Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Date read: 10/18/23. Recommendation: 9/10.

Steve Martin details his early years, influences, and the lightning strike of his stand-up success that was decades in the making. I love studying people who you can tell are doing what they believe they were meant to be doing. Martin is certainly one of them. His story resonates on many levels—finding something that feels true in childhood, taking risks to eliminate a nagging sense of what if, imitating your way to originality, struggling to find consistency, and eventually reaching a place where your craft no longer serves you like it once did and relearning how to find your way forward. Entertaining, insightful, and one of the best comedic biographies out there.

Check out my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Influences:
TV had a huge influence on Steve, it’s where he found Laurel and Hardy, who were clever and gentle. That’s where he learned that jokes are funniest when played upon oneself. He watched Jack Benny’s variety show and learned how funny a slow burn was. He would watch The Red Skelton Show and memorize Red’s routines and perform them the next day during “sharing time” at grade school. 

Disneyland:
Summer of 1955, Disneyland opened in Anaheim, CA. They were hiring kids Steve’s age to sell guidebooks on weekends and during the summer in the park. Steve pedaled his bicycle two miles to Disneyland, was pointed toward a souvenir stand a few steps inside the main gate, spoke with a vendor named Joe, and got the job. He was issued a candy-striped shirt, a garter for his sleeve, a vest with a watch pocket, a straw boater hat, and stack of guidebooks. They were sold at 25 cents each and he received two cents per book. Earning up to two dollars every day. They were sold in the morning when people poured through the gates. By noon he was done but didn’t have to leave, had free admission the the park. Became a regular employee at age 10.

As he wandered Disney and found shortcuts and hidden treasures, two places captivated him. “One was Merlin’s Magic Shop, just inside the Fantasyland castle gate, where a young and funny magician named Jim Barlow sold and demonstrated magic tricks. The other was Pepsi-Cola’s Golden Horseshoe Revue in Frontierland, where Wally Boag, the first comedian I ever saw in person, piled a hilarious trade of gags and offbeat skills such as gun twirling and balloon animals, and brought the house down when he turned his wig around backward. He wowed every audience every time.” SM

“Here I had my first lessons in performing, though I never was on the stage. I absorbed Wally Boag’s timing, saying his next line in my head…I studied where the big laughs were, learned how Wally got the small ones, and saw the tiny nuances that kept the thing alive between lines. Wally shone in these performance, and in my first shows, I tried to imitate his amiable casualness.” SM

“Merlin’s Magic Shop was the next best thing to the cheering audiences at the Golden Horseshoe. Tricks were demonstrated in front of crowds of two or three people, and twenty-year-old Jim Barlow took the concept of a joke shop fay beyond what the Disney brass would have officially allowed…I loitered in the shop so often that Jim and I became buddies as I memorized his routines, and I wanted more than ever to be a magician.” SM

“With any spare money I had, I bought tricks, memorized their accompanying standard patter, and assembled a magic show that I would perform for anyone who would watch, mostly my parents and their tolerant bridge partners.” SM

At age 15 (August 1960), a job opened up at the magic shop and Steve got the gig. “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. A few customers would gather, usually a young couple on a date, or a mom and dad with kids. I tried my first jokes—all lifted from Jim’s funny patter—and had my first audience that wasn’t friends or family.” SM

As he demonstrated tricks 8-12 hours/day, started to improve, channeling his impression of Jim. 

Later a man named Dave Steward took over as manager of Merlin’s, a former vaudeville performer, whom Steve learned a lot from. Like his opening joke, the glover into dove trick where he threw a white magician’s glove into the air, it hit the floor and lay there, he stared at its then went onto his next trick. First time Steve had seen laughter created out of absence so he borrowed this and used it in his own routine. 

Steve learned to throw everything at the audience, costumes, lights, music, everything. But originality was not yet on his mind. He started to lean more into comedy, because that seemed to have a clearer path forward, like Stan Laurel, Jack Benny, or Wally Boag. And advanced magic tricks cost too much. 

Knott’s Berry Farm:
At age 18, Knott’s Berry Farm needed entertainers with short acts. Steve auditioned with his thin magic act at a small theater and got the job at the Bird Cage Theatre. 

“At the Bird Cage, I formed the soft, primordial core of what became my comedy act. Over the three years I worked there, I strung together everything I knew including Dave Steward’s glove into dove trick, some comedy juggling, a few standard magic routines, a banjo song, and some very old jokes. My act was eclectic, and it took ten more years for me to make sense of it. However, the opportunity to perform four and five times a day gave me confidence and poise.” 

Over time learned it was not magic he was interested in but performing in general. 

Evolving beyond imitation:
Eventually, in his early 20s, realized how important originality would be and that comedy could evolve. “I would have to write everything in the act myself. Any line or idea with even a vague feeling of familiarity or provenance had to be expunged. There could be nothing that made the audience feel they weren’t seeing something utterly new. This realization mortified me. I did not know how to write comedy—at all. But Id did know I would have to drop some of my best one-liners, all pilfered from gag books and other people’s routines, and consequently lose ten minutes from my already strained act…After several years of working up my weak twenty minutes, I was not starting from almost zero.” SM

Started testing his concept of creating tension but never releasing it. No formal punch lines. What would audience do with all that? They’d eventually have to pick their own place to laugh out of desperation. 

Also gave himself 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 an egg on my face. It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing.” The act would go on with or without them. 

Taking the leap:
“I concluded that not to continue with comedy would place a question in my mind that would nag me for the rest of my life: Could I have had a career in performing?” SM

Writing career:
In 1967, landed a writing job on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Started painfully and was uncomfortable contributing anything of his own. He faced pressure to deliver, was unsure of himself, and felt doubt from other professional writers on the show. One afternoon was asked by Tommy Smothers to write an intro for a sketch dealing with television. Steve went upstairs to his office and couldn’t come up with anything. Suddenly a line occurred to him, but it belonged to his roommate, comedian Gary Mule Deer. Steve called him and got his approval to use it. Then he went downstairs, handed the line to Dick Smothers: “It has been proven that more Americans watch television than any other appliance.” Two highly experienced writers came up and asked if he wrote that joke, he said yes, and they said good work. Afterward, he was much more relaxed and able to contribute more to the show. 

Early Act:
In the early days (1960s), Steve’s act was a catchall, cobbled together from juggling, comedy, folk, banjo playing, weird bits he’d written in college, and magic tricks.

With practice, Steve’s act became more physical. Singing, dancing, etc. “My teenage attempt at a magician’s grace was being transformed into an awkward comic grace. I felt as though every part of me was working.” SM

“Between 1973 and 1975, my one-man vaudeville show turned fully toward the surreal. I was linking the unlinkable, blending economy and extravagance, non sequiturs with the conventional.” SM

Consistency:
“It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking…What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.” SM

After years on the road, now had four hours of material to pick and choose from. 

Hitting his stride:
Dave Felton, Rolling Stone, on Steve’s act: “This isn’t comedy; it’s campfire recreation for the bent at heart. It’s a laugh-along for loonies. Disneyland on acid.”

His audience developed more like that of a rock-and-roll band than that of a comedian. 

“This lightning strike was happening to me, Stephen Glenn Martin, who had started from zero, from a magic act, from juggling in my backyard, from Disneyland, from the Bird Cage, and I was now the biggest concert comedian in show business, ever.” SM

When he started playing arenas, he could no longer experiment. Eventually, he lost touch with what he was doing and suffered an artistic crisis. Walked away from stand-up and never did it again. 

Film:
Determined to parlay his success from stand-up into motion pictures. 

Carl Reiner’s influence: “His memory was sharp as cheddar, and he would spontaneously relate anecdotes relevant to our work.” SM

The world of moviemaking had changed me. Carl Reiner ran a joyful set. Movies were social; stand-up was antisocial. I was not judged every day by a changing audience. It was fun to have lunches with cast and crew and to dream up material in the morning that could be shot seven different ways in the afternoon and evaluated—and possibly perfected—in the editing room months later.” SM

“I got another benefit: my daily observation of Carl Reiner. He had an entrenched sense of glee; he used humor as a gentle way of speaking difficult truths; and he could be effortlessly frank. He taught me more about how to be a social person than any other adult in my life.” SM