Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

  Having no agent or any hopes of finding one, I could not audition for movies or television or even learn where auditions were held. I didn’t know about trade papers—Variety or The Hollywood Reporter—from which I might have gathered some information. I lived in suburbia at a time when a one-hour drive to Los Angeles in my first great car—a white 1957 Chevy Bel Air, which, despite its beauty, guzzled quarts of oil, then spewed it back into the air in the form of white smoke—seemed like a trip across the continent in a Conestoga wagon. But the local folk clubs thrived on single acts, and, as usual, their Monday nights were reserved for budding talent. Stand-up comedy felt like an open door. It was possible to assemble a few minutes of material and be onstage that week, as opposed to standing in line in some mysterious world in Hollywood, getting no response, no phone calls returned, and no opportunity to perform. On Mondays, I could tour around Orange County, visit three clubs in one night, and be onstage, live, in front of an audience. If I flopped at the Paradox in Tustin, I might succeed an hour later at the Rouge et Noir. I found myself confining the magic to its own segment so I wouldn’t be called a magician. Even though the idea of doing comedy had sounded risky when I compared it to the safety of doing trick after trick, I wanted, needed, to be called a comedian. I discovered it was not magic I was interested in but performing in general. Why? Was I in a competition with my father? No, because I wasn’t aware of his interest in showbiz until years later. Was my ego out of control and looking for glory? I don’t think so; I am fundamentally shy and still feel slightly embarrassed at disproportionate attention. My answer to the question is simple: Who wouldn’t want to be in show business?

  Onstage at the Ice House, doing my parody of male models.

  I looked around the Bird Cage and saw actors who had worked there fifteen years and counting, and I knew it could be a trap for me. With some trepidation, I gave notice. Stormie was gone, Kathy was gone, John Stuart and Paul Shackleton were gone, too, so there were no actual tearful goodbyes. Handshakes with George and Woody. At age twenty-one, three years after I had started at the Bird Cage, I slipped away almost unnoticed.

  I CONTINUED TO ATTEND Long Beach State College, taking Stormie-inspired courses in metaphysics, ethics, and logic. New and exhilarating words such as “epistemology,” “ontology,” “pragmatism,” and “existentialism”—words whose definitions alone were stimulating—swirled through my head and reconfigured my thinking. One semester I was taking Philosophy of Language, Continental Rationalism (whatever that is; what, Descartes?), History of Ethics, and to complete the group, Self-Defense, which I found especially humiliating when, one afternoon in class, I was nearly beaten up by a girl wearing boxing gloves. A course in music appreciation focused me on classical music, causing me to miss the pop music of my own era, so I got into the Beatles several years late. I was fixated on studying, and even though I kept my outside jobs, my drive for learning led to a significant improvement from my dismal high school grade average. I was now an A student. I switched to cotton pants called peggers, because I had vowed to grow up and abandon jeans. My look was strictly wholesome Baptist.

  A friend lent me some comedy records. There were three by Nichols and May, several by Lenny Bruce, and one by Tom Lehrer, the great song parodist. Mike Nichols and Elaine May recorded without an audience, and I fixated on every nuance. Their comedy was sometimes created by only a subtle vocal shift: “Tell me Dr. Schweitzer, what is this reverence for life?” Lenny Bruce, on the records I heard, was doing mostly nonpolitical bits that were hilarious. Warden at a prison riot: “We’re giving in to your demands, men! Except the vibrators!” Tom Lehrer influenced me with one bizarre joke: “My brother Henry was a nonconformist. To show you what a nonconformist he was, he spelled his name H-E-N-3-R-Y.” Some people fall asleep at night listening to music; I fell asleep to Lenny, Tom, and Mike and Elaine. These albums broke ground and led me to a Darwinian discovery: Comedy could evolve.

  On campus I experienced two moments of illumination, both appropriately occurring in the bright sun. Now comfortable with indulging in overthinking, I was walking across the quad when a thought came to me, one that was nearly devastating. To implement the new concept called originality that I had been first introduced to in Showmanship for Magicians, and was now presenting itself again in my classes in literature, poetry, and philosophy, 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 I 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. Worse, I would lose another prime gag I had lifted, Carl Ballantine’s never-fail Appearing Dove, which had been appropriated by almost every comic magician under the age of twenty. Ballantine would blow up a paper bag and announce that he was going to produce a dove. “Come out flyin’!” he would say. Then he would pop the bag with his hands, and an anemic flutter of feathers would poof out from the sack. The thought of losing all this material was depressing. After several years of working up my weak twenty minutes, I was now starting from almost zero.

  I came up with several schemes for developing material. “I laugh in life,” I thought, “so why not observe what it is that makes me laugh?” And if I did spot something that was funny, I decided not to just describe it as happening to someone else, but to translate it into the first person, so it was happening to me. A guy didn’t walk into a bar, I did. I didn’t want it to appear that others were nuts; I wanted it to appear that I was nuts.

  Another method was to idly and abstractedly dream up bits. Sitting in a science class, I stared at the periodic table of the elements that hung behind the professor. That weekend I went onstage at the Ice House and announced, “And now I would like to do a dramatic reading of the periodic table of the elements. Fe…Au…He…” I said. That bit didn’t last long.

  In logic class, I opened my textbook—the last place I was expecting to find comic inspiration—and was startled to find that Lewis Carroll, the supremely witty author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was also a logician. He wrote logic textbooks and included argument forms based on the syllogism, normally presented in logic books this way:

  All men are mortal.

  Socrates is a man.

  _________________________________

  Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

  But Carroll’s were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way:

  1) Babies are illogical.

  2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.

  3) Illogical persons are despised.

  ________________________________________

  Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles.

  And:

  1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste.

  2) No modern poetry is free from affectation.

  3) All your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles.

  4) No affected poetry is popular among people of taste.

  5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles.

  __________________________________________

  Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting.

  These word games bothered and intrigued me. Appearing to be silly nonsense, on examination they were absolutely logical—yet they were still funny. The comedy doors opened wide, and Lewis Carroll’s clever fancies from the nineteenth century expanded my notion of what comedy could be. I began closing my show by announcing, “I’m not going home tonight; I’m going to Bananaland, a place where only two things are true, only two things: One, all chairs are green; and two, no chairs are green.” Not at Lewis Carroll’s level, but the line worked for my contemporaries, and I loved implying that the one thing I believed in was a contradiction.

&nb
sp; I also was enamored of the rhythmic poetry of e. e. cummings, and a tantalizing quote from one of his recorded lectures stayed in my head. When asked why he became a poet, he said, “Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.” The line, with its intriguing reference to comedy, was enigmatic, and it took me ten years to work out its meaning.

  The second illuminating moment occurred when I was walking to class from a parking lot so far from campus that I could see the curvature of the earth. Again under the bright California sun, I saw a girl with short black hair, pertly walking in faded blue jeans. I was nervous about saying hello, but she offered me a welcoming smile that said it was okay. She had an unmelodic name—Nina Goldblatt—and she was a professional dancer. We started running into each other accidentally at every opportunity. I only had to get over the hurdle of her dating the handsome actor Vince Edwards, who played the TV doctor Ben Casey, and who was sending limos down to Long Beach to chauffeur her to Hollywood. Somehow I did, and a new romance was on.

  Nina was a dancer in The Mickey Finn Show, a banjo and pizza whoop-de-do, with an upcoming appearance in Las Vegas on the fabled Strip. I drove five hours to spend the weekend with her and was captivated by the city, but my excitement was dampened by having only four dollars in my pocket. I was so broke that when I hit a nickel slot for fifty cents, it momentarily changed the quality of my life. It was Nina who had the dough, and we learned that Vegas could support even the poorly heeled by offering dollar-twenty-five all-you-can-eat buffets. Nina treated me to some Vegas nightclubs and I fantasized about starring as a lounge act at a spiffy hotel. We went to see the Jets, a two-man comedy-music team whose gags included passing through the audience, using the microphone as a “falsie detector.” I enjoyed my time with Nina—she was funny and saucy as well as cute—and one year later, she was to have a significant effect on my professional life.

  Nina and me, ca. 1965.

  My college roommate, Phil Carey, was an artist and musician. He sang bass, not in a barbershop quartet but for a sophisticated chorale that featured music with complicated rhythms and mismatched twelve-tone arrangements. Phil’s contagious enthusiasm got me excited about art, particularly the avant-garde, and we quickly noted that the campus art scene was also a great arena to meet girls. We loved reading magazine reports of New York galleries stuffed with Warhol’s Brillo boxes and giant flowers, Lichtenstein’s cartoon panels, and throngs of people dressed in black. One afternoon I donned Phil’s beret—which meant I was disguised as an artist—and sneaked into his life drawing class, where an attractive nude blonde was casually displaying herself. I was all business on the outside, but on the inside I was shouting, “Yeehaw!” Phil had a developed sense of humor: His cat was named Miles, and when asked if the cat was named after Miles Davis, Phil would say no, it was “and miles to go before I sleep.”

  Working on a college project, Phil landed an interview with the great American composer Aaron Copland. However, he would have to drive from Los Angeles to Peekskill, New York, to conduct it. I jumped at the chance to go along. In the summer of 1966—I was still twenty and proud that I would make it to New York City before I turned twenty-one—we installed a makeshift cot in the back of my coughing blue windowless VW bus, and we drove across America without stopping. I was trying to write like e. e. cummings, so my correspondence to Nina, all highly romantic, goopy, and filled with references to flowers and stars, read like amateur versions of his poems. Nina saved the letters, but they are too embarrassing to reproduce here.

  Three days after we left Los Angeles, Phil and I arrived at Aaron Copland’s house, a low-slung A-frame with floor-to-ceiling windows, set in a dappled forest by the road. We knocked on the door, Copland answered it, and over his shoulder we saw a group of men sitting in the living room wearing only skimpy black thongs. He escorted us to his flagstone patio, where I had the demanding job of turning the tape recorder on and off while Phil asked questions about Copland’s musical process. We emerged a half hour later with the coveted interview and got in the car, never mentioning the men in skimpy black thongs, because, like trigonometry, we couldn’t quite comprehend it. We drove to West Redding, Connecticut, for a tour of the house of another great American composer, the late Charles Ives. Speaking with Ives’s son-in-law, George Tyler, we learned the peculiar fact that Ives was an avant-garde composer by night and an insurance agent by day. After a detour to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to cruise the home of my idol cummings, we drove in to glorious Manhattan. Saucer-eyed, we hustled over to the Museum of Modern Art, where we saw, among the Cézannes and Matisses, Dalí’s famous painting of melting clocks, the shockingly tiny The Persistence of Memory. We were dismayed to find that Warhol and Lichtenstein had not yet been ordained. We drove to Eighth Avenue, and Phil circled the block while I retrieved from the imposing central New York post office a lively and welcome letter from Nina, sent to me care of General Delivery, New York City. I bounded down the massive steps, waving the onionskin envelope aloft for Phil to see, as though it were the lost map of the Incas.

  Before we left Cambridge, I sent this postcard to Nina:

  Dear Nina,

  Today (about an hour ago) I stood in front of e. e. cummings’s home at Harvard; his wife is still living there—we saw her. But the most fantastic thing was when we asked directions to Irving Street, the person we asked said to tell Mrs. Cummings hello from the Jameses! She turned out to be William James’s great-granddaughter!

  Then I added:

  I have decided my act is going to go avant-garde. It is the only way to do what I want.

  I’m not sure what I meant, but I wanted to use the lingo, and it was seductive to make these pronouncements. Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

  AT THE ICE HOUSE, I had met the comedian George McKelvey. George had an actual career and was quite funny. In reference to radio’s invisible crime fighter, the Shadow, he would ask, “If you could be invisible, what would you do? [long pause] Fight crime?” He was in Aspen, Colorado, during spring break, about to work a small folk club, when he broke his leg skiing. Could I fill in for him? he asked. He generously offered me all his salary—I think it was three hundred dollars for the two weeks—which would be more than I had ever earned, anywhere, anytime. I was twenty-one years old in March of 1967 when I headed for the notorious ski resort.

  I arrived at a Pan-Abode house—a cedar cabin made from a kit—just outside Aspen. Visiting entertainers were bunked there, and after I made my way through the crunchy snow and stowed my suitcase under my bed, several of us introduced ourselves. One was my co-bill, John McClure, a lanky guitarist with an acute sense of humor. Wandering in later was a pretty waitress named Linda Byers who, I assumed, would fall for me because of my carefully designed, poetry-quoting artist’s persona, but who, to my shock, chose John, and they formed a long-term relationship. Also in the house was one of the few English comedians working in America, Jonathan Moore, who played a bagpipe to open his show, scaring the audience with its ancient howl as he entered the club from behind them. Jonathan was older than we were, had been around, wore sunglasses indoors, and had the charm of a well-spoken cynic. His sheepdog, an ecstatic, ball-chasing mop named Winston, dove repeatedly into the deep snowy banks to retrieve our enthusiastically thrown snowballs. Winston didn’t seem to mind that they would vanish white on white, and he earnestly pursued the impossible, digging, digging, digging. Jonathan Moore also said something in passing that put my hypochondriacal senses on alert. A local Aspenite had died, and Jonathan offered, “You can’t live at this altitude with a bad heart.” From then on, whenever I was in Aspen, I had a barely manageable fear that I would suddenly be struck down.

  Jonathan’s girlfriend Linda Quaderer, Jonathan Moore, Linda Byers, John McClure, Winston, and me.

  The nightclub, the Abbey Cellar on Galena Street, was at basement level in the middle of town and hard to fin
d even for us. John and I, in order to drum up business, left little cards on the tables in the upstairs restaurant that read STEVE MARTIN / JOHN MCCLURE, ENTERTAINMENT ORDINAIRE, which to me was hilariously funny, but never seemed to be noticed as a joke.

  Aspen was no place for poetry readings, and they were stripped permanently from my act. I was now doing my triptych of banjo playing, comedy, and magic. One evening at the Abbey Cellar, I had my first experience with a serious heckler, who, sitting at the front table with his wife and another straight-looking couple, stood up and said, “See if you think this is funny,” and threw a glass of red wine on me. The problem for him was, at this point in the evening, the employees outnumbered the audience. A few seconds later, John McClure and the rough, tough bartender, an Irishman named Mike, appeared like centurions and escorted him out. Eventually, his friends slunk out, too. The expulsion had a downside: The audience was now one third as large and in shock, and remained in stunned silence for the rest of my show. Later, I developed a few defensive lines to use against the unruly: “Oh, I remember when I had my first beer,” and if that didn’t cool them off, I would use a psychological trick. I would lower my voice and continue with my act, talking almost inaudibly. The audience couldn’t hear the show, and they would shut the heckler up on their own.

  I was in awe of the red-bearded Mike, who seemed so confident in the divided world of Aspen, where locals with a sense of entitlement were pitted against developers with a sense of condominiums. One evening after closing, I watched him crack open an amyl nitrate, a potent drug for the heart and a dangerous one to fool around with, but rumored to enhance sex. With a long, deep breath, he inhaled its fumes in one nostril, then did the same extended inhale through the other nostril. “Do you want some? It only lasts a few seconds,” he said. Not really, but I leaned over and, with the ampoule held far away from my nose, gave it the most tentative sniff possible. My brain exploded. I walked around the club feeling like a colossus with a four-foot-wide lightbulb where my head was supposed to be. Alarmed and anxious, I went sliding into the icy streets, trying to calm down. As for it lasting seconds, I was still vibrating twenty-four hours later. What, I wondered, must Mike feel as he inhaled the freshly broken capsule into both lungs with an effort worthy of the Big Bad Wolf?