Seinfeld builds wall of laughs at UM arts center

Pointing out the funny side of life’s everyday occurrences has long been Jerry Seinfeld’s trademark.

Seinfeld exhibited this skill in abundance before a younger, near-capacity crowd Friday night at the Maine Center for the Arts, University of Maine. Through the 75-minute show and 15-minute encore, he showed the audience why he’s one of the nation’s most in-demand stand-up comics.

Seinfeld doesn’t just throw out one-liners. Instead, he stacks up a series of jokes on one topic, building a solid comic wall.

Seinfeld uses more than just his voice. Whether he’s a bored little boy in a bank, a rider on a swaybacked horse, or a man trying to rinse a clinging hair off the shower wall, Seinfeld utilizes his slender body to become that person or thing.

Seinfeld even took the care to localize his material. Glancing around the cavernous MCA stage, he said, “I wish I had a little more headroom. Also this is an awful small stage. I guess I’ll have to scale down my act.”

He started out naturally enough with a bit on airport restrooms. A sample: “I like handblowers. They’re slower but that’s OK. When you’re in a room with a revolting stench, you want to linger.”

Next up was old people in Florida — “Their motto is `drive slow, ride low.’ They ought to change the Florida flag to a hat and two knuckles on a steering wheel.”

Just as Seinfeld was starting to get rolling, a bat swooped in around the curtains above the stage.

Seinfeld, quick on his feet, asked, “Is Stephen King here?,” then said, “I told them I didn’t want an opening act.”

Recovering his composure rapidly, he then launched into an impromptu riff on bats: “Don’t their wings look like something they built in the garage? They don’t look natural. It looks like they’re peddling while they’re flapping their wings.”

Seinfeld ranged from wanted posters (“Why don’t we put pictures of criminals on postage stamps, and let the postman look for them while he’s out?”) to selecting fruit (“Bananas are the fruit for idiots. They’re color-coded for safety — green, yellow, black”); to commercials for detergent (“If you’ve got a T-shirt with bloodstains, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem”), to expensive movie candy (“They’ve got it in a jewelry case, which gives you some idea what they think it’s worth. `I’d like to see something in a Milk Dud, please.”‘)

Throughout the show, Seinfeld mined his childhood and his day-to-day experiences, coming up with gem after gem. The audience certainly got its money’s worth in laughs-per-minute.