Sunday, November 18, 2007

Please Hold Your Applause Until It's For Me

I have a friend who's wife ( I set them up) has an uncanny gift for giving him the right gifts. She listens to his soul and remembers and then gives him what he knows is something he'd really want. He is blessed. It so happens that he and I have a lot of similar tastes, so often the things she buys him (The Odd Couple on DVD and Limudei Nissan are but two examples) are things I buy for myself (sigh). This comes to mind as I've just discovered, and pre-ordered, a new book by Steve Martin. Not since Billy Crystal's one man show (and subsequent book) have I so anticipated an autobiographical work.
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It also brings to mind other works and words. I read more than your average person about comedians. I love hearing what they have to say in their own words about the phenomenon of their art. I think now of this opening of Enter Laughing by Joan Rivers. She was quite the stand up in her day:
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"You want to hear stupid? Major stupid? Stand up comic. You walk onto a bare stage absolutely alone, no comfort, no help, no script or actors to support you, no lyrics and music to give you life - just yourself saying your own words out of your own head, telling each person one on one, the weirdest corners of your psyche. And everybody is judging your personality, judging whether you are worthy of their money, whether you make them happy. When they do not laugh, that silence is a rejection of you personally, only you. Not your mother. Not your piano player - if you have one. A thousand people in a room are saying, "You stink. You're nothing."
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But here's what is even more stupid. In order to get on that stage and walk that terrible tightrope, you struggle through years of humiliation and privation, feeling like the misfit of the world. For this job you have to be nuts, but it is the craziness that makes you funny, makes you obsessed with your career. It is craziness that makes you live for that hour facing an audience which can destroy you at any moment. Yet, those are the truly happy times in my life, riding the laughter higher and higher, feeling that euphoria, feeling washed in love."
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And here's what Gene Wilder says (Kiss Me Like A Stranger, pages 241-242) about the related field of acting. These thoughts rushed through his head while trying to fall asleep in a hospital bed:
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Actors are children. We're ll just babies. 'Look at me! Look at what I can do!' Why didn't we grow up like other kids? All we wanted was to be loved for ourselves, just as we were, our true selves - but it didn't seem to be good enough, and when we're six or seven, and Mama is sitting in the living room crying or reading a book or sewing, and we tell a joke that we saw in a cartoon, or we do a little dance or sing a song, and suddenly Mama gets up and says, "Oh, my G-d, honey-do that for Daddy." And we sing or dance or tell our joke again, and they applaud. Mama and Daddy applaud, and they hug and kiss us and we feel that they really love us, and we grow up longing for that exhilaration again, and we do get it, years later, from an audience that applauds and cheers us and we go home exhilarated and fall asleep feeling loved, but the next morning we wake up feeling lonely again, and we need another fix from another audience. I wish I could be a Catcher, like Holden, and save all those lonely children who become actors and grow up thinking that the applause is actually love for them and not for their performance. Maybe some of them will find real love...if they're lucky."
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I once gave a speech about serious issues addressed in comedians' lines. Here are a few examples that come back to me now.
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George Carlin says that he believes that after leaving this world people will go the place that they believe in. He says, "You know those people who are always saying "don't pray for me, I'm going to hell" - "that's where they're going!"
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A young Robert Klein said that his jury was still out about if there was a G-d. But he said, he did know that he performed on Yom Kippur and woke up with a giant puss wart on a most uncomfortable spot the next day.
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Richard Pryor has a routine about his heart attack, which starts with his heart telling him to GET DOWN!!! Then his heart asks him if he's thinking about dying and when he says a painful yes his heart jolts him with WELL YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THAT WHEN YOU WERE EATING ALL THAT PORK!!! After that he tries to make a direct call to G-d...
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Ellen DeGeneris' routine that put her on the map was the one about her phone call to G-d. After holding for a long time she gets to speak to Him and asks why He created fleas. This was based on her waiting in real life for her room mate to come home one night, listening to ambulance sirens, waiting for company. Then she found out that the sirens were for her friend/room mate who was in a terrible car accident and died. Then she had to move to a small basement apartment. It was infested with fleas and she wondered, seriously, why the fleas lived and her friend died.
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Without any further ado (in one of his routines Robert Klein imagines saying that once and someone standing up and shouting, "I'd like some more ado!") here is the first chapter of Steve Martin's forthcoming book. I ordered it, my first order, from Deepdiscount.com - thank you brother bee.
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Born Standing Up
By STEVE MARTIN

Beforehand

I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success. My most persistent memory of stand-up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next. Enjoyment while performing was rare - enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. After the shows, however, I experienced long hours of elation or misery depending on how the show went, because doing comedy alone onstage is the ego's last stand.

My decade is the seventies, with several years extending on either side. Though my general recall of the period is precise, my memory of specific shows is faint. I stood onstage, blinded by lights, looking into blackness, which made every place the same. Darkness is essential: If light is thrown on the audience, they don't laugh; I might as well have told them to sit still and be quiet. The audience necessarily remained a thing unseen except for a few front rows, where one sourpuss could send me into panic and desperation. The comedian's slang for a successful show is "I murdered them," which I'm sure came about because you finally realize that the audience is capable of murdering you.

Stand-up is seldom performed in ideal circumstances. Comedy's enemy is distraction, and rarely do comedians get a pristine performing environment. I worried about the sound system, ambient noise, hecklers, drunks, lighting, sudden clangs, latecomers, and loud talkers, not to mention the nagging concern "Is this funny?" Yet the seedier the circumstances, the funnier one can be. I suppose these worries keep the mind sharp and the senses active. I can remember instantly retiming a punch line to fit around the crash of a dropped glass of wine, or raising my voice to cover a patron's ill-timed sneeze, seemingly microseconds before the interruption happened.

I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. I was not naturally talented-I didn't sing, dance, or act-though working around that minor detail made me inventive. I was not self-destructive, though I almost destroyed myself. In the end, I turned away from stand-up with a tired swivel of my head and never looked back, until now. A few years ago, I began researching and recalling the details of this crucial part of my professional life-which inevitably touches upon my personal life-and was reminded why I did stand-up and why I walked away.

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.

From BORN STANDING UP: A COMIC'S LIFE by Steve Martin. Copyright © 2007 by 40 Share Productions, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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P.S. The Times' review is here and Entertainment Weekly's is here.

2 Comments:

Blogger kishke said...

Yet, those are the truly happy times in my life, riding the laughter higher and higher, feeling that euphoria, feeling washed in love.

How sad.

November 18, 2007 at 10:35 AM  
Blogger Jack Steiner said...

It sounds like an interesting book. Martin is a very smart guy. I expect that there should be some good material there.

November 18, 2007 at 11:14 PM  

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