Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

by STEVE MARTIN

  The collection of scraps I sent was sketchy, half-baked material that I never would have submitted to a college English class for fear of expulsion. But Mason liked it, or maybe he just liked Nina, and having never written anything professionally in my life, I was hired as a tryout for the few remaining weeks of the Smothers season. I gingerly went to my television writing instructor at UCLA and told him I had to resign from the class—and school—because I had gotten a job writing for television. Years later, I learned that because my material had not made it past the final judges at the top, Mason, in an act of artistic generosity, had paid this newcomer out of his own pocket.

  My professional writing career started off painfully. The older writers were rightfully suspicious of this kid, especially since my only qualification was being under thirty, and I felt the pressure to deliver. I was timid and unsure of myself in this suddenly wider world. If I was asked to write an intro for the folksinger Judy Collins, I would write, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, here’s folksinger Judy Collins!” One afternoon I was in the studio, watching a rehearsal of a sketch dealing with television.

  Tommy Smothers came up to me and said directly, “We need an intro for this bit. Can you write it?” This question was put to me with a clear implication that my job was on the line. I said yes but meant no. I went upstairs to my office as if I were on a march to the gallows; my mind was blank. Blanker than blank. I was a tabula rasa. I put paper in the typewriter and impotently stared at it. Finally, a great line occurred to me, except it belonged to my roommate, the comedian Gary Mule Deer. But it was perfect for this intro, so why not call him and ask if I could use it? By a miracle, he was home. I explained that I was stuck. He said sure, use it. I went downstairs, handed in the line, and Dick Smothers read the joke: “It has been proven that more Americans watch television than any other appliance.” Two highly experienced writers, Hal Goodman and Al Goldman, with credits extending back to Jack Benny, came up to me and said, “Did you write that joke?” “Yes,” I said. “Good work,” they said. If, at that moment, I had been hooked up to a lie detector, it would have spewed smoke. The event must have been cathartic, because afterward, I relaxed and was able to contribute fully to the show.

  The season ended, and I was asked to work on a summer replacement show, the malappropriately titled The Summer Brothers Smothers Show, starring Glen Campbell. Glen was a former studio musician who had just risen to stardom with his first big hit, John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind.” I was twenty-two years old when I found myself standing in a small room at CBS on Fairfax with a few other writers, including John Hartford, while Pete Seeger strummed his banjo not five feet from me. Around the calfskin head of Pete’s banjo was written in ink, THIS MACHINE SURROUNDS HATE AND FORCES IT TO SURRENDER (an allusion to Woody Guthrie’s earlier guitar slogan, THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS). We pitched concepts for Pete’s appearance, but his idea was the best. He would sing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy (and the Big Fool Says to Push On)” over images of the increasingly tragic war in Vietnam. Glen Campbell probably hadn’t known what he was getting into, but he endorsed us all the way.

  I was teamed with the hilarious Bob Einstein—an advertising writer who had found his way to CBS—and fortunately, as we shared a windowless office and worked together fourteen hours a day, we became inseparable friends. Bob and I were perfect writing foils. We had a mutual regard for Laurel and Hardy, Jerry Lewis, Daffy Duck, and Mel Blanc’s peculiar genius, and we could make each other laugh until we were breathless. If I accidentally banged my head on a stage pipe, Bob would collapse in hysterics and, following his lead, so would I. At least eight of our fourteen working hours were spent laughing until we were in pain, then trying to decide if what we were laughing at was usable or just comic delirium. Bob later achieved fame as Super Dave, a bumbling TV daredevil.

  Though Bob and I were a team, I sometimes worked with another young writer/performer, Rob Reiner, later to make his mark as the director of, among other films, When Harry Met Sally and the classic This Is Spinal Tap. Rob, in a coincidence that was yet to happen, was the son of my future film director, Carl Reiner. Rob and I closed our first season with a strong finish. We wrote a ten-minute finale combining short sketches with classic rock songs from the fifties. At that time “oldies but goodies” was a new concept. The segment was a hit and Rob and I gave ourselves credit, whether it was accurate or not, for starting a fifties music revival. We wrote it for Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry (who was still riding on the success of “Ode to Billy Joe”), and when Bobbie appeared onstage in an “itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini,” all the writers’ jaws dropped. We hadn’t known she’d started as a chorus girl in Las Vegas.

  I had a short-lived but troublesome worry. What if writing comedy was a dead end because one day everything would have been done and we writers would just run out of stuff? I assuaged myself with my own homegrown homily: Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening. This problem solved, I grew more confident as a writer and slid into steady work the following season, thanks to an endorsement from Bob Einstein, on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. I even had a few walk-on appearances where I inevitably played “the hippie.” The satirical show had taken a big left turn, which suited my politics perfectly. Constantly making news because of CBS’s censorship policy, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was the only source on prime-time television for both satire and contemporary music acts such as the Doors and the Beatles.

  Bob Einstein, Nina Lawrence, Don Wyatt, and me, in costume for a Smotherssketch.

  Though the new writing job frequently required allnighters, I continued to service my stand-up career. I would bomb regularly at the Ice House, but the audiences were so sparse that the proprietor, Bob Stane, couldn’t tell if I was flopping or the house was too empty. One night I realized I had been on for twenty minutes and had not gotten a single laugh from the dead Tuesday-night crowd. I thought, “Why not go for the record?” I set my mind to it and finished the show without having roused one snicker. However, there was a sign of encouragement from these early jobs, and years later I heard it phrased perfectly by Bill Cosby. He said that early in his career, when the audience wasn’t laughing, he could hear the waitresses laughing, and they saw the show night after night. I noticed that the waitresses were laughing.

  MY LIFE HAD BEEN ALTERNATELY inching or leaping upward: I was proud of my job on the Smothers Brothers’ show. I had some cash. My sex life was abundant and selfish. Things were rolling along nicely when I experienced a crushing psychological surprise. One night I was off to the movies with my friends John McClure, George McKelvey, and his wife, Carole. We were going to see Mel Brooks’s The Producers, and we decided to smoke a little pot, which had become a dietary staple for me. So now I was high. In the car on the way to the theater, I felt my mind being torn from its present location and lifted into the ether. My discomfort intensified, and I experienced an eerie distancing from my own self that crystallized into morbid doom. I mutely waited for the feeling to pass. It didn’t, and I finally said, “I feel strange.” We got out of the car, and John, George, and Carole walked me along Sunset Boulevard in the night. I decided to go into the theater, thinking it might be distracting. During the film, I sat in stoic silence as my heart began to race above two hundred beats per minute and the saliva drained from my mouth so completely that I could not move my tongue. I assumed this was the heart attack I had been waiting for, though I wasn’t feeling pain. I was, however, experiencing extreme fear; I thought I was dying, and I can’t explain to you why I just sat there. After the movie, I considered checking myself in to a hospital. But if I went to the hospital, I would miss work the next day, which might make me expendable at CBS, where my career was just launching. My friends walked me along Sunset again, and I remember humming, “Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune” from The King and I. I spent the night on George and Carole’s couch in absolute terror. I k
ept wondering, “Am I dying?” but was more concerned with the question “Do I have to quit my job?”

  I survived the night and struggled in to work the next morning. I was not relieved, but I was calmer; I confessed to Bob Einstein what had happened and found that as soon as I discussed the symptoms, they arose again with full intensity. However, I somehow maintained my implacable façade.

  The cycle was unbreakable. Any relief was followed by the worry of recurrence, which itself provoked the symptoms. After a few weeks, a list of triggers developed. I couldn’t go back into a movie theater, and I didn’t for at least ten years. I never smoked pot again, or got involved in the era’s preoccupation with illicit substances (I’m sure this event helped me avoid the scourge of cocaine). However, the worst trigger was a certain event that, cruelly, happened every day. It was night. Eventually, I could find my way through the daytime, but as I left work, winding my way up the canyon streets as the sun set, I imagined feeling the slight rise in elevation and the air getting thinner. Nuts, I know. As a teenager, I had mixed a somber home life with a jubilant life away from the house. Now I could be funny, alert, and involved while nursing internal chaos, believing that death was inching nearer with each eroding episode of terror. I learned over the next months that I could do several things at once: be a comedy writer, be a stand-up comedian, and endure private mortal fear. Thankfully, after a difficult year, my specific dread of nightfall faded. I suppose I was too practical to have such an inconvenient phobia.

  I discovered there was a name for what was happening to me. Reading medical and psychology books, I found my symptoms exactly described and named as an anxiety attack. I felt a sense of relief from the simple understanding that I was not alone. I read that these panic attacks were not dangerous, just gravely unpleasant. The symptoms were comparable to the biological changes the body experiences when put in danger, as if you were standing in front of an object of fear, such as an unleashed lion. In an anxiety attack you have all the symptoms of fear, yet there is no lion. I could not let self-doubt or lack of talent cause me to fail at this new writing job—this lion—which was the gateway to my next life as an entertainer. I carefully buried this fear; I was in over my head, but my conscious mind wouldn’t allow that thought to exist, and my body rebelled that night at the movie theater. At least this is my ten-cent diagnosis. I continued to suffer the attacks while I went on with my work, refusing to let this inner nightmare affect my performing or writing career. 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.

  IN THE LATE SIXTIES, comedy was in transition. The older school told jokes and stories, punctuated with the drummer’s rim shot. Of the new school, Bill Cosby—one of the first to tell stories you actually believed were true—and Bob Newhart—who startled everyone with innovative, lowkey delivery and original material—had achieved icon status. Mort Sahl tweaked both sides of the political fence with his college-prof delivery, but soon the audiences were too stoned to follow his coherent sentences. George Carlin and Richard Pryor, though very funny, were still a few years away from their final artistic breakthroughs. Lenny Bruce had died several years earlier, fighting both the system and drugs, and his work was already in revival because of his caustic brilliance that made authority nervous. Vietnam, the first televised war, split the country, and one’s left or right bent could be recognized by haircuts and clothes. The country was angry, and so was comedy, which was addressed to insiders. Cheech and Chong spoke to the expanding underground by rolling the world’s largest doobie on film. There were exceptions: Don Rickles seemed to glide over the generation gap with killer appearances on The Tonight Show, and Johnny Carson remained a gentle satirist while maintaining a nice glossary of naughty-boy breast jokes. Tim Conway and Harvey Korman, two great comic sketch actors working for the affable genius Carol Burnett, were deeply funny. The television free-for-all called Laugh-In kept its sense of joy, thanks in part to Goldie Hawn’s unabashed goofiness and producer George Schlatter’s perceptive use of her screwups, but even that show had high political content. In general, however, a comedian in shackles for indecent language, or a singer’s arrest for obscene gestures, thrilled the growing underground audience. Silliness was just not appropriate for hip culture. It was this circumstance that set the stage for my success eight years later.

  IN A COLLEGE PSYCHOLOGY CLASS, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it. I didn’t quite get this concept, nor do I still, but it stayed with me and eventually sparked my second wave of insights. With conventional joke telling, there’s a moment when the comedian delivers the punch line, and the audience knows it’s the punch line, and their response ranges from polite to uproarious. What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgment that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song.

  A skillful comedian could coax a laugh with tiny indicators such as a vocal tic (Bob Hope’s “But I wanna tell ya”) or even a slight body shift. Jack E. Leonard used to punctuate jokes by slapping his stomach with his hand. One night, watching him on The Tonight Show, I noticed that several of his punch lines had been unintelligible, and the audience had actually laughed at nothing but the cue of his hand slap.

  These notions stayed with me for months, until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? 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? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. 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.

  To test my idea, at my next appearance at the Ice House, I went onstage and began: “I’d like to open up with sort of a ‘funny comedy bit.’ This has really been a big one for me…it’s the one that put me where I am today. I’m sure most of you will recognize the title when I mention it; it’s the Nose on Microphone routine [pause for imagined applause]. And it’s always funny, no matter how many times you see it.”

  I leaned in and placed my nose on the mike for a few long seconds. Then I stopped and took several bows, saying, “Thank you very much.” “That’s it?” they thought. Yes, that was it. The laugh came not then, but only after they realized I had already moved on to the next bit.

  Now that I had assigned myself to an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing: This is funny, you just haven’t gotten it yet. If I wasn’t offering punch lines, I’d never be standing there with egg on my face. It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing. 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. Everything would be either delivered in passing, or the opposite, an elaborate presentation that climaxed in pointlessness. Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe that I didn’t care if they laughed at all, and that this act was going on with or without them.

  I was having trouble ending my show. I thought, “Why not make a virtue of it?” I started closing with extended bowing, as though I heard heavy applause. I kept insisting that I needed to “beg off.” No, nothing, not even this ovation I am imagining, can make me stay. My goal was to make the audience laugh but leave them unable to describe what it was that had made them laugh. In other words,
like the helpless state of giddiness experienced by close friends tuned in to each other’s sense of humor, you had to be there.

  At least that was the theory. And for the next eight years, I rolled it up a hill like Sisyphus.

  My first reviews came in. One said, “This so-called ‘comedian’ should be told that jokes are supposed to have punch lines.” Another said I represented “the most serious booking error in the history of Los Angeles music.”

  “Wait,” I thought, “let me explain my theory!”

  MY JOB WITH THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS allowed me to move to the hippie center of Southern California, Laurel Canyon. In 1968 Laurel Canyon was considered by the in crowd to be a nature reserve because of the presence of trees, even though the democratic Los Angeles smog covered all areas. Joni Mitchell lived there, so did Carole King, so did Kenny Loggins and Frank Zappa. I never met any of them, but I did reconnect with the person who, for the next fifteen years, would be the most significant figure in my performing life. His name was Bill McEuen, and he was the older brother of my high school friend John McEuen. John, a musician since the ninth grade, had joined a group, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Bill, who aspired to be a showbiz entrepreneur in the mold of Elvis’s Colonel Parker, was managing them. It was simply coincidence that Bill and I had both moved, with intermittent stops, from Garden Grove to Laurel Canyon.

  Bill had a deep love of early blues, country, and bluegrass music. He would pick up his guitar and sing Jimmie Rodgers’s line, “He’s in the jailhouse now!” and snap a string, giving the note a slight percussion. He also spotted genius. At Pepe’s, a dinky club in St. Louis, he saw an act called the Allman Joys and brought them to Hollywood. They changed their name to Hour Glass, and he represented them for a while before they became the Allman Brothers Band. A few years later, he would create and produce a revered country music album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, for which, it seems to me, everyone gets credit but him, even though Bill dreamed it all up and made it happen. He corralled some recording time for me at those Nashville sessions—after Mother Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, and Jimmy Martin had gone home for the evening—to lay down some banjo tunes I had written. In 1981 the songs appeared on my final last-gasp comedy album, The Steve Martin Brothers.