Word: martinisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...COMEDIAN who isn't funny, Steve Martin has made quite a career for himself With the money he's made from Saturday Night Live, movie appearances, and records, you'd think he could finally afford to hire writers to make his material funny, but no--Martin is an individualist, and insists on continuing his frantic pursuit of the banal...
...Martin can't sustain one narrative idea for more than two of even these decimated pages, anyway. And, unlike his stage appearances, he can't just spreadeagle and say "Excuuuuse me!" when things go wrong. Even so, you had a right to expect more from Martin's book. Maybe one funny piece. Or one funny line...
...style precludes that. Even when he gets a potentially funny idea, he puts it in his title, warning you, and then decapitates any rising titter by tacking some flat line at a moment when a curious twist or jab might have released a legitimate laugh. Martin bypasses the sublime, hurtles through the ridiculous and lands with a splat in the pitiful...
What does one do, faced with an entire volume of such curiously written items? You might ask what Martin or anyone else finds funny about them. There's a flat-footed doggedness to the way Martin takes tired jokes and tries to recycle them. Unfortunately, he has lost the ability to write a punch-line, and in Cruel Shoes he frequently gets around that simply by reprinting the title of the piece at the end--but this time, in italics. Witness "The Children Called Him Big Nose...
...closest approaches to the humorous Martin's eccentric orbit makes are when he delves into scatological jokes. This fertile soil, tilled years ago by satirists as nimble as Jonathan Swift, most often supports the locker room ho-ho's of nine-year-olds and Mel Brooks. Martin could take lessons from them; even his toilet humor festers...