Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

by Steve Martin

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream.

She didn’t know much about show business, having once told a ventriloquist to move the dummy closer to the microphone.

They were also touching and affectionate, and I believe this is where I got the idea that jokes are funniest when played upon oneself.

This mild but persistent adrenal rush beginning days before important performances kept the pounds off and, I swear, kept colds away. I would love to see a scientific study of how many performers come down with the flu twenty-four hours after a show is over, once the body’s jazzed-up defenses have collapsed in exhaustion.

She explained, as kindly as she could, that I was charming, not ridiculous, but I was forever after reluctant to sing in public.

I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.

When I moved out of the house at eighteen, I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn’t know I was supposed to.

All entertainment is or is about to become old-fashioned. There is room, he implies, for something new.

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

Almost forty years later, when I was in my early fifties, I purchased that photo as a collectible, and it still hangs in my house. The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus.

Kathy Westmoreland, another actress at the theater, had attended Garden Grove High School at the same time I did and was the first indisputably talented person I ever met. She sang like the Swedish Nightingale and, later in life, achieved a strange kind of celebrity. As a backup singer for Elvis, she became his confidante and then, quietly, his lover. Years later, after his death, she wrote a book revealing her secret, making her the focus of overwrought Elvis fans.

Hoyt Axton (an accomplished performer and songwriter himself—author of the oddly unforgettable lyric “Jeremiah was a bullfrog!”—but it’s hard to forget that his mother cowrote “Heartbreak Hotel”).

When asked why he became a poet, he said, “Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.”

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

I CONTINUED TO PURSUE my studies and half believed I might try for a doctorate in philosophy and become a teacher, as teaching is, after all, a form of show business.

When her current romance withered, Mitzi and I became entwined. After several weeks of courtship, I was ready for family inspection and she invited me to her parents’ house for dinner. Mitzi’s last name was Trumbo. Her father was screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the notorious Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors who were blacklisted during the Red Scare of the early fifties.

Dalton Trumbo was the first raconteur I ever met. The family dinners—frequented by art dealers, actors, and artists of all kinds, including the screenwriters Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner, Jr., and the director George Roy Hill—were lively, political, and funny.

Though Bob and I were a team, I sometimes worked with another young writer/performer, Rob Reiner, later to make his mark as the director of, among other films, When Harry Met Sally and the classic This Is Spinal Tap.

Rob, in a coincidence that was yet to happen, was the son of my future film director, Carl Reiner.

Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.

IN A COLLEGE PSYCHOLOGY CLASS, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it.

A skillful comedian could coax a laugh with tiny indicators such as a vocal tic (Bob Hope’s “But I wanna tell ya”) or even a slight body shift.

These notions stayed with me for months, until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension?

This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.

Now that I had assigned myself to an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing: This is funny, you just haven’t gotten it yet.

It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing. I would move through my act without pausing for the laugh, as though everything were an aside.

Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe that I didn’t care if they laughed at all, and that this act was going on with or without them.

In other words, like the helpless state of giddiness experienced by close friends tuned in to each other’s sense of humor, you had to be there.

Bob Einstein and I had become a solid workhorse writing team. When The Smothers Brothers ended, we continued to get jobs, including The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, which kept me busy for seven months out of the year.

I’m sure he noticed that this twenty-five-year-old stick figure was frozen firmly to the ground. About to pass me by, Elvis stopped, looked at me, and said in his beautiful Mississippi drawl: “Son, you have an ob-leek sense of humor.”

For the next few years, I was on the road with an itinerary designed by the Marquis de Sade.

THE CONSISTENT WORK enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.

Finally, I understood the cummings quote I had puzzled over in college: “Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.” Precision was moving the plot forward, was filling every moment with content, was keeping the audience engaged.

My friend Rick Moranis (whose imitation of Woody Allen was so precise that it made Woody seem like a faker) called my act’s final manifestation “anti-comedy.”

The room seated about two hundred and fifty, and the shows were oversold, riotous and packed tight, which verified a growing belief of mine about comedy: The more physically uncomfortable the audience, the bigger the laughs.

Time has helped me achieve peace with celebrity. At first I was not famous enough, then I was too famous, now I am famous just right. Oh yes, I have heard the argument that celebrities want fame when it’s useful and don’t when it’s not. That argument is absolutely true.

We were comparing psychoanalysis with the making of art. I said, “Both require explorations of the subconscious, and in that way they are similar.” He agreed, thought about it, then added, “But there is a fundamental difference between the two. In psychoanalysis, you try to retain a discovery; in art, once the thing is made, you let it go.”