Jerry Seinfeld’s web show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee returned to Crackle for its fourth season yesterday (a fifth season debuts later this year, because clearly Seinfeld has a lot of friends). The show I was once stupidly skeptical of (and the NYTimes has unfairly dismissed) has transformed into one of the Internet’s best little gems for many of the same reasons that something like the Nerdist or Jesse Thorn’s podcasts are: Because we get to see celebrities as actual honest to God people. I never thought that was possible with Sarah Jessica Parker, but I was very wrong.
Whatever you think you know about Sarah Jessica Parker from the tabloids or celebrity gossip sites, or whatever assumptions you have made because of Sex and the City or her string of terrible movies over the last decade, dismiss them all. She’s f**cking delightful. I have not liked Parker this much since she played SanDeE* in L.A. Story. Her and Seinfeld took a trip in Parker’s 1976 Ford Country Squire station wagon — against Seinfeld’s better wishes — and the two mostly reminisced hilariously about the kinds of things that their children are missing by not growing up in the 1970s and 80s, like the fact that moving the seat forward took the efforts of the entire family. Or, busy signals. Basically, they arrived at the fact that this entire generation of parents are secretly horrible narcissists, them included.
Seinfeld hit on themes he’s been hammering since the series began, which is mostly how things used to be, but not in a curmudgeonly get-off-my-lawn way. In more of a funny nostalgic way, and 49-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker (who looks terrific) was incredibly game for it. They were very much like an old, bickering married couple, so much so that at one point, Parker laughed, “I am so glad we are not married.”
There weren’t a lot of tremendous insights into either’s life, but three quarters way through the episode, I did find the conversation two celebrities have about how much to leave as a tip very illuminating. It was a $40 check, and Sarah Jessica Parker suggested a $10 tip (which is more than 20 percent).
Seinfeld, however, scoffed: Tipping rules are different for celebrities. “Everybody is going to ask [our waitress], ‘Oh my God, you waited on Jerry Seinfeld and Sarah Jessica Parker, how much did they tip you?’ What do you want her to say? Ten dollars?”
Parker offered that $20 would be satisfactory, although in the end Seinfeld clearly tipped much bigger. “Gross. Garish. Vulgar,” Parker joked, at what was probably a hundred dollar bill. “No, it was lovely, and I am a sh*t.”
If you’re a celebrity, and you don’t want to be thought of as a “sh*t,” you probably do need to leave a bigger tip than the meal was even worth.
It was another great episode of what really has become one of the most amiable twenty minutes you can spend online these days.
Watch Here: Crackle
