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Born standing up
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Steve Martin’s got a new memoir out, Born Standing Up. Martin is the perennial comedian-cum-intellectual, which is odd when you consider that he spent the first act of his career playing the dumb guy.
He’s done well at stand-up, at wearing a fake arrow-through-the-head, at writing humor for The New Yorker, at writing novels and screenplays, at writing oft-produced and erudite stage comedies, you name it . . . all things that make his Cheaper By the Dozen-type films look like cheap candy. And thus, it’s no surprise that his memoir is done well, and right.
Comedians’ memoirs aren’t usually very good: Stand-up is a series of intense right-brain sprints, while book-writing demands reflection, self-scrutiny, endurance. Indeed, the bookshelf of great autobiographies by American comics for a long time consisted of Lenny Bruce’s How To Talk Dirty and Influence People. Well, it’s now twice as big. Born Standing Up doesn’t deserve its place there because it’s well-written, but it is well-written: full of amusing anecdotes and well-crafted character sketches of the famous and obscure, and, given how nonpersonal if not impersonal Martin’s work has always been, surprisingly and touchingly candid.
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One more diversion
It really is a good book. I had a couple hours to kill the other day so I went to B&N and read it. It’s not a long book, 206 pages, and I read it all in two hours, but boy is it enjoyable. There are a few F bombs and other Anglo-Saxon words in the book, but overall it’s not objectionable.
I never knew how many beautiful women he’s had as girlfriends. One was Mitzi Trumbo, the drop dead gorgeous daughter of a Communist screenwriter. Another was Nina Goldblatt. They broke up, but later she got hired as a dancer on the Smothers Brothers show, and she got him a job as a writer. That was his big break, and without it probably none of us would have ever heard of Steve Martin. Just goes to show that talent and hard work are very important, but luck plays a huge, huge factor in our lives. He talks about losing his virginity to Stormie Sherk, who went on to become a Christian and marry a famous CCM musician, and then became even more famous as a Christian author herself under her married name, Stormie Omartian.
I learned a lot of things about Martin that I didn’t know by reading this book, and I had a lot of fun while doing it. Any Steve Martin fans out there should definitely read Born Standing Up.
Another thing. I don’t think most people, even his fans, realize just how long Steve Martin did comedy. He seemed to come out of nowhere into a blaze of glory that burned itself out in just a couple years. But he’d actually been doing comedy for years, and had made dozens of appearances on daytime TV talk shows, of which there were quite a few back then.
What’s really sad is that most younger people today only know Martin through his movies, which are mediocre, and display nothing of his comic genius. Last time I checked, you can’t even get a Steve Martin concert on DVD. That’s a shame. He was something else. There was never another comedian like him, and there never will be. Everyone raves about Andy Kaufman, and he was good. But he was a one or two trick pony at best, and he couldn’t hold a candle to Martin.
I think it’s a little creepy the way he never seems to age.
That impression is in large part due to his prematurely gray hair.
I don’t know if it’s his first one ever, but here’s one of Steve Martin’s very first TV appearances, performing magic on the Smothers Brothers show. I especially love the candle trick.
http://snipurl.com/1umrn
Martin actually started out as a magician, but noticed that he got huge laughs whenever he messed up or something didn’t go exactly right. Soon, he began flubbing things up on purpose, and that’s the root of his comedy routine.
Thanks for the review of the book, Night Train, really makes me want to check it out. Used to enjoy his stand-up material, have a couple of his concert albums at home from when I was a kid - on vinyl!
What’s really sad is that most younger people today only know Martin through his movies, which are mediocre, and display nothing of his comic genius.
Bowfinger, which he wrote and starred in, is one of the finest and funniest movies ever. I do think he’s sold himself short with some of the dreck he’s been part of, but some of his film work is outstanding.
However, looking over his filmography, I see that most of his really outstanding movies date from the 1980s, Bowfinger (1999) being the only real exception to that.
How many of you know him from the original Saturday Night Live acts? A wild and crazy guy is right, King Tut.
I have to agree, SteveG. Bowfinger was probably his best work since his lone masterpiece, The Jerk. He starred in a lot of movies in between, none of them very good. Actually, there’s one other one, that’s probably even better than Bowfinger. That’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, where his performance as Ruprecht the Monkey Boy evokes his old stand up act and steals the show.
OK, isn’t anyone going to ask NT if he PAID for the book? Or am I going to have to break my self-imposed rule to not communicate with him to ask him, myself?
NT, I’m also very fond of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Man With Two Brains, My Blue Heaven and Leap of Faith, though that last isn’t a comedy.
He’s very good when he has good material to work from.
No, I didn’t pay for the book. Why would I? i didn’t take it home.
Leap of Faith wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. Planes was pretty good, too. Never saw My Blue Heaven. I thought The Man With Two Brains was awful, albeit not as bad as its immediate successor, The Lonely Guy, which was execrable. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was different, but not bad, too.
I thought “Leap of Faith” was actually quite good because it shows God using Martin’s character as a vessel for good despite his cynicism and objections. Also, it’s rare to see a miraculous healing depicted so uncynically in a movie.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned All of Me as one of their favorites. It’s a great showcase of Martin’s physical comedy skills.
Of the Steve Martin movies I’ve seen (which admittedly isn’t all of them), I liked All of Me and My Blue Heaven best.
Leap of Faith was good, too.
#13: I agree, The Lonely Guy was bad. I forgot about Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. I need to see it again to be sure, but I think I liked it.
All Of Me also, one I overlooked that was quite good.
Night Train:
I have to laugh, because I did the very same thing: I was wandering through B&N with my family when I saw the book on display. I picked it up, started reading . . . and was totally sucked in.
Initially I started reading for selfish reasons not related to Martin’s writing skills: (1) I’m a fan and have been since his start. (2) We grew up not far from each other (I’m a few years younger), so I was curious to see how he treated growing up in Orange County (after his family’s move from LA). (3) I grew up about a mile from Disneyland, and my dad had business connections there, almost from its beginnings in 1955, so I essentially grew up at “the Park;” and I, too, worked there when I was in college.
However, like I said, I got sucked in by his skill as a writer and by his story. I thought I knew a lot about him, but I was fascinated by the Stormie Omartian, Mitzi Trumbo and Aaron Copland stories, etc., as well as his extensive time (and depth) as a real live Philosophy student.
I had long suspected that he had at least dabbled in philosophy — especially after reading Cruel Shoes — but this memoir fleshed it out.
And, he even cracks a couple of jokes — but just a couple.
Martin may not be a Christian (who knows, now?), but this book’s certainly an entertaining inside look at growing up in the “entertainment capital of the world” during the sixties and seventies.
michelle (8): How many of you know him from the original Saturday Night Live acts?
Frank: I was pretty behind the times growing up. I never saw him on SNL (Either I wasn’t allowed to watch it, or to stay up that late, I can’t recall. But then, I was an easy-going kid, so it didn’t matter to me. Heck, maybe I simply didn’t care … )
Anyhoo, I do remember the first time I saw Martin: Dad was watching the Gong Show, and I sat down to join him. One of the celeb judges was wearing twisty balloons on his head.
“Who’s the guy wearing twisty balloons on his head?”
“Steve Martin.”
“Name’s familiar. Who is he?”
“Some comedian.”
“Pass the chips, Dad?”
I was always behind the trends. (Class of ‘79, just FYI.) But like I said, easy going, so it didn’t bother me none.
I was interested to hear recently that Martin worked for the Brothers Smothers. They’ll be here in January. I hope to check ‘em out. Maybe bring the kids. Heck, maybe they’ll do Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, just for old times’ sake. (Some things never change.)
NT, the Stormie Omartian connection to Stever was interesting. I felt as though I was reading a Paul Harvey gem.
I seem to recall that Steve Martin was involved with Ann Heche who later became Ellen Degeneris’s live-in partner. Then lo and behold before you could say “homosexuality is genetic” Ann Heche had fallen in love with a photographer and soon became a mommy. (I dont think the marriage lasted. Heche is a bit “out there” to put it mildly).
I know who Dalton Trumbo was (”Johnny got His Gun”) but I didnt know about his daughter. A few years back I saw a pic of the all-grown up daughter of former dictator of communist Poland Wocjiech Jerezelski. She was quite the looker as they say (or used to say).