JOLLY DAYS

Steve Martin

A repeat interview on Fresh Air with Steve Martin. I've been a longtime fan. Martin is an interesting case. Martin is the most ingratiating and most ambitious of the comedians of his generation. At one time his ironic take on standup comedy hit the nail of the current pop culture moment on the head. He realized you had to make fun of being a comedian if you were to be funny. He would throw a bowl of spaghetti down his pants in a bit on Carson but smile knowingly, with the audience. He seemed in those days to be mocking pretention. Recently, in his interviews, I've had the uncomfortable feeling he really wanted to be those pretentious figures, but hadn't worked up the nerve until that moment. Even more disconcerting, he seemed to have no real sense of the distance between art and performance — a diminished value set derived from too much pop culture, too few interior discussions. When Charlie Rose suggested that the New Yorker was happy to publish his stories because he is so famous, Martin said that the New Yorker “doesn't need me”. But they do Steve. Martin seemed not to understand that the days of Pauline Kael and Arlene Croce, of the detached and savvy sophistication of the New Yorker, had long passed. It is just another magazine now. But in a self-effacing way, he was making claim to the powerful validation the New Yorker once could confer.

I'd never heard Martin speak about personal matters before. Martin said that his dying father had told him that he “had done all I ever wanted to do.” Gross asked him if that were too personal to share. Martin said no, because it was positive. Martin's answer focused on the public's reaction rather than seeing his story for what it was: the betrayal of a deathbed confidence — of a difficult father to his long suffering son. Publicly revealing the story was actually an aggression against his father; telling the story was a way of complimenting himself by indirection.

Gross, slavering Martin with praise, said people don't know “how smart you are”. Martin said that when he is around really smart people he feels like a dog must feel around humans. For a man with the ambition to be Chekhov it sounded a bit disingenuous. You can see why politicians admire actors: effortlessly actors manage to be self-effacing and self-absorbed.

It does point out a striking feature of Martin's personality though — again, a reason politicians are fascinated by celebrities. I said Martin was ingratiating; another way to say it would be that he has an uncanny sense of the diplomatic utterance. When Gross asked him about his bickering parents he said that yes, “they are always contradicting one another.” What an astonishing deflection “contradicting” is — a deflection of the truth of discordant relationships. It may explain why, try as he may, Martin doesn't seem capable of getting beyond middle brow performance — his need to consider the audience above all else, to say things nicely, euphemistically. It leaves out the interior life — a great bond human beings share and the subject of all art — the cacophonous sea upon which the public self attempts to sail.