Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

by Steve Martin

My most persistent memory of stand-up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next.

Years later, it was this pastiche element that made my performances seem unstructured and modern.

My act, having begun three years earlier as a conventional attempt to enter regular show business, was becoming a parody of comedy. I was an entertainer who was playing an entertainer, a not so good one, and this embryonic notion drove me to work on other material in that vein.

He had evidently saved his vibrant personality for use outside the family.

ended up selling real estate instead of pursuing acting was that my mother had pressured him to get a real job. But when she was older and I presented this idea to her, she said, “Oh, no, I wanted your father to be a star,” and she went on to say that it was he who hadn’t followed his dream.

Melinda, four years older than I, always went to a different school, and a sibling bond never coalesced until decades later, when she phoned me and said, “I want to know my brother,”

Having cut myself off from him, and by association the rest of the family, I was incurring psychological debts that would come due years later in the guise of romantic misconnections and a wrong-headed quest for solitude.

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.

nostalgia for the present.

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