The Unbearable Grimness of Comedy

Steve Martin's writing has always had a darker hue to it than his performances -- much more Spanish Prisoner than The Jerk. I have yet to read his most recent novel, but Shopgirl, while less melancholy than the film version, hints at a more brooding element to the amusingly intellectual, routinely bizarre and sweet persona Martin has shown over the years. Even so, it's striking how dour the tone of Born Standing Up is -- striking, but pretty understandable.

At the heart of the book is Martin's strained relationship with his father, a frustrated man who seemed to take out his lot in life on his increasingly successful son. It's not harped on throughout, but the book is framed by Martin's memories of his father's coldness (and one-time brutality) to him as a child and his tearful, regret-tinged mending of fences in the years leading up to his father's death. Frank about the emotional stuntedness of his young life, Martin doesn't beg us to excuse him on account of his upbringing; instead, he frankly lays out an unemotional saga of his rearkably serious intentions as a young comedian, discussing the stylistic challenges and medium-questioning tactics of his act. It's interesting stuff, particularly now that we take Martin's stand-up for granted, looking at how he turned his guns on comedy as a form at a time when this wasn't generally being done. You can see echoes of Martin's hyperkinetic take on a Vegas comedian in Norm McDonald's hoary Bob Sagat roast and Zach Galifianakis's many angry variations on comedy gone wrong (Nathaniel Buckner, his outbursts at audience members, etc.) -- he's generating in these pages the first wave of postmodern standup.

It's an interesting book -- not a profound or mindblowing one, not fall-down funny, but quietly insightful and self-aware, absent the name-dropping mania of other showbiz chronicles but with a real sense of shape and emotional journey to it.

This concludes my attempt to completely occupy the front page of this blog, and I regret only that I came up one book short of my "push every other contributer out of sight" goal. If I read fast enough on the plane back from vacation, I may yet see my goal of a unified frontpage!