Jerry Seinfeld delighted most of the audience at his show in Melbourne, Australia, on Saturday, when he verbally sparred with the latest in a series of pro-Palestinian protesters who try to disrupt his standup routine.
“The protesters are back! I missed you!” Seinfeld said to a crowd member who yelled that the veteran American-Jewish comedian was “supporting a genocide.”
“Oh, you’re not doing well,” the comic remarked as the performance hall filled with boos from the audience “It’s so hard for you,” he said.
“You and I are in the same business,” Seinfeld continued, explaining that both he and the heckler were trying “to get people to see things the way we see it.”
“The problem is, you’re in the wrong place,” said Seinfeld.
“Here’s the other thing I think you need to go back and tell whoever’s running your organization: ‘We just gave more money to a Jew,'” he added, eliciting waves of laughter from the crowd. “That cannot be a good plan for you.”
The show, in Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena, was the final stop on the Australian leg of Seinfeld’s world tour. It came a week after the comedian faced off with a pro-Palestinian heckler at a show in Sydney, ridiculing the protesters for having “solved the Middle East” by bothering a comedian on the other side of the world.
Seinfeld, who volunteered at the northern Kibbutz Sa’ar when he was 17, expressed his love for “our Jewish homeland” in a rare personal social media post published after Hamas’s shock October 7 assault, when thousands of terrorists stormed the country’s south to kill nearly 1,200 people and take 251 hostages back to Gaza.
The comedian, 70, made a solidarity trip to Israel in December, where he met with hostages’ relatives, visited Kibbutz Be’eri and the site of the Re’im-area Nova Music Festival, both of which were ravaged during the onslaught.
In a May interview, Seinfeld said the wartime trip was “the most powerful experience of my whole life,” as he wiped away tears — or “salty discharge,” as his fictionalized television doppelgänger would have it.
As Israel’s devastating retaliatory offensive on the Gaza Strip has unfolded, pro-Palestinian protesters have frequently attempted to disrupt public events featuring Seinfeld, who has largely failed to be vexed.
Seinfeld, whose eponymous television 1990’s “show about nothing” is considered a classic of the sitcom genre, and whose routine typically satirizes life’s minutiae, has in recent months somewhat departed from his longstanding apolitical veneer.
In an April interview with the New Yorker Radio Hour, the comedian railed against the “extreme left” and “PC crap” — referring to so-called political correctness — for destroying comedy. Former “Seinfeld” cast member Julia Louis-Dreyfus later pushed back on the comment, saying in a June interview that such claims struck her as a “red flag.”
Seinfeld’s wife Jessica is more politically vocal than her husband. A philanthropist, she aroused some controversy when she contributed $5,000 to a pro-Israel demonstration in May at the University of California, Los Angeles, that later turned violent.