LOS ANGELES -- Jerry Seinfeld scours the room for bosomy babes. Since this is a Hollywood restaurant, he finds them.

"Do you know what Mimi Rogers looks like?" he asks, craning his neck -- in fact, craning his entire body. "Because the woman sitting behind you looks just like her. I don't think you can see her. Try. She's really attractive. What can I do?"

Before her identity can be nailed down, she gets up from the table and heads for the door. "There she goes. She left. Story of my life," says Seinfeld, momentarily crestfallen.

When he walked into the restaurant, Seinfeld found he couldn't get the table he wanted near the back wall, and grumped that maybe having "a hit series" isn't all it's cracked up to be. But a hit it is, and named after him: "Seinfeld," Wednesday nights on NBC.

As if to keep his breakfast from being a total loss, halfway through it actress Susan Anton stops by Seinfeld's table to pay her gushiest respects. "The show is so fabulous, so very very funny! Hysterical laughter always!" she trills.

Seinfeld, 37, doesn't quite seem to believe that, but he smiles at the compliment, and he knows the show is darn good. It's hip, hot and fresh, and it's developed a loyal following of millions who identify with the irritations and petty angst that beset its characters.

A stand-up comic for 15 years, Seinfeld is now so popular that his May 3 engagement at the Kennedy Center sold out in mere hours; he plays Carnegie Hall, also sold out, a few nights later. He's one comic who never has stooped to tasteless or hateful material, who's always been essentially civilized and intelligent, and so it seems natural to ask him if signing up to do a TV sitcom automatically meant lowering his standards.

"Yes," he says without a blink. "I didn't want to do one. But they let me do this the way I wanted to do it. And I couldn't shrink from that challenge. The regular sitcoms you see on TV are not something I ever wanted to do. I hope I'm not doing that."

He did have a brief fling with regular sitcoms, two guest appearances on "Benson" in 1980. Is he embarrassed when the reruns turn up? "Yes. I am embarrassed. They're just stupid. I played the governor's joke writer. I was supposed to be a bad joke writer, and that was supposed to be funny."

A sickened expression crosses his face.

"Seinfeld" is definitely an irregular sitcom. Seinfeld gets to play a stand-up comic who is essentially himself. "I don't have a very broad range as an actor," he says, understating it. The hero lives in a New York apartment and interacts with three whiny, cranky friends for whom life is mainly a series of major annoyances and minor setbacks.

At its best, "Seinfeld" takes a wittily withering look at modern urban life and '90s relationships; it can be painfully amusing and amusingly painful.

"There is definitely a darkness to the soul of the show," Seinfeld says. "I think there is in all comedy, all good comedy. All comedians have an essential crankiness if they're funny at all. If you're a really happy-go-lucky person, you can't be very funny. Just being easily annoyed is kind of the early impetus for being a comedian. You're just aggravated by a lot of little things.

"We want the show to be about the problems no one is trained to handle. All this education and conversation and parental guidance that you've had in your life does not prepare you for a huge number of things that come up. I think what goes on in people's lives is that most of their mind, most of the day, is occupied with tiny struggles. That's what people's lives are about."

Among the most unusual "Seinfeld" episodes was one in which the four main characters (Seinfeld's costars are Julia Louis-Dreyfus as ex-flame Elaine, Jason Alexander as suffering friend George and Michael Richards as insane neighbor Kramer) spent the entire show trying to find their car in a parking garage. NBC will show two episodes tonight, a new one and a rerun, back-to-back, at 9 on Channel 4.

Anyone familiar with network television might wonder how such an essentially uncompromised sitcom -- no cute kids, no fake laugh track, no pat plots -- made it into prime time, especially on NBC. In fact, the network turned down the "Seinfeld" pilot two years ago. But the vice president in charge of late night, Rick Ludwin, had faith in the show and managed to get four episodes made out of the late-night budget. Brandon Tartikoff, then head of the company, said yes.

"And we stayed in late night and special programming, with some very nice people who know nothing about telling stories and using characters and doing that kind of comedy," Seinfeld says. "So they just come down once a week and say, 'How's everything going, fellas?' And we go, 'Fine, nice to see you.' And they leave.

"That's why we have no network interference. Because we're not really in the network. They never moved us into the prime-time department."

A working motto around the "Seinfeld" set is "No hugs, no learning," a reference to sitcom staples the writers are determined to avoid. "I don't think sweetness has to be a part of being funny," Seinfeld says. "Comedy needs a nice edge to it."

But do the Seinfelders go too far, beyond cranky to misanthropic? Recently, the stars and producers of the show gathered for a sold-out celebratory screening at the Los Angeles County Museum sponsored by New York's Museum of Television & Radio. Told by one who attended this event that most of those on the stage -- especially Seinfeld's friend Larry David, who created the show with him -- came across as surly and unpleasant, Seinfeld simply flashes his big-toothed smile.

"I'm very flattered by that characterization," he says. "This is the way I envision a comedy writing staff. Yeah, a bunch of guys who stand around all day in the hallways, wearing sneakers and talking about sports, and somehow at the end of the week, there's a show."

Seinfeld thinks that "a lot of people who don't normally watch TV" watch his show, which is consistent with the fact that the people who make the show don't watch TV, either.

"There's nobody on the staff who really watches TV," he says proudly. "No, not really. We don't really know what we're doing. I think that's a thing we have in our favor, is that we're kind of unstructured. There's nobody on our staff that has any sitcom writing experience at all. Not one show have they ever worked for."

The final "Seinfeld" of the season, airing May 6, has an irked Kramer wheeling west in Seinfeld's car. Seinfeld begged that a surprise in the last episode not be revealed, but then Marilyn Beck subsequently went and blabbed it in TV Guide. So it can be reported that the cast of the "Seinfeld" show will encounter the cast of CBS's "Murphy Brown" in a rare bit of inter-network networking.

"We were all so amazed at the efficiency and smoothness of the machine," Seinfeld says of the "Murphy Brown" operation. "Everybody knows what they're doing! And our show is kind of a jalopy. We herk and jerk along. It's kind of rough, you know, and we like that. We don't really want to improve it."

There have been other developments since the day of the interview. Seinfeld has hosted "Saturday Night Live," and did a very good job. And he has been romantically linked in the columns (are people still romantically linked in columns?) with actress Tawny Kitaen, who is so very Tawny she can hardly be Kitaen'd. Appearing on Howard Stern's riotous radio show, Seinfeld denied they were dating, but not very convincingly.

Riding high, a Porsche-driving kind of a guy, a roving-eye kind of a guy, Seinfeld nevertheless avoids the "happy go lucky" stereotype he worries about. "I don't know how much longer we can keep this up," he moans about the show, which is only in its second full season.

"Well we've done 40 episodes," he says. "It's the writing. It's the finding of the stories. It's the type of writing that it is. It's slow going. I'm not going to twist the sponge till it tears apart in my hands!"

Jerry-Built There is a blot on Seinfeld's record that may loom larger for some people than two guest appearances on "Benson." Roseanne and Tom Arnold, who do the No. 1 sitcom on TV (ABC's "Roseanne," of course), say Seinfeld is a Scientologist, a member of a religious sect about which there have been many disturbing reports.

"You can see it reflected in the kind of comedy he does," Roseanne says.

Seinfeld, Brooklyn-born and Jewish, doesn't disavow his dabblings with Scientology but says they occurred a dozen years ago. "I have taken some Scientology courses, but I've always taken a lot of meditation and yoga classes," he says. "I'm very interested in Eastern thought and I like to explore a lot of different ways of thinking.

"I was never in the organization. I don't represent them in any way. I took a couple of classes. It was great: how to improve certain conditions in your life, your ability to work, your relationships. It was very pragmatic. That's what I liked about it. It wasn't at all what you'd call highfalutin, for lack of a better term."

Doesn't this mean he's on the mailing list forever? "Yeah, yeah, but I have to say that the stuff I learned there really did help me a lot. That was, you know, 12 years ago."

In a sobering cover story last May, Time magazine called Scientology "the thriving cult of greed and power" and a "a ruthless global scam," and printed horror tales of the church allegedly gouging thousands of dollars from followers and vindictively persecuting critics.

"Time magazine, I think, was really poor journalism," Seinfeld says dismissively. Look who's an expert on journalism now! "I don't let that stuff stop me from getting the information I want," he goes on. "There are things in yoga that I don't agree with and I don't do. I go to get what I need. And that's the way I approach everything.

"To me, life is like flipping around the TV set, you know? I flip around to get what I want. It's there for me. But I don't embrace things wholeheartedly. I dissect them and take what I want.

"I don't have wild mood swings. I'm fairly normal. I think that's what's interesting about me, is the way I think about things and people seem to be interested in it, so that's what I do for them. If I thought my mood swings were interesting or funny, I would display them, but I don't think they are. If I thought my political views were amusing, I would talk about them, but I don't think they are.

"I don't worry, by nature, about things."

Seinfeld says one of the "funny" conceits behind his sitcom is that "here I am, I'm the comedian on the show, and I'm the 'normal' one."

He is asked if he has watched "Roseanne."

"I hear they're involved in some kind of cult," he says, jokingly. "I don't know what it is. But I've heard that and I think that's probably why their comedy is the way it is. I detect a subtle attempt at religious conversion in the jokes and I'm not -- " He decides to drop the joke. "I think it's always funny to hear that anyone discussed you," he says. "I can't imagine how that came up."

Fighter Pilot "My ambition since I was 7 years old was to be a stand-up comedian," says Seinfeld, who watched comics on the old "Ed Sullivan Show" while growing up in Brooklyn. "It was the fulfillment of my dreams."

A man who seems in some ways ultra-practical and practically passionless says he is "very passionate" about the noble profession of stand-up, and he does consider it noble.

"Having a comedy act is like having your own jet fighter," he says. "Only you know how to drive it, and that's what you spend years learning: how to trim the tabs a little and change the angle, and you have all these tools at your disposal, and that's what you're doing onstage. It sounds like you're just talking, but you're actually controlling a lot of little levers and dials, making little micro-adjustments all the way to hold people's attention."

These are certainly articulate and arresting observations, and observational comedy is what Seinfeld has perfected almost to the point of being an art form, but do you get the feeling maybe he has thought about this stuff a little too much? He says he doesn't want to write a screenplay, he doesn't want to be a serious actor. He apparently has no ambitions beyond precisely what he does.

One refreshing thing about him is that he does not, repeat not, want to do his own talk show. "The last thing I could pretend to be interested in is when some dopey actress's new movie is coming out," he says.

"To me, comedy is my mission. That's what I can do to make the world a little less bad. I just want to get out there in a sport coat and tell jokes like Alan King," he says. "That's what I believe in."

Jerry Seinfeld is so satisfied, it's a little scary. Shouldn't he be nuttier, wackier and much more insecure?

If "Seinfeld" were canceled tomorrow, he says, he wouldn't care, except that some people he likes would be out of work. "The great thing about a TV series is, I get to help other people do what they want to do," he says. "For my part, I am already doing what I want to do in life. So I didn't need a series per se."

Each episode incorporates some stand-up by him, filmed on a nightclub set. Originally the stand-up element was the focus for the show, with the story segments dramatizing how he found ideas for his act. But the stand-up segments have become smaller and less important as the characters and their comic tales of woes have caught on.

Seinfeld will be touring until July, when filming begins for the next season, because he says a comedian has to work out to keep in shape. He well remembers his first appearance on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson (May 6, 1981) -- a bar mitzvah, or bat mitzvah, for any comic -- and he is wondering what to do on his last, scheduled for April 28.

He won't be drawn into the argument about whether David Letterman should have succeeded Carson instead of Jay Leno. "It wouldn't have been a good corporate move for NBC," he says, "but Letterman's show is my favorite show on TV. The funniest, the cleverest, the most consistently sharp. I just love it, and I love him." Pause. "But I think Jay should do a good job there. I like Jay a lot too."

Out on the street in front of the restaurant, in his jeans and sneakers and crisp, freshly pressed shirt, Seinfeld seems to realize he doesn't look much like a big TV star. But he is, he is!

"It's weird how you adjust to things. It's really been amazing. I mean, I'm used to this now! I'm used to people recognizing me and I'm used to having a TV show. It's such an odd thing. You'd think that every day of your life you would wake up and go, 'I can't believe I have my own show,' you know. And in the beginning it was such hard work to get it born you never even thought you had a show anyway. And now that it's going, I'm kind of just used to it.

"That's the eeriest thing about it. It seems normal."

That's the eeriest thing about Seinfeld too.

"I remember reading something somewhere about some comedian, and he was saying, 'I don't want to be fiftysomething, getting up on a Tuesday night in Milwaukee.' And I thought, 'Boy, I'd love to be getting up on a Tuesday night in Milwaukee when I'm fiftysomething!' "

Does he think he'll get better and better?

"Yeah. That's the great thing about it. It's like being an athlete and you don't hit your prime till you're 50. That why it's a great life. I can't wait. I think your forties and fifties are your really prime time as a comedian. Because it's a hard thing to master. You really know yourself and you know how to work."

He thinks about it a minute, perhaps envisioning himself in Vegas 10 or 20 years hence. "My goal," he says, "is to be like George Burns, with a little more spinal flexibility."