Homage To Steve
Steve Martin’s white suit stadium show: possibly the greatest ever comedy routine about comedy.
I just watched the first part of the new Steve Martin autobiographic documentary on Apple, and it is a total tonic.
I’m a huge fan of his white suit phase, the stand up act he refined over a decade and describes in detail in his terrific memoir ‘Born Standing Up’. The first part of this self-narrated bio-doc deals with his metamorphosis from stage struck wannabe (a kid who’ll do anything to be in front of an audience where, in the classic sad clown style, there is the unconditional love he lacks at home) to one of the sharpest analytical minds in comedy, learning his craft while studying Philosophy and Logic to degree standard. He knows what he’s doing. His chosen medium is nonsense, but he’s not going to get away with saying he can’t explain what he’s doing up there. He’s too smart for that. It’s why he was one of my comic heroes growing up, and why I’m ecstatic he’s revisiting the development of his comic craft for this new two part film.
Martin’s stadium-filling stage clown - an act retired at its hysterical height - was a dignified, white haired, slick showbiz character, dissecting comedy frogs live on stage, while wearing bunny ears and a balloon animal on his head. The act somehow insisted to a delighted, included audience that his playground-grade dumb jokes, manic party-toddler bouncing around, and off-the-peg joke shop tricks were in fact the highest achievement in his chosen craft.
You get to watch it all unfold here, and for me there is nothing more invigorating than the moment he realises his act should be about the *idea* of an act. That this whole thing is silly. What else did you come for? You paid for comedy. Hey! This stuff is goooooood.
If the audience buy that, Martin realised, it’s a conspiracy that becomes a cult… and one that risks twisting itself into a meaningless, ritual-choked comic religion by the end of episode one. He’s developing the sort of a following that ends with an encampment being stormed by the FBI. He’s taking his crowd out after the show and blocking traffic. They will carry him aloft. He shaved off the Manson beard he wore when he played the Troubadour and hung out with the hippies, but the cult happened anyway.
He’s unleashed something primal that’s not about anything as tawdry as… material (disdainful look). It’s about selling nothing. But selling it so hard, that the crowd are delighted to pay through the nose. He started out as a teen wandering Disneyland selling a goofy (and presumably Goofy) on-site newspaper that nobody wanted. And that’s what his stage act was: selling. Hard. With his banjo, Manson-beard and cowboy duds he was 100% the character playing the theme to the Hitch Hiker’s Guide, but that had to go for the act to work. He needs to be spotless. Pristine. Shining white. Like a guy advertising the most powerful detergent on earth. It’s a salesman’s suit. It’s all about the hustle.
In the documentary, he talks about needing to shave, to smarten up, to wait for his hair to turn grey. He needed to look older, because the joke is that the act is childish / childlike, making the arrogance of his “greatest stand up of all time” performer-clown inappropriate.
Technically what he’s doing is the purest childhood joke. It’s a colossal variation on Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road. Zero content. Total confidence. And all about context: demonstrating comic mastery by saying you’re great at jokes and then refusing to land the gags properly. Or even to do any gags. Daring you to call it out. A high wire act *about* competence.
Steve Martin is doing Tommy Cooper’s crap-magician routine, but for stand-up. (And Martin shows us that he started by doing that same flubbed-magic act… That was his early technical breakthrough.) Learning that though the tricks themselves - the vanishing boxes, the linked cards, the arrow through the head - could be bought from a magic store, it’s kind of boring to watch someone push shop-bought hidden buttons, no matter how slickly. The analogy with hack joke material is obvious.
Bigger laughs come when patter and personality have to cover for the tricks going wrong. Anyone can push the switch on the fake guillotine, or learn to palm a card. But having the learned tricks seem to break and fall apart and fail, the cards dropping on the floor, the fake finger releasing at the wrong time… and then talking your way out of it? That’s when an audience are inside the routine, not merely watching a shop-bought trick do its mechanical work. Get the crowd in there with you, building the act by your side. Reading character. Inferring intent. Joining in the game.
This sort of act is active. Not passive. There’s space for a whole stadium of conspirators to play with you. Suddenly we’re making each other laugh. And the crowd will laugh much harder. Now we’re all on stage, part of the show. This is ridiculous, but it’s more fun than just being impressed by someone else having learned to find a card (or play the banjo for that matter).
It’s intimate, trusting, both brave and dumb. Better still, we’re not an audience, just receiving entertainment. We’re caught helplessly in a laugh that unites us as a gang. We’re mates now. Proper tribally bonded laughter. We know Steve meant to get that wrong. We’re smarter than him, but *he* knows that *we* know he made us think that. So he’s smarter than us.
Martin is an icon of what would come to be known as anti-comedy, but the obvious comparison here, it struck me, is less Andy Kaufman’s aggressive (but invigorating) excluding of the audience, and more Stewart Lee’s pompous Comedy Masterclass tone. “I’m so good at this, that if you think I’m not doing this properly, that’s your problem…” It’s a move that lets the audience know the performer is both in control but not patronising them; you’re clever enough for this shit. The crowd are flattered: this comic understands they’re afficianados of the form, along for the ride, helping to build that conspiracy of comic expertise.
It’s no coincidence that the VHS home sale version of Steve Martin’s peak 1979 white suit stadium act was titled, with mock grandiosity, ‘HOMAGE TO STEVE’. It even started with a short film where other great US comics - and Paul Simon - drill him, faux-awestruck, for tips on his peerless comedy technique. The joke is, of course, that we are laughing at his arrogance (when all he’s doing is singing the same two lines from Mack The Knife over and over again) but we are aware that he *does* know how to do the magic. He just chooses not to. For comic effect. Surprise! You thought I was better than this? You paid… money? To see the Greatest Working Comedian On Earth? Sure! The most unexpected move then? To fail. Which demonstrates his mastery.
“To get to the other side!” And a pause. And a ta-daaaa face. Kids learn to do this. But not at this arena scale.
This new documentary is a chance to watch Steve Martin work this out. And also to see a whole nation of fans get on board with a stage act that was both the most sophisticated and challenging reinvention of American stand-up in a decade, and yet somehow also a half-arsed kids’ party clown.
I’m looking forward to part two. But part one already earned a stadium full of people in balloon animal hats, clapping their own faces with one hand. It’s a masterclass. A Homage To Steve.
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My new book Be Funny Or Die, How Comedy Works And Why It Matters is out now.