Jerry Seinfeld is as sharp as ever at his Milwaukee show loaded with new material

"This is so much fun for me."

It's something an exuberant Jerry Seinfeld said a few times from the stage of the Miller High Life Theatre during a sold-out stand-up show in Milwaukee Saturday, his last gig of 2023.

That it was fun for him was already clear — not just Saturday, but at Seinfeld's many Milwaukee shows over the years. It's not like the co-creator and star of one of the most beloved and financially successful sitcoms of all time needs the money. He doesn't need to prove himself. Why else would he play Milwaukee, and scores of other cities, every few years?

But there had been a problem: Seinfeld needed to put more work into his fun.

His 2017 set at the Riverside Theater was nearly verbatim from his show there in 2014 — and was largely similar to another Riverside show in 2012. It was frustrating watching this multimillionaire cheat his paying fans.

I can't speak to Seinfeld's Riverside show in early 2020, which I didn't review, but his return to town Saturday was explicitly promoted as a "new show." And sure enough, his 73-minute set was just that.

Included in the show: Bits from Seinfeld's new Netflix special

Well, most of it was.

Pondering why a 5-Hour Energy drink lasts five hours, describing the "coronation" his kids have to go through to get to sleep, likening eating Shredded Wheat as a kid to kissing a woodchipper — those bits Saturday, and a few others, had appeared at past Seinfeld sets in Milwaukee.

And viewers of his latest stand-up special on Netflix, 2020's "23 Hours to Kill," would have recognized Seinfeld's takes on vacation ("Let's pay a lot of money to fight in a hotel") and golfing ("Eight and a half hours of idiotic hacking through sand and weeds while driving drunk in a clown car through a fake park").

They may be old jokes, but Seinfeld — via the voice-cracking, wide-eyed zest of his delivery — made sure they didn't feel old. Honestly, they were welcome, the wit still sharp, and since the vast majority of Saturday's set was new.

How new? Well, he joked about the Titan submersible implosion near the Titanic wreck site this past June, exasperated that its rich passengers were riding in what he called a "kazoo" operated by a video game controller. He also personified the Titanic itself, fantasizing that the ship was proud it's "still got it," killing more people more than 100 years after it sank. It's debatable whether enough time has passed from this tragedy to equal comedy, but it was interesting seeing a comedian who's frequently played it safe with recycled gags take a big swing, and uncharacteristically show a little edge.

The Titan stuff may have caused some discomfort Saturday, but it also got some laughs. There was another new bit, though, that should be trashed entirely, a whiff of a riff about "sexy" outfits female meteorologists wear on the local news — not the best target for a 69-year-old man.

Seinfeld brings lots of new material, including some improv

But nearly everything else that was new to a Milwaukee stage, or not on "23 Hours to Kill," was as sharp as Seinfeld's classic material — revamped takes in many cases of familiar territory, but cleverly conceived all the same.

His assessment of artificial intelligence was one for the Seinfeld quote books: "We're smart enough to make fake intelligence, dumb enough to need it and stupid enough to not know if we did the right thing." In a delightful bit on his favorite thing to watch — Flex Seal infomercials — Seinfeld waxed poetic about their host, Phil Swift (Seinfeld deadpanned that he was “real" and "relatable," like he'd seen "a lot of leaks in his life"), and expressed his frustration with actually owning Flex Seal ("You have the solution but you don't have the problem").

There were smart, fast takes on everything from jet skis, the "amazing water propelling device that nobody uses to go anywhere"; to people who wear visors at a golf course ("Finish your hat!"); to the efficiency of a mini mart, where an empty half-inch is used to sell ChapStick.

Seinfeld slipped into funny and surreal fantasies, imagining little stools being used to milk almonds for almond milk; a scientist angrily spitting out watermelon seeds, inspiring them to invent seedless watermelon; and how the seemingly endless availability at a cemetery was made possible by a "Tetris"-like organization of caskets under the earth.

Much of the set was scattershot, as it often is for Seinfeld. Also common for his stand-up: married life being the main topic of discussion, again the case Saturday. But his takes in Milwaukee, new to my ears, were as funny as anything he's ever said on the subject.

After getting some applause for saying he'd been married for 23 years, Seinfeld joked that every crowd is forced to do that after hearing how long he's been married, and likened their clapping to the sound an injured athlete gets when giving a thumbs up after they're carried out on a spinal board.

He also offered advice for husbands wanting a long marriage: "Leave your wife alone." Likening himself to a deer drinking from a stream who becomes alert when he hears the snap of a twig, Seinfeld said he gleans what he needs to know by listening to his wife's phone conversations with others — learning, for instance, who's coming over, places he'll be going, and the kind of mood he's been in for the past three days.

And in Milwaukee Saturday, there was even a touch of improv. Distracted at one point by flakes that kept falling onto the stage from above (as was his opener, friend and veteran comic Mario Joyner, during a 15-minute set), Seinfeld told the crowd they were little pieces of white paper used for a recent production of "The Nutcracker," cracking jokes about the cost-efficient "snow" effect. He also sang a few lines of "Let It Snow," and even made himself laugh.

Seinfeld was having a lot of fun, no doubt about that. And so was everyone else.

5 takeaways from Jerry Seinfeld's Milwaukee show

• Seinfeld offered a bit of Milwaukee trivia Saturday he hadn't disclosed at any of the shows I've seen: He flew to Milwaukee to do his first radio commercial, for Grizzly Beer, which he said earned him a Clio Award.

• These days, it feels like most of the major comedians require fans at their shows to seal up their phones, but Seinfeld isn't one of them, saying at the start of the show that he didn't care if people had their phones out. "I choose to enjoy the dumbness of your excitement," Seinfeld joked.

• At one point, Seinfeld asked the crowd to guess what his favorite show was, prompting one fan to yell out "Seinfeld." "'Seinfeld?' No, I'm Seinfeld," he jokingly replied. "Why would I watch myself? How egomaniacal do you think I am?"

• Seinfeld Saturday also revealed that his film directorial debut, "Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story," will be out early next year on Netflix, featuring a star-studded cast including himself, Bill Burr, Sebastian Maniscalco, Jim Gaffigan, Amy Schumer, Melissa McCarthy, Hugh Grant, Earthquake, Peter Dinklage and more. "It's a story of how Kellogg's and Post were at war to come up with the Pop-Tart first," Seinfeld said. "That part is true. The rest of it, total (expletive)."

• Seinfeld answered a few questions at the end of Saturday's show, revealing for instance that his favorite car is a 1958 Porsche Speedster. While he doesn't have a favorite episode of "Seinfeld," some of his favorite show moments include George accidentally killing his fiancée with toxic wedding invitations, Kramer hitting a golf ball into the blowhole of a whale, and "when I got to steal the rye bread from the old lady."

Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or plevy@journalsentinel.com. Follow him on X at @pietlevy or Facebook at facebook.com/PietLevyMJS.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Jerry Seinfeld's new jokes are as sharp as ever at Milwaukee show