A Reflection on Steve Martin’s Memoir, Born Standing Up
What makes this one of the best books about comedy (and craftsmanship) ever written?
Part Two of the “Quality Works Resonance Series”
I recently stumbled upon the audiobook version of Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up by way of a random walk through the internet.
Ambling my way to this article on Vulture, I discovered that, after losing a bet with Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin did a stand-up routine for the first time in 35 years. My immediate thought was, “He was a stand-up comic?”
It took a moment of dissonance before connecting Steve Martin the actor with Steve Martin the stand-up comedian. “Oh right,” I finally recalled, “the arrow-through-the-head, the wild and crazy guy, etc.”
So why did Steve Martin walk away at the peak of his fame?
An interview of Steve on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee provided my next vital clue as well as another puzzling question.
In watching the two comedy legends casually converse, it dawned on me that Steve Martin the man was absolutely nothing like Steve Martin the act. Steve Martin the man is intelligent, soft-spoken, incredibly articulate and almost painfully introverted. Steve Martin the act is… well…
So, in addition to wondering why Steve dropped stand-up, I was now also left to wonder, how does one reconcile the man and the act?
Just as this thought crossed my mind, Jerry revealed that Steve had written a memoir seemingly intended to answer precisely those two questions. Furthermore, Jerry goes on to describe the book as “one of the best books about comedy of all time.” If you’ve ever watched any of Jerry’s other interviews, you know he is not one to gush.
So, with sundry questions in tow, I retrieved the audiobook and began to listen.
(As an aside, I have never listened to an audiobook before but this memoir may have very well been the perfect gateway drug. Hearing Steve Martin himself speak his own story, reenact his own bits and sing his own songs was something that would just not translate completely on the written page. I imagine it was similar to how his own platinum-selling comedy records inevitably left much of his physical comedy to the imagination, with the audible sounds of wild shuffles, goofy ad libs and pointed movements acting as a brilliant teaser for an act where “you just had to be there” to truly experience.)
From the very first passage of Steve’s preface, I knew I was hooked:
“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.”
Beautiful.
This was what Jerry Seinfeld was drawn to. As Jerry recently explained to President Barack Obama, success was never about the fame or the fortune for him but about the “love of the work.”
Thus, I began to understand that what Jerry and Steve recognize in each other is a shared apprecation of comedy as a craft, as a vehicle of self expression and, yes, as a form of art.
“Anything you make out of thin air that someone else likes, is art.”
— Jerry Seinfeld.
And so, to understand what makes this book one of the best about comedy, one must also look at it as a book about craftsmanship. Incidentally, this also helps to reconcile Steve Martin’s persona with his person. Once you realize his wild persona is not happenstance but rather a deliberately constructed work of art, it becomes all the more astonishing.
So what does Steve have to say about comedy as a craft? Judging by this first passage alone, I would argue, a lot.
On Being “In the Zone”
First, he describes his state, a mental snapshot taken of his most requisite parts, i.e. that of his mind and his mouth, while in the act of performing itself. He describes his steadfast retention of a nearly out-of-body mindfulness while still in the heat of the moment. This is what many craftsmen and women know as being “in the zone”. There is a sense that one is simultaneously the conductor and the orchestra and the audience all at once.
When fully “in the zone”, the performer can maintain high levels of detachment and engagement simultaneously, expertly controlling their own delivery while also figuratively evaluating themselves from afar. All this while telling a killer fart joke.
To draw upon a connection where there is none to start, to elicit laughs from an audience of strangers, must be like pushing on a string. Stand-up is a study in ephemeralism which comics fearlessly launch into at risk of full dismemberment of their egos. As comedians say, someone will get “murdered” but whether this be the audience or the comic one can never be too sure. Oh yes, there will be blood.
On Iteration
Steve also describes the mind’s role in this creative process as one of constant observation, analyses and adjustment.
In effect, in the first half of his sentence, he describes the state of his necessary parts. In the latter half, he describes their roles, their purpose. The state is a necessary prerequisite to the latter. Only with a proper state of mindfulness is one able to objectively process all manner of feedback that is both instantaneously received and diffused in the elusive present. This iterative process is a fundamental component of effective craftsmanship; i.e. an acute mindfulness combined with a focused creative intent. The fact that it is so similar to the mantra of Jiro Ono is no coincidence.
Through the course of his memoir, Steve walks the reader through his eighteen years in stand-up. In a nod to the oft-heard 10,000 hours, he says that ten of those years were spent learning, four were spent refining and four were spent in wild success. However, more importantly, he also says that the goal of this relentless iteration was not fame, it was instead “comic originality.” He was crafting his unique voice one gesture, one bit, one mannerism at a time. Fame and fortune were, as he describes it, merely a “byproduct.”
On the Joy of the Work
Finally, Steve describes in his opening passage an acute lack of enjoyment not merely as symptomatic of his artistic process but essential to it.
This seems odd.
In his stand-up performances, it seems as if he is having the time of his life on stage and yet here he describes enjoyment as a dangerous temptation which steals focus from a performance. How could this be?
Interestingly, I believe both observations are true. I believe Steve’s lack of enjoyment is actually a euphemism for a constant battle with the ego. Any pursuit of quality work is, as Steve describes stand-up, the “ego’s last stand.”
Those who seek to hone their crafts to exceptional levels find themselves in a constant internal struggle between the ego and the work. To create quality work, there is a necessary injection of one’s individuality, while, concurrently and in direct opposition, there is also a persistent temptation to inject all sorts of extraneous hints of the ego.
You know the bits. The ones that seem to say, “Look at how talented I am!” “Did you notice this?” “Look at me!” These elements are incredibly tempting to insert into one’s work because they are, in fact, intrinsic parts of what make us us. Without the ego, we wouldn’t be. But here, in a few keystrokes, Steve describes, with expert brevity, the incredible importance of keeping these indulgences in check for the sake of the purity of one’s work.
Ultimately, in following his own refrain, Steve actually achieves a greater level of satisfaction than briefly satiating the ego’s constant thirst for recognition. He experiences the enduring enjoyment of doing quality work.
A Writer’s Envy
In fully appreciating Steve’s book on craftsmanship, a couple things also made me overtly envious.
First, as the passage above hopefully illustrates, Steve is a damned good writer. It is almost unfair to me that this man who conquered stand-up could also conquer the written word in such a way.
Second, the book is beautifully detailed. Having a terrible memory myself (I constantly have to ask my wife, “What was the name of that restaurant we went to on such and such date? And uh… what did I eat?”), I was completely envious of how he was able to recall his memories and then articulate them with such grace. Similar to how he describes the sun-drenched canvas-covered theater where he first started performing as an adolescent, it is as if his memories are frozen in a golden amber for him to study and to document. Later, I was somewhat relieved to find that this was as much a result of his own detective work (revisiting canned footage, rifling through ancient receipts) as it was his own natural powers of recollection.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I am envious of how his life story so closely follows my own ideal for a life worth living. I dream not so much of attaining the pinnacles of fame and fortune (which he incidentally describes as being the loneliest period of his life), but of the fearlessness of his journey. The persistence. And, at times, the serendipity.
He describes his ten years as a comedic journeyman, traveling from state to state with his next meal no more guaranteed than his next gig. In hindsight, he describes it as a “course that was more plodding than heroic.” Along the way, he recalls several moments of utter disappointment; the time he “broke the record” for longest performance without a single laugh, the moment a heckler threw a glass of wine on him and asked if he thought that was funny, the times he was paid $200 for a gig when the cost to get there was nearly the same amount.
All these moments are the cruel but unavoidable rites of any creative journey. By themselves, they are already thoroughly encouraging and engrossing tales for any would-be artist who has encountered similarly frustrating obstacles. However, curiously, what I found even more admirable than his response to failure was Steve’s dogged pursuit of “comedic originality” in the face of exceptional success.
Case in point, he describes his first appearance on the Tonight Show as a series of detached thought bubbles. “I am about to be on the Tonight Show” he thought in the green room. “I am performing on the Tonight Show” he thought as he performed in front of the studio audience. “I was just on the Tonight Show” he thought in wonder in the immediate moments afterwards.
Despite his appearance, it was not a storybook breakthrough, he was not an overnight success. In fact, after a few more performances, Johnny Carson himself was so displeased with Steve’s routine that he demoted Steve to “guest host” status, i.e. only performing when a guest was hosting the Tonight Show and not Johnny himself.
And yet Steve persisted.
As Steve describes, people usually think that once you do the Tonight Show then you made it. But no one remembers the first show. Or the second. Or the fifth. On the tenth, someone may say “Hey, weren’t you that guy from that thing?” It wasn’t until Steve made his sixteenth appearance that he felt he truly had a breakthrough performance.
And what did he do immediately afterwards? He hit the road again to continue his work on his stand-up routine.
Completely consistent with his prior stated wariness of “enjoyment,” Steve’s response to big breaks was not to celebrate his own awesomeness but rather to double down on the work. By resisting the temptation to get swept up in his own success, to drink his own Kool-Aid as it were, Steve remained focused on the constant process of self-assessment rather than the persisent allure of self-aggrandizement. I imagine that in order to keep this focus in the face of the mounting temptations of fame and fortune, Steve found both solace and solitude in his work.
This relentless pursuit of craft in the face of life’s unpredictable twists of fate is what I have come to truly respect about Steve Martin.
It is what I hope to emulate in my own way and it is, in all honesty, what I have failed to emulate at a number of similarly unexpected turns in my own life.
It makes me wonder what could have been, what level of craft I could have attained had I had simply pushed ahead as Steve had done.
The Answer
And so this brings us to the resolution of this minute mystery. Why did Steve Martin quit stand up at the height of his powers?
If you listen to Steve’s own words, it was because he had “nothing left to say”. His stand-up routine and the subsequent movie The Jerk (which drew much of its inspiration from the routine) were the purest forms of what he had wished to express at that time.
To continue to extract relevance from the same routine would have been unfaithful to his true pursuit, his craft.
A follow-on question is how could he just give it up cold turkey? How could he risk it all with nothing else to fall back on?
In truth, I’m sure it wasn’t easy. That said, in a way, as much as Steve had been practicing comedy those eighteen years, he was also practicing something else. Over eighteen years, ten of which were spent literally slumming through backrooms and basement cellars, Steve Martin had developed a more powerful safeguard than any professional “plan B.” He had built a lasting trust and confidence in the work.
Whatever failure he met, whatever success came and went, whatever fits and starts he encountered, there was one thing that always endured, that he could always come back to; the pursuit of his craft.
“To destroy is always the first step in any creation.”
- E.E. Cummings
It was this pursuit that compelled him as a young comic to drop all material that had any relation or inspiration from another comic’s routine even though it left him with a frightening scarcity of material (if people laughed, his material was twenty minutes max, if they didn’t… it was less than ten). It was this that urged him to go back on the road after being a hit on the Tonight Show. It was this that kept his gaze focused even in the brightest of lights. And, ultimately, it was this that assuaged his fears when he decided to hang up his white suit and arrow-through-the-head for good.
As a post-script to Steve’s life as a comic, Steve’s decision to leave stand up created an even more fertile ground for his vibrant imagination. Since leaving the stage, he has recorded albums, made movies, written books, penned screenplays, hosted shows, developed both musicals and plays. He was named one of Comedy Central’s top ten stand-up comics of all time. He has won an Emmy, a Grammy and an American Comedy award.
Needless to say, his decision to quit stand-up has turned out pretty well for him and for us, the beneficiaries of his expanded breadth of creative pursuits.
Incidentally, although it seems like stand-up was certainly Steve’s first love of craft, it was not his last. In describing his work as a playwright he said that when he quit stand-up, it was the last time he was solely in charge of his own material… until he tried theater! In theater, he found himself in charge of the material again but in a profoundly different way. Because he was responsible for each word, it forced him to have an even deeper commitment to the work. When actors asked him whether a line could be said in a different way, he would know why or why not it could be from the perspective of the characters and the piece itself. And for this reason he has also said:
Theater, it was so much fun.
On writing, he simply says, “I love writing. There’s nothing between you and it.” Enough said.
So, in the end, what makes Born Standing Up one of the best books about comedy? As a technical feat, it is an expertly written book about comedy as a craft spoken in the words of a master craftsmen himself. From a much simpler perspective, it is a heartfelt ode to the craft of comedy from a man who simply fell in love with his work.
(PS — for more background on the book from Steve Martin himself, I recommend Charlie Rose’s interview with him on behalf of the 92Y.)
Previous Story: An Inquiry into a Lego Star Wars Dinosaur
Related Story: A Lesson From Jiro
