Steve Martin

(Jump over to read a review of The Pleasure of My Company)

"Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life "

(reviewed by Mary Whipple JAN 1, 2008)

“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.  Enjoyment while performing was rare—enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford.”

Looking back twenty-five years to his eighteen-year stint as a standup comic, Steve Martin analyzes how, in the 1970s, he becomes “the biggest concert comedian in show business, ever.”  His growing-up years are often traumatic, with little comedy in his personal life, and his often hostile relationship with his father, who once wanted to be in show business himself, leads him to leave home at eighteen and hit the road in an effort to find out who he is and what he will do with his life.  With Jack Benny, Abbot and Costello, and Bob Hope as early influences from radio, he works as a teenager at Disneyland, where he practices magic and card tricks, becomes a juggler, and learns rope tricks, but by the age of twenty he moves on, eventually acting in melodramas at Knott’s Berry Farm, and traveling to New York, Cambridge, and then Aspen in an effort to find his comedic “voice.”   

Comedy does not come easily to Martin, and it is not until he studies philosophy at Long Beach College and decides to write all his own material, observing the funny things in life and making them his own experience, that he finds a personal direction.  Hired to work as a writer for the Smothers Brothers and Glen Campbell, he eventually teams with Rob Reiner, but for all his outward success, he suffers.  Anxiety attacks often give him a heartbeat of two hundred beats a minute, and his hypochondria and phobias about nightfall, which plague him for twenty years, often make his life a misery.

A college psychology class changes his life and his act in an unexpected way.  After reading a treatise on comedy and what makes us laugh, Martin decides to do the opposite:  “What if there were no punch lines?” he wonders.  “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?”  With this revolutionary idea, in which the audience chooses to laugh, rather then being set up to laugh, Martin’s style is born, and he is on his way to becoming one of the most popular comedians in history with crowds as high as twenty thousand people attending a single one-and-a-half-hour show.

Despite his phenomenal success, however, he is depressed, feeling like a party host, not a comedian.   His life is “developing more like a rock and roll band’s than a comedian’s,” he comments.  He is sometimes in concert in eighty-five cities in ninety days, and he never has time for a regular conversation, he has no privacy, and he has no natural way to meet people. By 1981, he knows it is time to walk away.

Though Steve Martin’s narration of the audiobook, is, according to friends, told in a very amusing way, the book itself could not be more serious.  Martin’s approach to his craft is intellectual, analytical, and extremely thoughtful.  His comedy is not spontaneous but cerebral, and his own evaluation of what made his standup act so successful in the seventies is enlightening.  The phenomenon of Saturday Night Live, of which he was a member, was connected to the social and political rebellion of the day, and the stars who became instrumental in his success—Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Don Rickles, for example—were as irreverent and as willing to take chances as he was. 

Readers expecting juicy tidbits about the Hollywood scene may be disappointed—Martin concentrates on the development of his own comedy style and remains as private in this book as he is in life, providing little information about his professional life after standup, and almost nothing about his personal life.  A huge star who has managed to create a real, personal life, Martin shares his past but not his present, “writing about someone [he] used to know.  Yes,” he says, “these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else…” 

  • Amazon readers rating: from 397 reviews

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About the Author:

Steve Martin Steve Martin is a celebrated writer, actor, and performer. His film credits include Father of the Bride, Parenthood, and The Spanish Prisoner, as well as Roxanne, L.A. Story, and Bowfinger, for which he also wrote the screenplays. He's won Emmys for his television writing and two Grammys for comedy albums. In addition to a play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile , he has written a bestselling collection of comic pieces, Pure Drivel , and a bestselling novella, Shopgirl . His work appears frequently in the New Yorker and the New York Times . He lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

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