While Bee Movie's mildy disappointing $39.1 million opening weekend may not stop Dreamworks execs from thinking franchise, it's a stretch to imagine Jerry Seinfeld slipping back into his yellow-and-black leggings for a sequel, considering the media drubbing he took for the most quietly self-destructive press tour since Tom Cruise plugged War of the Worlds by challenging Matt Lauer's sincerity and prancing around on Oprah Winfrey's love seat.

Things got off to a fittingly bizarre start last May at the Cannes Film Festival, when the comedian donned a giant bee costume and repelled down from the roof of his hotel. The stunt led one USA Today writer to rhetorically wonder, "What Jewish mother ever raised her boy to jump off a building to call attention to himself?" ("I heard Scorsese had to do this last year for The Departed," Seinfeld quipped.)

The downward slide continued into June, when Jerry poked fun at bumblebee-on-bumblebee rape. Anti-rape groups blasted Seinfeld's insensitivity, apparently determined to educate the world that, in the bee community, "BZZZ" means No!

Then it got personal when Seinfeld's wife, Jessica—whose only previous demonstrable talent consisted of marrying rich and almost immediately trading up—timed the publication of a healthy cookbook for children to coincide with her hubby's flick and found herself under scrutiny, first for allegedly plagiarizing recipes and later for sending Oprah 21 pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes (valued somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000) as a thank-you for letting Jessica hawk her book on Oprah's TV show.

David Letterman pressed Jerry about the plagiarism accusations on Late Night last Monday and Seinfeld responded by defending his wife from "vegetable plagiarism" and calling Jessica's critic a "woodwork wacko." This did little to appease the New York Times, which used Jessica's moment in the limelight and her much gossiped about '90s courtship with Jerry as the basis for a 2,000-word foray into the snark genre in Sunday Styles. The coup de grâce was getting Mrs. Seinfeld—who does not respond to gossip—to own up to her lies about her early days with Jerry. While "the former Jessica Sklar" claims that some of the confusion over the timing of her breakup with her first husband can be put down to her attempt to spare everyone's feelings, other sections of the article ("By September 1998, having left her husband, Ms. Sklar had little money to hire a publicist and stopped returning gossip reporters' calls") may present a more accurate picture.

And what of Seinfeld himself? How has the man who famously dated a minor, bought an entire building in Manhattan for the sole purpose of storing his cars, and tried to cheat a real estate broker out of her commission managed to retain any public goodwill? Is it the constant loop of repeats of his tiresome nineties sitcom on every channel in America? Are we willing to give a guy a pass if his epic disquisitions on airline peanuts and laundry detergent commercials are delivered from that harmless, equine visage? [UNRELATED: Were Seinfeld to cuckold his Bee Movie costar Matthew Broderick and somehow impregnate Sarah Jessica Parker, would the resulting offspring be an actual horse?]

Rape jokes, bee costumes, and stolen recipes aside, the lowest (and possibly most revelatory) moment of the press tour happened last Thursday during an interview with Larry King, when King (who has a cameo in Bee Movie) stumbled over whether the comedian's TV show was canceled or if the comedian ended his run voluntarily. "Are you under the impression that I got canceled?" Jerry asked in that nasally what-is-the-deal tone. "Is this still CNN?" He continued, asking King, "Do you know who I am?" and, in a strangely prophetic coda, asked one of his off-camera flaks, "Can we get a résumé in here for me that Larry can go over?"

That might not be the worst idea Jerry has had in the past year.