Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (52 page)

Judd:
One thing I read was that they dressed you up as Superman in the street. And people just looked at you like you were just anybody and you just flew away and they didn’t even say anything.

Steve:
That was when we were doing the talk show in the early sixties from Hollywood. We were opposite a crazy hangout for Hollywood eccentrics, an open-all-night place called the Hollywood Ranch Market. And we did our show late, so it was kind of a pretty zany neighborhood—perfect for our purposes. And I had done a number of Superman sketches over the years. Because anybody with glasses, dark hair, an old fedora, and a gray suit looks like Clark Kent. I never looked that much like Superman, but I did a great Clark Kent. However, as soon as I put on the Superman suit, it never seemed to fit trimly, it always looked like baggy underwear. So right away it was funny before I did anything. So I had the Superman suit and the Clark Kent attire over it. One night I ran out and the cameras were there and they had a phone booth set up across the street—you know, so I could change clothes like Superman. I ran in and I tried to change like I did in my dressing room, where I had plenty of room, but you don’t have much room in a phone booth. If you’re not Superman, it’s tough. I need
a lot of elbow room. So I couldn’t get my pants off. I looked like a jerk. A man trying to take his pants off in a phone booth. At this point a guy walks by carrying a bag of groceries, coming out of a grocery store. So I say, “Hey, Mack, you got a minute?” He says, “What?” I say, “Can you give me a hand here?” He puts his bag down. He says, “What’s the problem?” I say, “I can’t get my pants down.” So I sit down on the little seat in the thing and I stick my legs out and this guy pulls my pants off for me. And then I stand up and I throw the hat off and now I’m dressed like Superman. I say, “Thanks a lot.” He says, “Don’t mention it,” and he walks away. Now, if that happened in Cleveland, the guy’d say, “Hey, what are you, some kind of a nut?” But in Hollywood and New York, they don’t even notice. Because they see craziness around them all the time.

Judd:
They used to make you do those weird things all the time. I remember I saw one sketch where you were made into a human tea bag.

Steve:
Yeah, they had a big—I don’t know where it came from—but they had this big plastic tank. See-through plastic. It was about maybe seven feet deep and six feet wide and four feet the other way. They filled it with warm water and then they attached about a hundred tea bags to my body, and so I made tea for the whole neighborhood. They would never let me know—by “they” I mean the production staff—exactly what was planned. Sometimes just at the last minute, you know, I’d have to find out because I would see what I was getting into. But whenever they could keep it from me, they would. Because they had discovered that I was much funnier if I did not know for sure what was going on. I would often have a hint that it would be messy. They would come to the dressing room and say, “Underdress.” So I would wear a pair of swimming trunks or a tight kind of a jockey short thing or something underneath. And sometimes they would say, “Wear one of your Hong Kong suits.” They meant, we don’t want one of your nice suits to get cream pie on it or dog food or mustard or whatever they were gonna hit me with. But beyond that, I did not know what the heck was up.

Judd:
What do you consider the highlights of the show? Comedic highlights?

Steve:
My weekly check was hysterical.

Judd:
(
Laughs
)

Steve:
I don’t know. It was funny every night, actually. Just recently, I was listening to one particular show, because we’re putting together the comedy albums. And it’s remarkable how many of them hold up, if you can just hear them. Often, we’re just describing what’s going on. Once we had a woman—a nurse—come in from the blood bank and just take my blood. The point of it was to show how simple it is and that all of us should give blood. That’s not an inherently comic notion—certainly there’s nothing funny about giving blood. But when you do it in front of three or four hundred people, it somehow
becomes
funny, especially if you’re a comedian.

Judd:
What was it like having Lenny Bruce appear on the show?

Steve:
Lenny was a brilliantly inventive and original comedian, as the world now does not have to be told. There was never any fear in my mind that he would say or do anything in poor taste, although at the time he was saying things that would’ve been construed as poor taste in a club. But he was very intelligent and we were friends, and he would’ve never done anything of that sort on the air. And in fact, he did not.

Judd:
The last time he was on, didn’t they have to cut something out, something he was talking about?

Steve:
I don’t know. Sometimes there would be discussions about production details, which did not come to my personal attention because I was usually busy enough the day of the show. What Lenny did do at the time—and nobody censored it because nobody knew what it meant—is a little routine about glue sniffing. This was probably the first time sniffing of glue was mentioned on a nationwide basis in the comic context. In fact, the nation as such knew nothing about that at the time. That there were just a few weird kids sniffing airplane glue. But anyway, Lenny did about four lines on that and nobody cut them out, because it would be like today somebody wrote a thing about spaghetti sniffing. You know nobody would cut that because they think,
What’s the harm in sniffing spaghetti?

Judd:
What kind of man was he?

Steve:
He was neurotic and self-destructive, but absolutely brilliant in his comedy. A true original. He was the first guy—first comedian, I should say—to speak the language of musicians. Which is now common. Even squares now say “hip” and “cool” and “I dig” and “you know, baby” and all that stuff. But in the thirties and forties only jazz musicians used that language. And Lenny was the first of the comedians to do so in his performing. He had sort of a musician’s sense of humor. It was very hip and courageous. He would discuss politics or religion or sex or social attitudes. And he was a true pioneer.

Judd:
How do you choose the subjects for your books,
Funny People
?

Steve:
Very much at random. It’s all a matter of personal judgment. For the most part I write about people I personally think are funny. And that solves one problem, because the world does not need Steve Allen explaining why Joe Dokes is terrible when he does comedy. Therefore, when I write about somebody, it’s because I like their work and it’s very easy to make the appropriate compliments. There was one exception to that, but I did it only after the performer had died. He was a great performer, a great song-and-dance man. A very important figure on Broadway and in films, an old comedian of the 1920s and ’30s named Eddie Cantor. In my opinion Eddie was a cute, likable, lively, vivacious personality. But I never thought he was terribly funny. So I took about twenty-seven pages to say that. But again, since he was already dead, I couldn’t hurt his feelings.

Judd:
You did the same with John Belushi. That wasn’t very complimentary.

Steve:
On the contrary. If you’ll reread it you’ll find it was highly complimentary. But it gave both the bright and dark sides of it.

Judd:
You said other performers were a lot more talented.

Steve:
I considered Aykroyd funnier, I considered Bill Murray funnier. I considered Chevy Chase funnier. But there are a lot of compliments for John in the chapter. But I could not avoid discussing John Belushi, simply because Belushi himself sort of forced that on the public consciousness. It was not anything particular in my own reaction to him. I’d already discovered
that, although I could laugh at what was funny in his work. I liked a lot of what he did in the
Blues Brothers
movie, for example. In this, I was very much alone in the over-fifty generation. Now, it is generally true that people over fifty don’t laugh that much at comedians, let’s say, under forty. Whether they should or not is a separate question. I’m simply reporting the fact that they do not. I, on the other hand, do. Some of the funniest people in the world are young guys in their twenties and women in their twenties. I don’t care how old a person is. If he’s funny, that’s all there is to it as far as I’m concerned.

This interview appears by permission of Meadowlane Enterprises, Inc.

I don’t think anybody has made me laugh longer or louder than Steve Martin. When I was young, I loved him without even understanding the premise of his act. I didn’t realize that he was poking fun at the self-importance of showbiz personalities, or the clichés of comedy. There was this whole meta thing going on that was completely over my head. As a ten-year-old kid, I just thought he was insanely weird and funny, and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t want to know why, because it didn’t matter to me.

I can remember my dad bringing home Steve’s
Let’s Get Small
album, and then us listening to it for fourteen hours straight as we drove from Long Island to South Carolina on vacation. Okay, maybe we didn’t listen to it the entire time; I do remember hearing a lot of the Little River Band on the radio, too. But I remember laughing, as my parents laughed right along with me, and thinking,
I am beginning to understand a little more about how the world really works.

As I entered middle school, my obsession with Steve Martin only deepened. I had a grandmother who lived in California, and when we would go visit her, I would beg her to drive by Steve Martin’s house. (Yes, I’d found out where he lived.) It was this solid white house with no windows. I imagined it as this bunker filled with light. I begged her to drive by not because I thought I would see him—although I badly wished that would happen—but because I just couldn’t believe there was a structure that actually contained him. It seemed impossible to believe he existed and was somebody you could talk to.

Then one day in the summer of 1980, as we drove by his house, I saw him standing there in his driveway. I can’t quite remember what he was
doing; maybe he was washing his car, maybe he was raking leaves. All I know is I yelled for my grandmother to stop the car. My brother and I got out. I ran up to Steve and said, “Hey, can I get an autograph?” And he said, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t sign autographs at my house.” “Well,” I responded, “then can you sign it in the street?” (Which, looking back, was not a bad joke for a thirteen-year-old.) No, he said, sorry, he didn’t sign autographs at his house, because if he did, then everybody would walk up to his front door and ask for things and that wouldn’t be good. I did not understand this logic at the time. (I understand it today, however: If you knock on my door, even if you are from a charity, I will call local security.) I wasn’t done yet, though. I started begging him, “Please, please, I’m from out of town, I won’t tell anyone where you live, I’ll never bother you again….” But he wouldn’t break. He smiled—and kept to his policy.

So I ran straight home and went to my room and wrote him a long, crazy letter, the spirit of which was: I have bought everything you’ve ever made, and you wouldn’t live in that house if it weren’t for people like me. And then I demanded an apology.

I went back to his house a few days later and slipped the letter into his mailbox. (Notice that I didn’t mail it, for that extra stalker touch. Yes, Steve: I know where you live.) I’m pretty sure it was several pages long.

About six months later, long after I stopped thinking about how I was wronged, I received a package in the mail, which contained two copies of
Cruel Shoes
, his seminal collection of essays and short stories. In one of the copies, he wrote: “This is for your friend. Steve Martin.” That friend, of course, was my brother, who did not appreciate Steve Martin on nearly the same level as I did, and has since turned into an Orthodox Jew and lives in Israel. I still have his book. The other one said, “To Judd: I’m sorry I didn’t realize I was speaking to
the
Judd Apatow. Your friend, Steve Martin.”

This story always gets a laugh, but to me, it’s more meaningful than that: This moment with Steve made me think I must have made him laugh, or he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of sending me that book. And if I could make Steve Martin laugh, maybe I was funny enough to go into this comedy business I’d always dreamed about, after all.

Decades later, I met Steve Martin—formally, in a non-stalkish way—for the first time at a work-related meeting, to discuss a project he was
kicking around. At the meeting, I was urged to tell that story, and so I did. When it was over, someone said to Steve, “Is that how you remember it?” And Steve responded, “Actually, I believe I was the one who knocked on Judd’s door.”

Judd Apatow:
It takes a lot to get up onstage and perform. What drove you to try it?

Steve Martin:
I didn’t even know what stand-up was in the beginning. I started off in magic so I liked the idea of performing onstage and stand-up—I kind of defaulted into it because, at some point, I realized the magic thing was a dead end and stand-up had a future. So I started to pare away the magic tricks. I fell into stand-up because it seemed like there was opportunity in it. It was the path of least resistance.

Judd:
What about before that? When you were a teenager, did you just want to get out of the house and be in front of people? For me, my parents got divorced. And so, as a teenager, I thought,
These people are crazy. Whatever advice they’re giving me, I shouldn’t listen to.
It made me ambitious. But it’s a big leap to get out of the house, isn’t it?

Steve:
I definitely wanted to get out of the house and I wanted to have a job. I don’t know why, but the idea of working at Disneyland—that was, you know, fantastic.

Judd:
You lived near there, as a kid, right?

Steve:
I lived two miles from there and I would ride my bike there. Two miles seemed like such a long way to a kid of ten.

Judd:
You did it at ten? Wow, times have changed. Most people today won’t let their kids leave the driveway until they’re seventeen years old.

Steve:
Yeah.

Judd:
My parents never knew where I was. My whole childhood, they would have no idea how to find me, from after school until seven at night.

Steve:
I had the same thing.

Judd:
What did your parents do?

Steve:
My dad was a Realtor, and my mom stayed home. She was fascinated with show business.

Judd:
So you had one parent who was fascinated by show business, and the other who—

Steve:
Oh, my dad wanted to be in show business, too.

Judd:
What did he want to do?

Steve:
He wanted to be an actor, but he gave it up for the family. He had to. He couldn’t earn money.

Judd:
Did he actually attempt it?

Steve:
Yeah. I have a photo somewhere of him in a play. He was very young. I also have a photo of him—a publicity photo—that I’m in with him. I was like four or five. I didn’t understand it as a kid. In the photo, the police are taking him away and I am the forlorn child.

Judd:
My dad quietly wished that he had pursued a career in comedy, but he never said that to me. He only told me decades later. But there were always a lot of comedy albums around the house. I would put on one of your albums when we were driving somewhere—like, we would drive to South Carolina on vacation—and he didn’t mind if I kept playing it for five hours straight. He would laugh his ass off. But he never told me he was
interested
in it. Did your dad resent your success at all?

Steve:
I think there was an element of that. There was almost a condemnation of the type of material, the type of act it was, yeah.

Judd:
Because it was the sixties and everything was changing?

Steve:
Yeah, everything was changing out from under him.

Judd:
Did he like any of the comedians that you were making fun of?

Steve:
I don’t think he perceived what I did as parody. I think he just—you know, he was critical. The first time I did
Saturday Night Live
, he thought that was a bad move, you know.

Judd:
That’s terrible show business advice. My dad, when my parents got divorced—and I’m just saying this because I think it’s so funny how men
acted, pre-therapy and pre–the days of people talking about their feelings. When my parents got divorced, I lived with my dad. My mom moved out. And one day, he left out a book on the coffee table called
Growing Up Divorced.
He just left it there. He never asked me to read it. He never checked to see if I did read it. He just hoped I would find it. That was his child-rearing approach.

Steve:
I had the same. My dad said to me once—and this was after I’d grown up: “I didn’t teach you about sex because you learn about that on the school yard.”

Judd:
Oh, that’s funny. But what I found fascinating in
Born Standing Up
is when you wrote that you made a conscious choice at some point to spend time with your parents, and then you did it every week for fifteen years.

Steve:
Yeah.

Judd:
I was struck by that kind of commitment to healing or connecting. It’s difficult to do that.

Steve:
Well, part of it is selfish. I didn’t want my parents to die and then have all this guilt, you know.

Judd:
Their guilt or your guilt?

Steve:
My guilt. You know, they raised me. And now I’m raising them. That’s what it is when they get older. You can’t just strand somebody.

Judd:
When you were starting out in the early seventies, did you feel like you were a part of the comedy scene?

Steve:
There wasn’t really a comedy scene.

Judd:
What about when you were doing
Saturday Night Live?
Did you feel like you were part of it then, or did you still feel like you were visiting?

Steve:
I was always on the road, so I didn’t have that opportunity to feel like a part of
SNL
, but I really liked the people. I liked Danny Aykroyd. I had a few moments with Belushi, who was very sweet. He had just done
Neighbors
and was excited about acting. He was calm and well-spoken, very intelligent about what he wanted to do—and then he was dead a few
months later, you know. I had this moment with him. I remember one night, this was after an
SNL
show, and we were in this caravan of cars. At one point he got out—this was on Seventy-second Street—and just started directing traffic. It was one of those crazy moments. And I just had the feeling he didn’t really want to direct traffic, but he felt that he had to for his persona. That he was doing something to fulfill others’ expectations of him rather than it was coming from his heart. I felt he was a little caught in a vise. And then when I saw him many years later in California, he was expressing this other side of himself. He seemed sober. I felt he had overcome that need to be the party guy.

Judd:
And then the other side won.

Steve:
You can do that for a while, and then—

Judd:
It seems like everyone has a kind of transitional moment in life. Adam Sandler and I tried to put it in
Funny People
, actually. There was this line we cut, where he said something like, “I’m not a young guy anymore. I’ve got to switch to my Walter Matthau period.” But for you, it feels like you’ve made an effortless transition across eras, from stand-up to—

Steve:
Did you ever do stand-up?

Judd:
I did it from the time I was seventeen until I was twenty-three or twenty-four.

Steve:
That’s a long time.

Judd:
But then I stopped because I was getting a lot of writing offers and not a lot of performing offers. I just thought,
Oh, the universe is telling me not to perform live.
But lately, I’ve been going out and performing again. Last summer, I went out and started performing a few times a week. And I just felt like, this is why I got into the business in the first place, for the fun part. I felt like I had lost sight of the fun part of working in comedy because, as a director, I spend all my time in small rooms with sweaty editors and everything’s so stressful. The whole time you’re thinking,
Oh God, I hope it works.
I don’t get that much fun out of it. I just feel like I escape humiliation.

Steve:
That’s the way I feel, too. I found it really hard to make a funny movie. Plus, in movies, the strikeout ratio is so against you.

Judd:
But your ratio, when you write, is like one hundred percent. You haven’t written that many movies in the last ten years or so, but do you like the writing part of it?

Steve:
It’s excruciating.

Judd:
Did you stop because it was exhausting, or because you had a bad experience?

Steve:
It’s just so frightening. The pain of it. And that first screening is so awful.

Judd:
We just had a great screening of a movie, and the numbers were fantastic. And then someone at the studio called and sounded disappointed. That haunts you.

Steve:
Yeah.

Judd:
It’s like,
Oh my God, am I wrong?

Steve:
It’s like what Brian Grazer said to me once. He was giving me advice as an actor or as a deal maker or whatever. And he said, “Always be just a little bit disappointed.”

Judd:
Albert Brooks told me the reason he doesn’t make more movies is not about the difficulty of writing the movie or making the movie, it’s about the release. He said, It’s so painful. The press, the response—

Steve:
It’s hard.

Judd:
But isn’t that also why it’s so fun, that uncertainty and pain? Is that what you feel when you’re out making music now, touring with your band?

Steve:
It has been a joy to get those chops back. Get a new joke. Get a new thing, you know.