Steve Martin: The Television Stuff
It’s no secret that retrospective box sets capitalize on boomer nostalgia—after all, if twentysomethings wish to view D.A. Pennebaker’s sprawling film of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, their first recourse won’t be to Barnes & Noble but rather to the BitTorrent client of their choice. Hitting markets this Tuesday, Steve Martin: The Television Stuff fits squarely into the traditional model. Sadly not released in time for Father’s Day, The Television Stuff features more than six and a half careening hours of standup, sketch, and handsomely packaged bonus commentary from Martin and various SNL collaborators—all of which will earn it a comfortable home under the Christmas Tree this December, promising parents across the country bellylaughs and psychotropic flashbacks alike.
More fruitfully, this box set reminds us how decisively new Martin’s shtick proved in its day. It marked a departure from decades of television comics trading one-liners over canned laughter and making Hollywood in-jokes that were really Hollywood out-jokes—little nuggets of industry allusion that were accessible to suburban families and that met all the criteria for what Jack Donaghy might call “synergy.” It also represented a departure from the strategies of more cutting-edge comedians in the Lenny Bruce/Andy Kaufman mold, who responded to the Eisenhower/Nixon-era TV scripts with a reflexive (if occasionally high-concept) strategy of be-stoned confrontation: instead of Miles Davis turning his back on an all-white live audience, you had Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby aloud in deadpan until the auditorium was empty.
The physically and mentally agile Martin, with a certain schooling in university philosophy and plenty of tricks up his sleeve from an earlier career as a magician, merged these comic approaches into something mildly outrageous and largely fresh, even now. In his lengthy liner notes, essayist/commentator Adam Gopnik goes deep, analyzing what he calls the “sublime absurdity” of Martin’s early act—bunny ears, banjo and all. In his stand-up, Martin made hay from the idea of an audience in his thrall. He created an onstage persona of a self-congratulatory showbizzy performer who assumed everyone was immensely taken with him. He played both a sophisticate and a rube, gesturing towards the high-concept (any of his bits about the perils of metaphysics) before undercutting his own suavity with cannily calibrated buffoonery (mispronouncing “Socrates”). Martin announces that he’s getting “more outta the comedy thing, more into the intellectual thing” and then observes that his novels “really brightened up” once he started using verbs. Surrealism might be putting too fine a point on it, but Gopnik notes the comedian’s “kind of lunatic grand alliance” with the Monty Python crew. (The DVDs feature period cameos by Eric Idle and John Cleese.) In one mock PSA, Martin and Regis Philbin warn America that “over one half of all steamroller accidents involve drunk drivers.” If the Pythons were wreaking havoc on the conventions of British television (easier fish to shoot, and a smaller barrel), Martin was doing something similar stateside.
Though the three discs in this set are a bit uneven, the sheer antic pleasure that galvanizes Martin films such as All of Me and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is very much on display. In one bit for a 1978 NBC special, Martin lopes into a rodeo, mangling a cigarillo in his teeth and flashing cold eyes at all comers. The MC challenges Steve to tame the wildest beast in the West—“That’s him over there,” the guy says gravely, “the one with the fire in his eyes.” The camera, of course, pans to a sleepy-eyed tortoise, which Martin proceeds to ride while wearing a green dress. (It’s a long story.) Elsewhere, we get montages of Martin riding a dwarf pony; Martin riding an elephant; monkeys riding donkeys; Martin sharing a smoke with an orangutan (perhaps post-coital, though the context remains unclear)—reminding the viewer that no comic has ever worked better with animals.