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I spoke with a cigar-chomping vendor named Joe and told him my résumé: no experience at anything. This must have impressed Joe, because I was issued a candy-striped shirt, a garter for my sleeve, a vest with a watch pocket, a straw boater hat, and a stack of guidebooks to be sold for twenty-five cents each, from which I was to receive the enormous sum of two cents per book. The two dollars in cash I earned that day made me feel like a millionaire.
With its pale blue castle flying pennants emblazoned with a made-up Disney family crest, its precise gardens and horse-drawn carriages maintained to jewel-box perfection, Disneyland was my Versailles.
I was now performing at the hectic pace of one show every two or three months.
Later in life, I wondered why the Kiwanis Club or the Rotary Club, comprised of grown men, would hire a fifteen-year-old boy magician to entertain at their dinners. Only one answer makes sense: out of the goodness of their hearts.
I was to perform a five-minute act, billed as “Steve Martin: Youth and Magic,” in an evening show for Wally’s fans. The programs appeared from the printer with the perfect prescient typo: “Steve Martin: Mouth and Magic.”
“And now, the glove into dove trick!” He threw a white magician’s glove into the air. It hit the floor and lay there. He stared at it and then went on to the next trick. It was the first time I had ever seen laughter created out of absence.
Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.
But wait—maybe the best opening line I heard was Richard Pryor’s, after he started two hours late in front of a potentially miffed crowd at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. He said simply, “Hope I’m funny.”)
“I laugh in life,” I thought, “so why not observe what it is that makes me laugh?”
A guy didn’t walk into a bar, I did. I didn’t want it to appear that others were nuts; I wanted it to appear that I was nuts.
John and I, in order to drum up business, left little cards on the tables in the upstairs restaurant that read STEVE MARTIN / JOHN MCCLURE, ENTERTAINMENT ORDINAIRE, which to me was hilariously funny, but never seemed to be noticed as a joke.
Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.
Though panic attacks are gone from my life now—they receded as slowly as the ice around Greenland—they were woven throughout two decades of my life. When I think of the moments of elation I have experienced over some of my successes, I am astounded at the number of times they have been accompanied by elation’s hellish opposite.
The country was angry, and so was comedy,
What if there were no punch lines?
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.
I would move through my act without pausing for the laugh, as though everything were an aside. Eventually, I thought, the laughs would be playing catch-up to what I was doing.
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.”
Then he said, “Do you want to see my guns?” After emptying the bullets into his palm, he showed us two pistols and a derringer.
However, when it was over, something odd happened. The audience didn’t leave. The stage had no wings, no place for me to go, but I still had to pack up my props. I indicated that the show had ended, but they just sat there, even after I said flatly,
“It’s over.” They thought this was all part of the act, and I couldn’t convince them otherwise.
Silence, too, brought forth laughs. Sometimes I would stop and, saying nothing, stare at the audience with a look of mock disdain, and on a good night, it struck us all as funny, as if we were in on the joke
Change was imminent. I cut my hair, shaved my beard, and put on a suit. I stripped the act of all political references, which I felt was an act of defiance.
“Are you that boy who was on The Tonight Show last night?” “Yes,” I said. “Yuck!” she blurted out.
no one showed up to see me and a new duo, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
My entry for the Hub Pub Club started this way: “This town smells like a cigarette.”
And my closer, “Well, we’ve had a good time tonight, considering we’re all going to die someday.”
Today I realize that I misunderstood what my last year of stand-up was about. I had become a party host, presiding not over timing and ideas but over a celebratory bash of my own making. If I had understood what was happening, I might have been happier, but I didn’t. I still thought I was doing comedy.
In a public situation, I was expected to be the figure I was onstage, which I stubbornly resisted. People were waiting for a show, but my show was only that, a show.
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.
After the screening, I got a left-handed compliment of juicy perfection: A woman approached me and said, “I loved this movie. And my husband loved it, and he hates you!”
Thankfully, when the movie is finally screened, I discover that my intuition is not always right. If it were, there would be no surprises left; I would be living in a dull comedy heaven.
