Born Standing Up - a comic's life by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s autobiography Born Standing Up is fascinating, but not funny. More than any other factor, this is probably due to the fact that the author is not a particularly funny guy. If we assume that the 1981 incarnation of Steve Martin could not have written this book due to lack of perspective, then it’s not too far off to say that the 2008 vintage writes with so much detachment that, at times, he seems to be struggling to get a feel for the subject matter. How did a man who, these days, primarily writes novels and appears in broad family comedies in order to finance his art collection become a phenomenon that the world of stand-up comedy had never seen before and will surely never see again?

I remember Steve Martin’s heyday very well. I had no idea who Lenny Bruce was or that the medium was in the midst of a linear continuum. This arc would link the great new wave of razor sharp observational comics while simultaneously putting the last nail in the coffins of borscht belt kings of one-liners, prop-comics and ventriloquists. The names on the list are familiar enough to us now: Lenny Bruce begat Robert Klein, who opened the door for George Carlin and Richard Pryor etc., etc. all the way to Chris Rock. In the mid-to-late 1970s, Saturday Night Live showed the world that this different sort of humor existed – overtly political, controversial and hipper than thou. This was the beginning of my education. I watched SNL and its sanitized early prime-time re-runs so I knew of Carlin, Pryor and Klein. But, at the same time, another, often overlooked (at least by comedy historians) innovation was to give me and many of my generation an almost unintentional PhD in the field – the VCR. I could now go to Errol’s Video at the mall and choose from the stand-up section on the back shelf. A ten-year-old kid didn’t have to take the train into the city and sneak into a smoky nightclub. From Bill Cosby to Steven Wright: They were all there, and still, none could hold a candle to comedy’s biggest and most popular star.

The question that Mr. Martin’s book begs is: How, in the midst of this well-documented revolution, did a complete outlier, a banjo playing-prop comic with short hair wearing a white three-piece suit, become the first full-fledged rock star of comedy?

It is fortunate for his reader and a testament to Mr. Martin’s intelligence that he writes only of his stand-up career. We are spared any dissection of his later career when the creativity that made him the “world’s funniest man” started to become conspicuously absent from his films. He describes his stand-up career as “ten years of learning, four years of refining and four years of wild success.” He doesn’t dwell on what was going on in the industry, (other than the rise of SNL, of which he became a sort of honorary cast member) I suspect because he hadn’t been all that aware of it at the time. Whatever was going on in the rest of the world was largely irrelevant to his process. I haven’t verified this conclusively, but I believe that he cites more professional magicians as influences than comedians.  The inventiveness that made him so great was completely non-derivative while remaining a gross parody of show business. It’s now almost impossible to believe that the thirty to forty thousand people who packed arenas on a nightly basis to see the man were all in on the joke. The mock big-shot posturing and the absurdist indulgences he allowed himself were met with a sea of people wearing arrows through their heads and shouting out unintentionally created catch-phrases. Martin certainly sensed the ridiculousness of a man, “a white dot” appearing on stage alone at the Nassau Coliseum and delivering an act which had been forged on small stages in dingy, poorly-lit (and oftentimes poorly attended) clubs beginning in the late 1960s. He sometimes, forgivably, couldn’t resist pointing out this lack of inherent sense (one memorable bit performed at the Nassau show called for him to change the date on a dime onstage.)

Martin is generous in giving us access into the pathos and psychological drama that drove him as it seems to create all great comic talents, but at the end of the day, he struggles with the same question that we consider here. Why him? Martin refers to the parody aspect of his act when he quotes Rick Moranis as referring to his stage act as “anti-comedy.” I think this is a bit misguided in that the master of anti-comedy, Andy Kaufman (a performer so anti-comedy that he seemed to revel in not being laughed at) never approached the popularity of Martin (although all signs point to the fact that he would have never allowed it.) Was the drug-era responsible? I first heard Wild and Crazy Guy on 8-track when I was twelve and found it funny enough to play until the tape popped. And this was completely without the benefit of mind alteration. The theory that seems to hold the most water is accessibility. Unlike his fellow comics of the time, Martin wasn’t “daring” you to get him. He had learned the hard way not to try to be “too funny for the room”, even if, on some macro level he was just that. I believe that, in the final analysis, if you can be (as Martin puts it) “another banjo-playing balloon animal prop act” and be undeniably funny at the same time, then you’ve earned exactly what he got. Just remember the fourteen years it takes to work out the kinks.

Born Standing Up - a comic's life  by Steve Martin

Also, for an extremely well-written and comprehensive history of the rise of stand-up comedy during the 1970s, check out Richard Zoglin's Comedy at the Edge.