From: Minneapolis Star and Tribune

Date: May 5, 1986

Headline: Seinfeld and Hodgson

Subline: Comics Team Up for Cable Special

Photo(s): Jerry Seinfeld, left, and Joel Hodgson with a smoking mug, for people who like a cigarette with their coffee.

Author: Covert, Colin

Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Nicholas and May, stand alert! Seinfeld and Hodgson are about to stake a claim on your territory.

That's Jerry Seinfeld and Joel Hodgson, an unlikely pair of comedians collaborating on a project that could be The Big Break for both of them. In an outrageously cluttered loft in a nondescript Minneapolis warehouse, they're birthing a national cable TV special.

Seinfeld, 32, is a wiry New York standup comic who's considered by some to be among the nation's brightest. A frequent guest on "The Tonight Show" and "Late Night with David Letterman", he's eager to step into the spotlight on his own.

Since Seinfeld's hot enough to attract a sizable audience, but not so hot that he'd be expensive to hire, the Showtime cable service has given him a "pretty definite" commitment for an hour-long special. That could mean about 6 million viewers. Now all he has to do is give them an hour's worth of fresh, entertaining material--in two weeks.

That's where Hodgson comes in. The 26-year-old Minneapolis *wunderkind* burst brilliantly onto the national scene several years ago with elaborate sight gags and high-tech special effects. But after multiple appearances on the Johnny Carson show and "Saturday Night Live", he felt uncomfortable with the pace and pressure of performing.

Hodgson abruptly retired to pursue his interests as an inventor and sculptor.

The pair met during Seinfeld's appearance at the Comedy Gallery in November. Seinfeld's idols are middle-of-the-road comics like Bill Cosby and Robert Klein, and Hodgson's favorites are wild men like Jonathan Winters and Andy Kaufman, but they got on famously nonetheless. When the Showtime deal emerged, Seinfeld recruited Hodgson as his co-writer and all-around idea man.

So far they have generated a lot of funny material, but haven't found a framework to hang it on.

"The only thing we don't have is the theme," Seinfeld said. "We have tons of jokes."

"You know those buttonhole flowers that squirt water?" Hodgson offered as an example. He connected a canister of pressurized propane to a length of flexible tubing. Holding the tube's open end at chest level, he snapped a lighter and unleashed a geyser of flame. "Jerry's gonna be all charred after this. He'll fall over, his hair will be smoking."

In Hodgson's chaotically littered warehouse "office," the creative process is not pretty. The scene is one-third da Vinci's workshop and two-thirds pigpen. One a messy workbench a jar of bloodshot plastic eyeballs stands beside a toothbrush whose handle is a realistic-looking pink plastic squid. Battered video equipment balances precariously on dilapidated kitchen chairs, and a fine patina of grunge covers everything.

But from such rich creative mulch do ideas emerge. "I just build stuff to come up with ideas," Hodgson said. "I'm like Uncle Fester. Always working."

The process of creating a comedy special doesn't resemble work as most people know it. It involves lots of apparently aimless converstation and giggling.

"We just sit down and talk, and funny things come up," Seinfeld explained. "I was sitting on top of a sofa, and he asked me why I was sitting there. I said I'd never been up there before. And we got on the idea of all the spots in your home where you've never been. You spend hours and hours in your own house and you get so bored but you never explore it," he said with mounting enthusiasm. "You could go have sandwiches with your clothes in the closet, hang around under the dining-room table, put a chair in the shower and read."

Hodgson laughed and Seinfeld quieted down again, but his restless comic energy simmered almost tangibly beneath the surface. With two professional comedians in the same room, it's like a volcano: only a matter of time before the next eruption.

The centerpiece of the special as it's shaping up is a visit to a vast research facility where jokes are developed and tested before being released to comedians, Hodgson explained. "We're thinking of a scene like in the James Bond movies where Q shows him the new equipment they're working on. That'll be where the flamethrower flower comes in, and the hovercraft skirt."

Seinfeld's eyes light up. The sequence will be the opposite of Marilyn Monroe's skirts being blown up over her head in "The Seven Year Itch". "It'll be Newton's Third Law applied to that. If the dress blows up then there should be an equal force down. Enabling her to travel that way."

"It'll really work," interrupted Hodgson. "It'll fly around, go over water. But they have problems with the dress; it keeps spinning, tilting over, hurting people. We're going to have a fashion model smoking a cigarette among all these technicians." Hodgson assured the role, slouching against a wall with studied test-pilot nonchalance. "She says," (he mimed dropping a cigarette and stubbed it out with his toe) "'I can ride that dress.'"

The payoff for Hodgson, if the project gets the go-ahead, will be getting to see some ideas that are too big for his workshop, like the hovercraft skirt, become reality. The trick, Seinfeld acknowledges, will be creating ideas audacious enough to crack up an audience without giving Showtime's accountants a coronary.

"It's tricky," he agreed, "but comedy's always a gamble. Every time I deliver a punch line I have no idea whether there's going to be a laugh. Sure, this is a tremendously frightening stretch, so what else is new?"