Born Standing Up

Timing!

Steve Martin's first book, Cruel Shoes, was published in 1977 at the height of his fame as a stand-up comedian. Its blurb stated that "Steve Martin is the kind of guy who loves to write things about himself on book flaps. In fact, he has been known to write entire books just so he could write on their flaps." Some of the collected pieces were obviously jokes; others less so. One was a poem, 'November 25':

A thread strains to say goodbye
you snip the thread goodbye

Read aloud in the persona of his doofus standup "wild and crazy guy" it was doubtless funny. Lurking on the page, it read suspiciously like good poetry.

Comedy is about timing. Clive James said humour and common sense are the same thing moving at different speeds. Jerry Seinfeld told the BBC that comedy is about hard work and precision: "Everything about it has to be right for it to work, or it's useless. You have to be very thorough and attentive... Most music or drama, if it's in the ball park, it's pretty good but comedy has to be in the bullseye every time or it's not very good at all."

Steve Martin's memoir of his stand-up career, Born Standing Up, supports all three statements. It draws gentle but telling parallels between the moment of a joke's conception and his own personal development. His show business dreams are underscored by a cheerful, relentless rationalism. And at 207 pages, it wastes no words. But like 'November 25', or indeed, his 2000 novel Shopgirl, it's a product of epiphanic observation that targets more than laughs.

"I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years," he writes: "Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success."

Born Standing Up describes this development as a graceful arc. Like his 1998 collection of essays, Pure Drivel, its cultural references are sprawling. There is romance, too, spaced as carefully as paintings in a modern art gallery.

"When her current romance withered, Mitzi and I became entwined," he writes of Mitzi Trumbo, daughter of Hollywood Ten writer Dalton Trumbo. Martin became a regular guest at the household where he mixed with Dalton ("the first raconteur I ever met") and screenwriters such as Ring Lardner, Jr. He would lose Mitzi to the director John Frankenheimer who, twenty years later, would attempt to seduce his then wife, the actress Victoria Tennant. "Incidentally," Martin writes, "Frankenheimer died a few years ago, but it was not I who killed him."

You can read the line over and still not know if Martin is being flip or grave. It's reminiscent of his 1991 script L.A. Story in which his character says of his neighbourhood, "some of these houses are ten or twenty years old." It's funny and it's true, and the pathos verges on the Carver-esque.

Born in Texas and raised in a California suburb a few miles from Disneyland, Martin was the classic sunshine boy, beaming in family photographs and eager to learn. He was fascinated by vaudeville acts and radio comedians, and as a young high school student got a job at the Disneyland Magic Shop. "I stood behind a counter eight hours a day, shuffling Svengali decks, manipulating Wizard decks and Mental Photography cards, and performing the Cups and Balls trick on a rectangle of padded green felt."

Martin's focus on the quaint art of conjuring was obsessive. He spent four months mastering one technique of card-shuffling. As his confidence grew and his interest shifted to performance he realised there was a problem. "At age eighteen, I had absolutely no gifts. I could not sing or dance, and the only acting I did was really shouting." He taught himself to play the banjo by slowing down banjo records on his turntable and picking out the songs note by note.

He quit Disneyland to join a comedy troupe at Knott's Berry Farm only to quit at age 21 after seeing actors "who had worked there fifteen years and counting... I knew it could be a trap." At university he studied metaphysics, ethics, logic; at home he listened to Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May. "Some people fell asleep at night listening to music: I fell asleep listening to Lenny, Tom [Lehrer], and Mike and Elaine." He moved to Laurel Canyon and wrote for The Smothers Brothers and Sonny and Cher. Martin acknowledges his remarkable optimism and drive only in passing. His motive is self-evident - who wouldn't want to be in show business? - and a break with the maxim that the best comedy is born of a tragic life. (His 1979 movie The Jerk openly mocked the cliche, beginning with the narration, "I was born a poor black child.")

But Born Standing Up is nontheless bracketed by a distant family and a father who consistently ignored his achievements. An analyst might read Martin's stage persona - flailing, desperate to impress - as an exaggerated version of that relationship. His recollections of family, broken romances and the promoters who did him wrong are measured. "Lose it" a club owner barks at his famous arrow-through-the-head prop, but Martin recounts it without bitterness. If the anecdotes don't read as therapy, one suspects they slip by so smoothly as a result of it. The result is a narrative with real humour and remarkable clarity.

Eventually 45,000 people would buy tickets to see Martin perform in New York's Nassau Colisseum: a man in a white suit folding balloon animals and playing the banjo. The scale of his success forced him to examine the science of the jokes, stretching the punchline until the audience found it for themselves. At first the silliness of it made him even funnier, and then, suddenly, not. "I had become a party host," he writes, "presiding not over timing and ideas but over a celebratory bash of my own making."

Steve Martin bailed, moving on to become a movie actor, screenwriter and director, evading the success that would have typecast a lesser talent. Born Standing Up thus ends a story we don't expect from a clown. It has depth and range and quietude and – so far – a happy ending.

(Sunday Star Times)