Born standing up
by John-Ivan Palmer
[ bookreviews ]
Can a mall-plex mega-star, whose books sell on Amazon for as little as one penny, deserve serious literary consideration? That might be a rhetorical question for anyone except Steve Martin, master of The Comic Mismatch, whose pop self has long since been snuffed.
Born Standing Up is the chronicle of an oblique relationship of stage to page. His early reading was magic and joke books. By the time he was doing magic for $2 a show at Knotts Berry Farm, he had discovered Salinger and Maughm. And when he was featured on stage as a goofball hayseed with Wally Boag, he was deep into metaphysics, logic and ontology. The stage was set for future annihilation.
Martin's goal was to be a professor of philosophy, which he saw as "a form of show business." To pay for college he worked at a coffee house, the Prison of Socrates, where he did tricks and recited the poetry of cummings, Eliot, Sandburg and Benét. To develop his "poetry-quoting artist's persona," he grew a beard, and became a full time funnyman hippie. Somehow Wittgenstein and symbolic logic sat on the same lap as his voluminous show notes on the creation of what he called "anti-comedy."
You can hold Steve Martin responsible for the death of the punch line. His philosophy was to create comic tension never released, like walk around in a suit and bunny ears. The audience had to pick their own place to laugh. The result? Appearances on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Johnny Carson, combined with near unanimous rejection by night club audiences. He once tried to make America laugh by reading the telephone book on the Tonight Show, but only infuriated Carson. He regularly bombed at the Ice House in LA. At the Abbey Cellar in Aspen, someone hit him with a glass of wine.
Martin's Künstlerroman is the journey of a mask, hippie to straight guy. And behind the mask is the poignant story of a son whose parents never accepted his eventual fame as the most successful concert comedian in show business history. What kids will do to get attention.
Even as a star, he still haunted college libraries, antiquarian bookstores and wandered through museums like a character in a Henry James novel. The inevitable crack-up occurred and the suit and tie doofus ended up in the hospital, physically and psychically demolished. He realized that comedy "is as ephemeral as the daily newspaper." The symbolic dead end was when a nurse asked him to autograph a printout of his irregular heartbeat. He pulled the plug on himself and the clown was dead.
But the artist lived on, and a series of books and scripts followed. Martin's themes in Born Standing Up are weighty, and the cast of bizarre people are drawn with complex sympathy. He presents a life deeply examined. In the resounding pathos of Martin's memoir are numerous unique observations rooted in the arcane world of show business, but with universal application, such as, "comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening."
The ultimate irony: if you hold off, you could have this gem for a penny.
