Jerry Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan at the United Center: Every little thing they do is magic

Here are some of the topics that Jerry Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan talked about at the United Center on Thursday night: Marriage, brunch, vacations, children’s movies, horses, circuses, cemeteries, golf visors, pets, having kids, submarines and Pop Tarts.

Here are some of the topics that didn’t come up: war, poverty, politics, racism, inequality.

That’s not a knock, and, unless you’ve been under the comedy rock for the past three decades, it should not be especially surprising. They don’t do statements. They don’t write around themes; they don’t take off a couple of years only to return transformed, touting a fresh thesis. They are not those kinds of stand-ups, and though you know this, of course, watching them together, on a four-city tour, sharing a huge arena, the Beatles (Seinfeld) and Rolling Stones (Gaffigan, a shade darker) of the prosaic rant, it’s hard not to think that a lack of topicality itself can feel like its own mission statement these days.

The zeitgeist, this is not. Social outrage, for the most part, felt extremely distant.

Yet: “Everybody is sick of everything,” Seinfeld said early in his set.

It’s a misdirected outrage of minor, daily quasi-tragedies, he winked, and before you say, “Yeah, that was his TV show,” two hours of Seinfeld and Gaffigan, back to back, becomes a two-man march against universal annoyances at a time when nothing feels universal anymore. These men and their well-honed jokes are products of a shared uni-culture — the kind where millions waited to watch “Seinfeld” at the same hour, weekly.

Steve Martin, emerging out of the 1960s and landing in the 1970s, somehow without any overt politics attached to his laughs, got away with ignoring the world through sheer absurdity. Seinfeld and Gaffigan remain resonant and insightful — and they were Thursday night, with occasional brilliance — because they know how to write a line and because, the world changes, but your kids are still awful and shredded wheat still sucks.

Surrounded by footlights, taking the stage to Sinatra, they lent an air of throwback, minus the hackiness that might imply — the hard-won result of clear professionalism and thousands of stage hours. Whatever cracks have formed in their personas feel less like decay than growth: Seinfeld — who’s rarely allowed much vulnerability into his act — spoke with a painfully hoarse voice at times, and offered fleeting nuggets of personal life. Vacation is not his thing, he said, sardonically adding: “Let’s pay a lot of money to fight in a hotel room.” When an audience member — creepily — stood still at the lip of stage for a long moment, then sprung forward and snapped a selfie, he sounded unnerved, amazed: “Look at the arrogance of this individual,” he told the sold-out house. And that was just moments after he talked about the uselessness of cellphone photos.

Gaffigan, in his familiar Eeyore sigh, said everyone thinks he has cancer because he’s lost lots of weight. In truth, the reason is an appetite suppressant. Turns out all these years, he said, “all I had to do was take a weekly shot that killed the passion inside me.”

Seinfeld is still very much Seinfeld, pinging from golf to the softness of contemporary parents, keeping his set tight, vibrant and fast, but Gaffigan allows so much darkness into his inoffensive sad-sack air now that, after saying “I know I complain a lot about my children but they have ruined my life,” he followed with a sincere: “Is that too negative?” Born in Elgin, raised in Northwest Indiana, he said Chicagoans don’t recognize Hoosiers without their sweatpants on. He said when his wife accused him of gaslighting her, he said he didn’t know what she meant: “I think you’re going crazy.” Darkness suits him.

Seinfeld and Gaffigan, their sets and themselves complimenting each other, are a clever, welcome pair. (They joked that they are going to have a steel-cage match with Steve Martin and Martin Short.) But neither plays arenas often, and you can see why. For Seinfeld, the cavernous United Center, echoing his jokes about nothing much at all, drains a smidge of his chit-chatty intimacy. Gaffigan’s goofy hush feels swallowed at times, even more muted than intended, inside such a large space. It’s also harder to sustain a cascading, breathless eruption of laughs when the audience is so scattered.

I’ve seen it happen in arena comedy shows, but rarely, and these aren’t those kinds of comics. They don’t do eruptions. They do steady, certain: joke, joke, personal bit, joke, joke. They don’t want to change your life. They just want you to sweat the small stuff.

Jerry Seinfeld & Jim Gaffigan continues 7:30 p.m. Friday at the United Center, 1901 W. Madison St.; tickets from $46 at www.unitedcenter.com

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com