It’s all the buzz

First came a thriving career as a stand-up comedian. Then the nine-year run of the show TV Guide voted the No. 1 sitcom of all time (beating second-place “I Love Lucy”).

Considering Seinfeld’s ongoing popularity, profitability and ubiquitous reruns (it’s on your TV now!), being in a room with Jerry Seinfeld is a little like being in a room with Lucille Ball.

Except, of course, that he’s alive. He doesn’t have red hair. He doesn’t go “Whaaaa.” And he’s the father of three children.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Seinfeld’s legacy is such that you wonder why he does anything but sit around and count his money. Yet here he is on the stump, shilling for “Bee Movie,” his new animated comedy, the biggest post-“Seinfeld” move of his career.

He’s as cool as a cucumber. Except as regards the bee thing.

The world’s honeybee population has been mysteriously disappearing since 2005. They’re apparently sick, these bees. Or slacking off.

While denying that the entire apiary community is involved in an elaborate DreamWorks-inspired publicity stunt on behalf of his film, Seinfeld does recognize that the timing is odd; the bees in “Bee Movie” are on strike, too.

“How weird is that?” he asks, smiling a smile that’s been seen in 26 languages.

“I think they’re closing in on the causes now; they think it’s some kind of viral thing. But I don’t know how they’re going to get bees to take antibiotics.”

“Bee Movie” follows years of DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg asking Seinfeld to do voices for animation, and one dinner party, when Seinfeld told host Steven Spielberg that he might want to do something called “Bee Movie” – a play on the concept of the low-rent Hollywood “B movie.”

At the time, all he had was the title.

“I knew Jeffrey at Disney,” Seinfeld said. “He had tried to offer me something and we were never able to get together on anything, and then when he was here (DreamWorks) he had some things he wanted me to voice, but I’ve never really done any work as just a hired hand.

“Or I have problems with the material and it doesn’t work out – so the only way to do ‘Bee Movie’ was to have me do the script, so if I had a problem with the material it would be my own fault. Which did happen quite a bit.”

In the movie – which Seinfeld wrote with three of his former sitcom collaborators – he voices a bee named Barry B. Benson. No drone he, Barry wants more out of life than a 9-to-5 at Honex and a mundane life in New Hive City.

So he takes off on adventures that include a cross-species quasi-romance with Vanessa Bloome (Renee Zellweger), a Manhattan florist, and the labor organizing of bees worldwide to fight exploitation by multinational, robber-baron honey interests, like Hunron.

As becomes immediately clear, “Bee Movie” makes no concessions to age – there’s even a Carl Kasell (of National Public Radio) gag – despite animation being forever categorized as a medium for kids.

Which is something, Seinfeld says, he never even thought about.

“I’m telling you,” he says, “the audience I have from the sitcom between the ages of 10 and 12, you would not believe. I meet them all the time on the street, all the time.

“Parents always come up to me and say, ‘My son …’ I say, ‘How old are you? Ten? Eleven? Twelve?’

“I never wrote it for them, never gave a thought to, ‘I wonder how this is going to hit a 10-year-old?’ But they’re there. They don’t care.”

You have to wonder what kids could possibly think about some of the TV show’s rather adult concepts, such as “sponge-worthiness” and “shrinkage.”

“I’ll tell you what they think,” Seinfeld says. “They think, ‘These people are funny; I don’t know what it’s about, but these people are funny.’

“Comedy has a way of translating itself across age lines and cultural lines,” he adds. “When I went into this (‘Bee Movie’) project, they said, ‘We’re going to have a very limited appeal for this movie outside the U.S. because it’s comedy, it’s verbal.’

“(That’s) not proving to be the case. Latin America, it’s like exhibitors have bought into it huge. Europe, huge. So I never predict. Just make it good, make it funny.”

“Bee Movie” producer Christina Steinberg says there was never any thought given to try to steer the film toward any demographic group.

“It’s sort of been the idea from the start at DreamWorks that we make films for all age groups, with sophisticated humor and visual appeal,” she says. “And we never worried about it. Kids were laughing at the storyboards.”

She says Seinfeld’s enthusiasm for promoting the film comes out of the 8- and 10-hour days he devoted to the project over the last three years, and a year of writing before that.

“He’s a perfectionist,” Steinberg says, “but in animation you have to be.”