The Bee in His Bonnet

Jerry Seinfeld's New Flick Began as a Joke but Made Him Busy as a . . . You Know

GLENDALE, Calif.

In this episode of Jerry Seinfeld's life, the comedian is to be found in a little room at the DreamWorks Animation studio. You can hear him before you see him. That laugh. There is a couch that would be at home in a college dormitory, a very large TV, and a film-editing console that is humming with computers and screens. The room smells faintly of quality takeout. This is where Jerry Seinfeld has spent the past four years, obsessed with cartoon bees.

"I've got three feet of bee books," he says. "I know quite a lot about the bee."

For example? "They can't fly in the rain," says Seinfeld. "They have to land.

"And technically, they can't fly," he continues. "Because their wings are too small and their bodies too fat. And the weirdest one is how important pollination is. There is an Einstein quote that if there were no bees, mankind could only live for four years. I don't know if that's true."

Who knows, with Einstein.

"But it sounds good," he says.

Apparently, there is nothing that Jerry Seinfeld will not do to promote his "Bee Movie," a $150 million animated film, which he wrote and stars in as Barry B. Benson, a bee who breaks all the rules and talks to humans -- and then sues us in court (it is complicated) for stealing the bees' honey, leading to global environmental catastrophe (see Einstein, above). The movie opens nationwide on Friday.

As part of the film's ubiquitous super mass marketing campaign, Seinfeld donned a bee costume and was dangled above the cameras at the Cannes Film Festival in France. He went on "Oprah" and was interviewed by the show's host as she wore bee antennae (later we learn she has a bit part in the film). He did a cameo on the television show "30 Rock," in which he appears as himself complaining that NBC has digitally inserted Seinfeld into all their programs in an attempt to boost ratings.

But back up. That name. Barry B. Benson. Rings a bell. Because in 1979, Seinfeld appeared in several episodes of the sitcom "Benson," about a bumbling white governor and his acerbic black butler. Seinfeld played Frankie, the mail delivery boy. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

You named the bee after the sitcom, didn't you?

"Yeah, I did," he says. We wait for the joke. None.