Jerry Seinfeld opined to me that comics are the opposite of actors. That is to say, one is judged on his portrayal of other people, while the other is judged on himself.
By this criterion, Steve Martin shouldn't have performed standup. I've interviewed him and found him to be almost-surgically analytical and dry on subjects other than himself (on that, he clams up completely).
And yet, this painfully shy man managed to become the defining comic of the '70s, the first to fill arenas.
It shocked many when Martin walked away -- at the height of what turned out to be, for him, hellish success -- to devote himself entirely to film.
In Born Standing Up, an autobiography limited to his early life and standup career, we get a look at the dichotomy that created Steve Martin. From his days as a teenage Disneyland carny and rookie magician at Knott's Berry Farm, we get every "Eureka" moment of the mechanics of making people laugh. Example: he discovers that a crowd reacts more favourably to a trick that screws up than to one that works -- a revelation that began his turn away from magic, and lived on in classic sketches, like the one that gave birth to his catchphrase, "Well, excuuuuuse me!" (In it, he demands a "blue spot" from the techs at the Boarding House in San Francisco, doesn't get it and begins a hilarious and increasingly furious rant.)
Clearly, he had a mind for dissecting comedy -- even before he enrolled in college logic classes and became enamoured of Lewis Carroll's syllogisms.
And yet, almost from the first, Martin suffered panic attacks. "I sat in stoic silence as my heart began to race above 200 beats a minute," he writes of one, "and the saliva disappeared from my mouth so completely I could not move my tongue. I thought it was the heart attack I had been waiting for, but I wasn't feeling pain. I was, however, experiencing extreme fear."
Fame, for someone like that, was a curse. "I had never been outgoing," Martin writes, "and when strangers approached me with the familiarity of old friends, I felt dishonest returning it in kind."
It's actually brave for Martin to write an autobiography considering how uncomfortable the personal stuff makes him. His explanation is that he and his family had kept all kinds of archival material from his '60s/'70s standup days, and it was a period of his life that would likely be forgotten otherwise.
So here he is, spilling on his emotionally abusive father, a failed showman who developed seething anger toward his attention-getting son. (Though there's a detachment to his self-analysis that suggests he's regurgitating the thoughts of his actual analyst.)
The psychological journey is interesting, as is the name-dropping history. And, of course, Saturday Night Live is de rigueur (biggest admission: he and Dan Aykroyd never really "got" each other).
But it's Steve Martin's small steps to smash convention that should appeal to fans of standup comedy. His absurdities -- saying "It's great to be here," then moving 10 feet and saying, "No, it's great to be here," -- influenced comics from Steven Wright to Mitch Hedberg. And before Andy Kaufman, he indulged in acts of anarchy, like taking an audience to McDonald's, ordering 300 hamburgers and then suddenly changing the order to one small fries.
I'm pleased to report Born Standing Up has a happy ending, his filming of The Jerk with Carl Reiner, which inspired him to quit standup. "The world of moviemaking had changed me," Martin writes. "Movies were social; I was not judged every day by a changing audience."
Just by critics, whom he can ignore.
