Seinfeld believes funniness is genetic. When his father, Kalman, was stationed in the Pacific during World War II, he'd transcribe jokes he heard and store them in a box for safekeeping. "In the army, that's kind of how you got through it," Seinfeld says. "People would tell jokes by the score, because what else are you going to do to maintain sanity? The recognizing of jokes as precious material: that's where it starts. If you've got the gene, a joke is an amazing thing. It's something you save in a box in a war." Since Richard Pryor, at least, confession has been prized in stand-up, and this is as true today as ever. The biggest stand-up story of 2012 came this summer, when the comedian Tig Notaro took a Los Angeles stage and wrung laughs from a saga of personal misery that included the sudden death of her 65-year-old mother followed by a breast-cancer diagnosis. At Seinfeld's office, I asked him what he'd do, onstage, if he had a month like that, and I appended a "God forbid" to the question. "Thank you for 'God forbid,' " he said. "I love it. Hilarious. You have to say that." He clapped his hands with delight. "If I had a month like that, I'd do a whole bit about 'God forbid.' " Seinfeld's father died in 1985, while battling numerous cancers, "probably ultimately of heart failure," Seinfeld says. (His mother, 98, lives in Florida.) He never told jokes about it, he said, because "it doesn't make me funny. If it makes you funny, that's what you talk about. That bit for Tig Notaro, it decided it wanted to be a bit. The bit is using her to get to the audience, and she's lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. She's the second baseman in the double play: You've just got to be there to catch it and throw it on. She's a genius for recognizing it and making the move." But he insisted that bloodletting was not requisite for greatness. "What does Don Rickles tell us about himself in his show? Probably not much. He's not pouring his guts out to you, but his craft is so amazing, his skill is so amazing, there's depth in that." http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/magazine/jerry-seinfeld-intends-to-die-standing-up.xml?f=19