Jerry, Paul and Jay Are Stand-Up Guys Again : Benefit: TV’s heavy hitters of comedy share a stage at a fund-raiser for a fellow comic’s family. All turned in breezy sets that skipped along the surface of their catalogues of material.

When Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, Jay Leno, Larry Miller, George Wallace, Mark Schiff and Dennis Wolfberg were emerging through the comedy ranks, they would hang out at gigs and encourage one another while they performed. All have had successful careers--some, obviously, more than others--so, when Wolfberg died of cancer last month, his friends decided to reunite on stage to raise money for his family.

With such heavy hitters of television and, um, literature, like Seinfeld, Reiser and Leno making rare local stand-up appearances Sunday at the Wiltern Theatre, the evening was certainly primed to play out as the Dream Team of comedy. But no one here was itching to run up the score and upstage anyone else, with all turning in breezy performances that skipped along the surfaces of their catalogues of material, offering a fair representation of the work that has made them familiar names.

It’s easy to see why these guys all responded so favorably to one another back in those early days. To varying degrees, they all share the same sensibility--that of the hip, slightly cynical, urban observer. They’re at their best picking through minutiae--finding the mild irritants of everyday life and rubbing at them until they produce a laugh.

Leno has had to retool his stand-up persona the most for TV, and his performance was largely a smattering of the topical gags that he’s been delivering lately on “The Tonight Show.” He opened with “I was gonna make fun of the Democrats, but there aren’t any anymore,” before riffing on such evergreen topics as the Northridge earthquake, Jeffrey Dahmer (“They found him not insane--how many people would you have to eat to be insane?”), postal workers, dead Jack in the Box patrons, Charles Manson and Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

Noting that the author of the suicide manual “Final Exit” had written a sequel, Leno asked, incredulously, “Who is this for? What’s the title--’Can’t You Do Anything Right?’?”

One of the best-received sets came from Schiff, who imagined a set of “un-motivational tapes” dispensing such advice as “Get a bottle of whiskey and a pie and go back to bed,” and reflected on sundry aspects of married life, such as when buying a new car, whether or not to get a passenger-side airbag for the wife (“Nah, give me a CD player”).

Subdued a tad due to a cold, Reiser largely sidestepped the relationship material that inspired his TV series, “Mad About You,” and his book, “Couplehood,” in favor of some reflections on his recent trip to Washington. Reiser also shared some thoughts about the discrepancy between the post office’s regular and overnight mail system: “What they’re saying is, ‘For 29 cents, sure, we’re fooling around. But give us some real money, give us $10, and we’ll guarantee it gets there.’ ”

Wallace, who declared himself “the only non-millionaire on stage tonight,” riffed on the holiday season, which now includes Halloween (“We were so poor that for Halloween we exchanged clothes with the neighbors--they went as us and we went as them”).

Perhaps the most cerebral of the comics, Miller made comic hay out of the recent decision to build Coast Guard Headquarters in West Virginia--which, he pointed out, is a land-locked state. “When you’re land-locked,” he meticulously explained, “you tend not to have a ‘coast.’ Now, the Coast Guard is predicated, somewhat, on having a coast to guard. . . . And you wonder why we’re not intercepting more drug boats?”

Seinfeld came on as the reigning champ, and turned his microscope onto pharmaceuticals: “They’re all ‘extra-strength’--there’s no ‘strength’ anymore. Now, there’s ‘maximum strength,’ the maximum allowable human dosage. It’s like saying, ‘Take what will kill me, then back it off a little bit.’ ” He closed with what must have been the largest catalogue of jokes about horses known to the comedy world.

No one got maudlin about Wolfberg, and only Leno shared any remembrance of the man, an anecdote about how he, without knowing his microphone was on, made fun of Wolfberg’s toupee on Oprah Winfrey’s show. The award for weirdest juxtaposition, however, goes to the evening’s host, a Vegas yukster named Hiram Kasten, who earnestly intoned, “It is a very special night. I’m glad we could all be here,” before launching into a creaky old groaner about a tightwad named Lipschitz.