Feresten, who wrote on “Seinfeld” and was one of three writers (along with Andy Robin, another ex-”Seinfeld” guy, and Barry Marder) whom Seinfeld brought in to write the first draft of the movie.

“That line about ‘We had a deal with the pigeons,’ I remember Jerry coming up with that on [‘Seinfeld’], the same way I remember his saying bees are the only . . . insect species that humans have been profiting off of, and what if the bees found out about it and did something about it?”

On “Seinfeld,” the writing staff tended to split, with the inner sanctum of Larry and Jerry (co-creators Larry David and Seinfeld) and then everyone else.

“Doing a sitcom is like running in front of a locomotive,” said Seinfeld, asked about the writers he assembled for “Bee Movie.” “I never got to have lunch with everybody. I always envied them those lunches, you know. They’d talk sports and make fun of whatever’s going on in the world. And I would usually either be working or napping. I would take a nap in the middle of the day. Every day of the show.”

As a comedy, “Bee Movie” comes in at a lean 82 minutes, but it also sells something Seinfeld has never sold -- sentiment. And feelings. Barry the bee falls in love with a human; Seinfeld on “Seinfeld” never did (or quickly broke up over something petty, to avoid the intimacy).

The film, then, is on a continuum with “Finding Nemo” and “Antz” -- the tale of a nobody doomed to the same job for the rest of his life, who rebels against his place in the hierarchy, the moral of which is usually that individual choice trumps the complacency of the group.

Said Katzenberg: “It’s not as though the movie doesn’t deliver a completely great fun roller-coaster ride for that traditional, you know, somewhat older, but mostly traditional audience. There’s no question that this film leaves behind the [3-, 4- and 5-year old], but so did ‘Shrek.’ ”

“I need to get excited,” Seinfeld said. “And this was exciting, because it was, like, you know, all new toys. All new controls. All new machine. And it was, like, ‘Gee, I wonder if I could do that?’ And if I could, it would feel totally different than what I have done. That’s why, I think, Julia and Jason and Michael had difficulties, you know, because, well, we’ve kinda seen this.”

Just a guy and a stage

“Julia and Jason and Michael,” of course, are Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards, all of whom, post-”Seinfeld,” attempted and failed, glaringly, to reimagine themselves in new sitcoms (although Louis-Dreyfus has found modest success with her CBS comedy, “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” due back early next year).

Seinfeld, however, was at an advantage. “The act” was always his passion, and so the comic on the sitcom needed only to go back to being the comic in life, even if his stand-up could now seem like a billionaire’s hobby.

As if to head off this perception, Seinfeld did the 1998 HBO special “I’m Telling You for the Last Time,” burying all the material that had gotten him here, reemerging with the 2002 documentary “Comedian,” which chronicled the unromantic business of working up a new act.

He was “Seinfeld,” but he had to be funny or else. Today, Seinfeld likes to joke about how his return to stand-up has, nearly 10 years after “Seinfeld,” conspired to make him irrelevant -- as someone who does stand-up but, because of this, is not really in show business.

“We are the ones who are winning this game in the end,” he said of stand-up comics. “It’s better that people look down on it. The comedians are the winners. We have a relationship with the audience [that actors] don’t have. I will always have an audience. I can always work. It’s better that they look down upon it as creatively inferior. . . . It’s kind of a Jewish thing, let them not notice us, ‘cause we’re getting away with murder.”

It is in this vein that Seinfeld compares his experience presenting the best documentary award at the Oscars last year (“And now, here are the five extremely depressing movies that are nominated for this award . . .”) to a bad corporate gig.

“You’re walking out in front of an audience that really doesn’t want to hear your la-di-da pitter-patter ‘Did you ever notice?’ But you’ve gotta make it work. So the fact that I have been doing these corporate gigs . . . as soon as I open my mouth -- I don’t even know what my first line was -- I feel it. ‘Oh, one of these crowds. Oh, OK. Quicksand. I got it.’ I go into, like, a gear in my head. ‘Oh, I see. We’re gonna shovel some wet snow tonight.’ You just feel it, you just know it.”

Though much of “Bee Movie” was accomplished with Seinfeld sitting in his office on 57th Street in Manhattan, with DreamWorks beamed in via a high-tech video-conferencing system called the HP Halo, Seinfeld and his wife keep a rented house in Beverly Hills. (She is the former Jessica Sklar and author of the cookbook “Deceptively Delicious,” about sneaking healthy stuff into food finicky kids love; the book is currently both a bestseller and the subject of a publishing kerfuffle regarding a similarly themed cookbook released earlier this year.)

Seinfeld arrived in Los Angeles in 1980, a stand-up in his mid-20s dreaming of a spot on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” and left, finally, in 1998 as one of the richest men in America.

During those 18 years, he says, he went into the ocean exactly once. He was a workaholic with various girlfriends but who would put down roots when he got back to New York. L.A. was the scene of his king-making, but otherwise he seemed to have little connection to the place.

This too, apparently, has changed.

“My wife said, ‘You know, we should get rid of this rental house now that the movie’s over.’ And I said, ‘No, no, we’re not. ‘Cause I gotta go to the Malibu Kitchen.’ ”

Seinfeld has long been a car nut (the car Barry the bee drives was modeled after his 1959 Porsche GT Speedster), and he proceeds to describe, in lavish, minute detail, a cherished, only-in-L.A. Sunday morning routine with comedy writer Feresten: up at 6:30, meet in a Santa Monica parking lot at 7, stand around their vintage cars. They pick a theme, a car, for the day -- ‘50s-era cars, green cars, street cars or racing cars. Italian cars. Porsches. Admittedly, Seinfeld has a much bigger collection than Feresten to choose from.

“First we park the cars together in a parking lot, and we just stand there and walk around them for a while and just talk about the cars,” he said.

By 8 they’re at Malibu Kitchen, in the Malibu Country Mart, where the bagels are imported from H&H; in Manhattan and you pump your own coffee. “Bill is the proprietor of the Malibu Kitchen, who is a transplant from Long Island, so I feel very comfortable with him. He’s a New Yorker guy, he plays fantastic music in the shop -- Sinatra and Harry Nilsson -- and everybody that works there is very friendly. And you wanna get outta there before 9, because then you get the Malibu, loose-pants, unshaven, SUV crowd. And you don’t wanna get caught up in that maelstrom, you know . . . David Duchovny and all those people. I like David, but I can’t . . . it’s not my scene. Too showbizzy.”

He continued.

“With their kids, you know. Not one decent article of clothing. For all their success they cannot put on something clean, they cannot shave . . . And I intentionally get up and make sure I am clean-shaven. Just so they know, I am not one of you.”

Then it’s up into the Santa Monica Mountains, Seinfeld and Feresten tooling the majestic, winding roads in their respective vehicles.

“Guys are funny when they get a routine that they like,” Seinfeld said. “And they don’t wanna vary it, and they love the consistency of it. And that’s the way Spike and I got with that thing.

“I’m telling ya,” he added, “there’s no vacation -- Tahiti, Paris, you can have it all. Give me the Malibu Kitchen.”

On the road again

After the onslaught of “Bee Movie,” there will still be the act. Seinfeld plans to get more focused on his stand-up, to do more than Vegas (Nov. 16-17) and the odd date elsewhere (Nov. 9, a convention center in Lima, Ohio). It’s the same Seinfeld, different observations -- i.e. why are terrorists always working out on the monkey bars in those training videos?

He has been a stand-up comic since he turned 21, and he has always appeared self-conscious as an actor, even while playing a version of himself on “Seinfeld.” This is partly why he’s scrupulously avoided the potential flop of a romantic comedy. That would be morphing too far -- another blockbuster stand-up (think Rodney, think Chris Rock) trying to graft the stage persona onto a feature premise.

“To me, that’s my day, is work on some stuff and then do a set. That’s what feels like a normal day for me. Everything else, I feel that I’m being pressed into service. ‘We need you to . . . cast this movie. We need you to write this scene. We need you to help us edit this line.’ I don’t really wanna do any of these things. But then I just offer my services, but these are not my fields. I know it, I’ve learned it. I’ve learned it from the sitcom and from stand-up, I have acquired these skills, but they all feel like sidelines to me, they all feel like detours.”

He is asked about Carson, the icon, and the stoic way he exited “The Tonight Show” stage and, by extension, public life.

“I will never leave the way he did,” Seinfeld said. “I will always perform if I can.”

He tells of a dinner with Carson after his retirement, when Carson talked of how he intended to pattern himself after Cary Grant, who refused, in later life, to do “The Tonight Show” despite Carson’s repeated pleas.

Carson, Seinfeld said, even had a bit he wanted to do with Grant, after NBC cut “The Tonight Show” from 90 minutes down to 60, where Grant would come on at the end of the 60 minutes, at which point the host would say, “I’m afraid we’re out of time.”

“And he couldn’t even get Grant to do that,” Seinfeld said. “Just for the gag. . . . But Carson respected Cary Grant very much for that. And did it himself once he left. I do believe in those kind of values.

“We started this conversation talking about movies that are too long, and this is the same thing. It’s the same self-indulgent virus . . . ‘They can’t get enough of me, they can’t.’

“They can,” Seinfeld said, hitting the punch line. “And have.”

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paul.brownfield@latimes.com