Jason Alexander Now Doing Stand-Up Comedy

Jason Alexander, the stage/TV/film actor best known for his role as George Costanza on the 1990s hit sitcom Seinfeld, has taken to stand-up comedy.

It’s actually a one-man show, but the stand-up is a major part of it, and let’s hope it turns out better for him than it did Michael Richards (aka Kramer), who took a massive career hit over racial slurs he hurled at some hecklers during a 2006 performance.

And while Alexander can certainly offend some groups, from the sound of things, his material will be safe enough. “It’s all very good-natured. I make fun of myself and make fun of everybody else. And, hopefully, it’s a party,” Alexander said in comments to the Regina Leader-Post in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, where he held a recent engagement of An Evening with Jason Alexander and His Hair.

(That’s right. He has hair in this thing, and it’s every bit as creepy as the episode of Seinfeld, where George buys a rug.)

For some reason, it’s strange thinking of Jason Alexander doing what Jerry Seinfeld does so well, but maybe it shouldn’t be. He had pitch-perfect comedic timing on the series, and to be able to hold his own with the rest of that cast, and even stand out as a fan favorite, well, maybe this is a natural fit.

Explaining the move, he told the Leader-Post, “It began with me being asked to host things over the years. People always think that hosting is a no-brainer for anybody because all you have to do is get up and read from their script. Their script is usually terrible, so I had to come up with three to five minutes of some sort of material based on the organization that I was doing it for.”

Alexander continued: “I realized that it wasn’t that terribly hard. And that became a show that I did for about five years, called the Donnie Clay Experience, where I did a stand-up comedy show as a character who was a bad motivational speaker. Out of the Donnie show, my agent advised me that I had enough experience and enough different kinds of material that it would make sense to do a show as myself.”

Even so, Alexander said he had “always kept that idea at arms length as I, having worked with some excellent comics over the years, had never thought of myself as one.”

In July, the former “Can’t-Stand-Ya!” will be taking his show, for the first time, to Sydney, Australia. According to Sydney’s Enmore Theatre, where Evening will take place, fans can expect a comedy variety show, featuring “stand-up comedy, music, Jason’s amazing voice, a Seinfeld Q & A and audience participation.”

“It’s not political; it has no magic in it, or any poker in it. Pretty much, if you mixed one of your favorite old-fashioned singers from Vegas with one of your favorite old-fashioned comics from Vegas, that’s what you’d have. You’d have a night with an actor trying to play the part of a comic-entertainer,” Alexander said.

Are you a Jason Alexander fan? What was your favorite George Costanza moment?

[Image via s_bukley / Shutterstock.com]