Born Standing Up

Beginning in 1980 and lasting the rest of the century, Hollywood went through a phase where one new star was anointed "Comedy's Top Box-Office Draw" every two years or so. Working backwards, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy are examples of past winners in this sweepstakes. But the first was Steve Martin, who — after conquering the live comedy circuit, the record industry, then television — single-handedly invented this contest when he made what was at the time a daring move for a popular stand-up: Martin wrote and starred in his film debut, The Jerk.

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life is the story of how this son of suburbia acquired the leverage he needed to take this risk, and what he sacrificed to reap its rewards. Martin wrote the book looking to correct a failure he found in many celebrity memoirs. He recently told USA Today, "[Entertainers] write something like, 'And then I got a job at the Copacabana,' and move on. And I say, 'Wait a minute! How did you ever get a job at the Copa?" Though Born Standing Up lacks the subtlety of thought of his other serious writing, Martin tells how he got his equivalent of the Copa gig with engaging candor.

Intertwined with the book's anecdotes, revelations and, ultimately, its failures, is the hedonistic Sixties. Martin, through his recollections, is quick to distance himself from its cliches of personal liberation. He writes of two experiences with amyl nitrate which produce more slapstick than elated sexual escapade. In 1969, a year by which doing recreational drugs loses its baggage among his peers and colleagues, Martin gives up pot after the first of an intermittent series of anxiety attacks which parallel his career's rise. Seeking to distance himself from shaggy peers, he resists growing his hair until he realizes it's required for showbiz legitimacy. And, in a shrewd move, Martin chooses Vaudeville's eclecticism instead of Lenny Bruce-style rants for his act's template.

As anxious as Martin is to contradict the spirit of this era, one can't help but recall its decadence every time he stops to describe a revelatory moment. A 20-year-old Martin writes on a postcard to his sweetheart after visiting the house of the late e.e.cummings, "I have decided my act is going to go avant-garde. It is the only way to do what I want." And so "art for art's sake" enters the picture. This mode of thinking later provides the comedian's response to an audience's unsweetened indifference. There is a moment in every decent memoir written by a comedian — from Charlie Chaplin to Jack Benny to Richard Lewis — when the author comes to grips with the toughness required to survive in comedy. But in Martin's book, the challenge is met through a particularly Sixties strategy — a loss of nerve disguised as genius.

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

Using late '60s TV standards such as The Steve Allen Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour as testing grounds, Martin unfolds this unorthodox comedic method with the comedy groundswell of the 1970s. It was a time of Richard Pryor's "Mudbone," Albert Brooks's Famous School for Comedians and the rise of a self-sustaining stand-up camaraderie (and, later, comedy industry) not beholden so desperately to the whims of the old man's club of TV and film. Over half-way through the book, with much time and many words spent on the likes of Don Henley and Linda Ronstadt, Steve Martin's legacy is formed by a single event:

"It was there, on the night of October 11, 1975, that I turned on the TV and watched the premiere episode of Saturday Night Live. 'Fuck,' I thought, 'they did it.' The new comedy had been brought to the airwaves in New York by people I didn't know, and they were incredibly good at it, too. The show was a heavy blow to my inner belief that I alone was leading the cavalry and carrying the new comedy flag. Saturday Night Live and I, however, were, destined to meet."

They do, of course, and the confluence of a handful of hosting-gigs at SNL, three hit comedy records (Let's Get Small, A Wild and Crazy Guy, and Comedy Isn't Pretty), an hour-long concert film broadcast on fledgling HBO, along with the regular Carson appearances which had been steadily raising Martin's profile, put the comedian on the most elite level of celebrity. He appeared on the covers of Newsweek and Rolling Stone, sang with the Muppets, sold out entire stadiums, and, inevitably, suffered the backlash of overexposure. "By 1981," Martin writes, in what is the sharpest turn of phrase in a book with its share of erudite flourishes, "my act was an overly plumed bird whose next evolutionary step was extinction." He'd already hit big the previous summer with The Jerk and had met with Stanley Kubrick to discuss the lead in what eventually became the iconoclastic director's last film, Eyes Wide Shut. Taking the matter into his own hands, Martin was preparing the first of many attempts to break out of his career's "Wild and Crazy" prison with Pennies from Heaven, a bold if flawed film musical based on a lauded BBC serial.

The book ends here, with Martin as comedy's first "Top Box-Office Draw." The trajectory of Martin's career from this perch of rare influence — from immortal Jerk to extraordinary screenwriter (Roxanne, L.A. Story, and Bowfinger) to serviceable novelist (Shopgirl, The Pleasure of My Company) — proves Woody Allen's maxim, "Being funny is not anyone's first choice." It wouldn't take much to make Born Standing Up an infinitely better book than it is. It merely requires the author taking the art of being funny as seriously as he takes the art of being Steve Martin.

(Click to read six books about comedy better than this one.)