Using a Bic ballpoint pen, Jerry Seinfeld composes all his jokes on sheets of yellow legal paper, as he’s done since 1975 when he first tried his hand at stand-up comedy. He kept every joke, organized alphabetically, but never intended for anyone to see the pages.

“I don’t want to say embarrassed, but they were a very private thing for me,” Mr. Seinfeld says. “I don’t want people to know how much work I put into it. I just think it’s more fun when it seems off the cuff.”

The 63-year-old comedian opened up his archives when he made a one-hour special for Netflix. It’s the first result of a deal he struck with the streaming service that includes a future special and his interview series “Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee,” which previously ran on Sony’s streaming site Crackle.

Scroll down to see how Jerry Seinfeld breaks down a cereal joke.

“Jerry Before Seinfeld,” released on Netflix last week, is a stand-up set that doubles as his oral history of an initiation into the comedy life. The show was shot in a tiny club in Manhattan, the Comic Strip, where Mr. Seinfeld sharpened his skills nightly but hadn’t performed in 30 years. He tells stories of that incubation phase and delivers jokes written in the years leading up to his first appearance on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” in 1981, eight years before the premiere of “Seinfeld.”

Though music stars routinely play hits from their back catalog, it’s rare for stand-ups to resurrect vintage material. The observations in some of Mr. Seinfeld’s old jokes defy aging—his free-range childhood in the 1960s, socks escaping from the laundry, the improbable power of the Notary Public—but it was challenging to get that material back into shape for the new special, he says.


“When a bit is your act and your act is your life, you know every letter of every word. Every note of inflection and timing. And I had forgotten it all. I had to re-learn it.”

In a recent interview, Mr. Seinfeld broke down elements of a joke written in his formative years that resurfaced in “Jerry Before Seinfeld.”

Breaking Down ‘Cookie Crisp’

Photo: Jerry Seinfeld/NETFLIX

1. Long before “Seinfeld” showed a lineup of cereal boxes in Jerry’s kitchen, the comedian was tickled by breakfast foods, especially the sugary brands. “Cereal. It’s just one of the funnest things. It’s candy masquerading as food. What a racket,” he says.

2. On stage, he ticks off these cereal brands like a mantra. “You want things that are just fun to say. It’s fun to say Cocoa Crisp and Fruity Pebbles. It’s not fun to say Oat Bran.” He hits a sort of high note on the last word, which comes out as a strangled shriek. “Pops has a consonant strength that Froot Loops does not have. Frosted Flakes? Soft. Sugar Pops is on the end and not by coincidence. I plan that out.”

Photo: Jerry Seinfeld/NETFLIX

3. Of his cursive handwriting, he says, “I love penmanship. I love writing with a pen. I feel like I’m painting.”

Photo: Jerry Seinfeld/NETFLIX

4. Crossed out lines will sometimes survive in performance (this line pops up in the “Jerry Before Seinfeld” version) but such edits illustrate a painstaking part of the creative process. “You’re always trying to trim everything down to absolute rock, solid rock. I will sit there for 15 minutes to make it one syllable shorter.”


5. The whole bit hinges on this line—“It’s not like cookies, it is cookies,” Mr. Seinfeld says. “There’s a brevity and a rhythm and an insanity to that. When you’re writing stand-up, you’re looking for something that you can wield like a syntactical weapon.” There’s also an element of surprise: “You make it a little shorter than the audience thinks it’s going to be. When I say, ‘It’s not like cookies,’ they don’t think this joke is going to end in three more words.”

Photo: Jerry Seinfeld/NETFLIX

6. Mr. Seinfeld initially got excited about featuring a 19th century German existentialist in his bit. “If I can get a joke that refers to Nietzsche, it’s like shooting an arrow into the sun.” However, the average audience member’s sketchy knowledge of the philosopher made the set-up wobbly, so the comedian spiked it. “There’s a lot of places you can use that joke, but in a nightclub it’s not going to cut it. I love that [juxtaposition]—you’re talking about Cookie Crisp and using Nietzsche—but that was a dream that died on the page.

Photo: Jerry Seinfeld/NETFLIX

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Cookie Crisp We rolled out of bed right into a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, Frosted Flakes, Cap’N Crunch, Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Sugar Pops. I got to stop, I’m feeling a little light headed. Life cereal. Named after the exact opposite of what it was offering you. How about the balls on these people “Lets call it LIFE.” “Oh no, this is much bigger than that” What else did they kick around? “How about ‘Almighty God?’ Or new Almighty God with Raisins? and if you don’t like it, you can go to hell.” Our parents had no clue there was no food in any of these products. Until the Cookie Crisp people came along and blew the lid off the whole racket. Cookie Crisp should have been called “The Hell with Everything.” If you don’t know what this is, this is a cereal that, it’s not like cookies, it IS cookies. This is your breakfast, a bowl of chocolate chip cookies. Ice cream for lunch, cake for dinner, bacon and cigarettes in between. This is the Cookie Crisp Total Health Plan. I think Nietzsche said after a bowl of Cookie Crisp “If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.” He loved Cookie Crisp, and it almost killed him.

Write to John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen@wsj.com