Steve Martin on being funny
Steve Martin has influenced my sense of humour, and writing, greatly. I can't wait to get my greedy little hands on his new book.
[link]
tags: Steve Martin, humour
Jan. 30th, 2008
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Comments
I read the whole article about Steve Martin that you linked to, and I watched the video clip too. And I don't get it.
You say that he has influenced your sense of humor and your writing. Are you happy that it has?
From the article it seems to me that he deliberately chose a difficult form of humor and like he says he made it work by training it through thousands of performances.
While reading the article I thought about who I would point to as having influenced my sense of humor, and I really don't know. I'll have to think about that one.
“You say that he has influenced your sense of humor and your writing. Are you happy that it has?”
His humour, through his movies and books have yes, influenced me. I need to re-read Picasso at the Lapin Agile, but I loved it, along with Shopgirl, and his movies The Jerk, Roxanne (“See, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a high priority.”), The Absent Minded Waiter, and of course L.A. Story. One of the comments to the article comes close to how I feel about Steve Martin: “Underneath all the apparent silliness, Steve made it clear to me and my small group of friends, struggling through our teens in a terribly unaccepting place, that it was cool to be smart.” I didn't grow up in an unaccepting place, but everything else is right: people liked having me around because I was goofy and eased the tension with my silliness, and if I had to be serious and smart, I had that going for me too. He didn't make it cool just to be smart, but he made it cool t be smart and silly. He's not the only one who influenced my sense of humour and writing greatly. Every time I think of him though, I see him in a concert with a toy arrow on his head talking to the audience as if he's forgotten it's there.