What Jerry Seinfeld said after students stormed out of his Duke college speech

Dozens of students walked out of Jerry Seinfeld’s appearance at Duke University on Sunday (May 12), where he was delivering the commencement speech.

Seinfeld publicly supported Israel following the 7 October Hamas attack, and travelled to a kibbutz in December to meet with hostages’ families.

The walk-outs appeared to be in relation to his public support for Israel, rather than the content of the speech itself.

Seinfeld received an honorary degree from Duke. During the speech, he did not address the issue of support for Israel.

After students walked out at the beginning of the speech, he was able to finish the rest of the speech without interruption. See the whole thing below.

"A lot of you are thinking, 'I can't believe they invited this guy.' Too late," he said at one point.

"I say, use your privilege. I grew up a Jewish boy from New York. That is a privilege if you want to be a comedian," he also said.

Speaking about his best advice for the young graduates in the crowd, he added: "Find fascination. Fascination is way better than passion… I will give you my three keys to life - no jokes. They are, number one: bust your ass. Number two: pay attention. Number three: fall in love.

"Make an effort... effort always yields a positive value, even if the outcome of the effort is absolute failure of the desired result. This is a rule of life: swing the bat and prey is not a bad approach to a lot of things. “

He also made a joke about the Titan submersible, saying: "Number two: pay attention. If you're in a small submersible that looks like a giant kazoo and is going to visit the Titanic seven miles down at the bottom of the ocean, and the captain of the vessel is using a GameBoy controller, pay attention to that."

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"Number three: fall in love. It's easy to fall in love with people. I suggest falling in love with anything and everything every chance you get."

Seinfeld poked fun at Harvard during the speech, saying: "On my staff in the 90s we had a lot of Harvard guys. They were fantastic, but I could never understand why these guys were so embarrassed about being from Harvard. They would never talk about it, they would never mention it. I'm not talking about Harvard now. I'm talking about how it used to be. You're never going to believe this. Harvard used to be a great place to go to school. Now, it's Duke."

Duke spokesperson Frank Tramble in a statement regarding people walking out of the speech, saying: "We understand the depth of feeling in our community, and as we have all year, we respect the right of everyone at Duke to express their views peacefully, without preventing graduates and their families from celebrating their achievement.”

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