Word: martinisms
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...relives his upbringing in Orange County, his isolation from the stern father he wanted to please. Martin doesn't sugarcoat or spit on this domestic tension, but he sprints through it in a short chapter. "Everybody's had the same childhood," he says. "Just because it happened doesn't make it interesting. Whenever I read an autobiography, I'm always bored by the childhood part. I'm like...
...young Steve--the defining epiphany of his youth--was Disneyland, which opened near his family's home in 1955. In the book, Martin describes the park's kitsch splendor with the rapture of Marco Polo on first seeing China. There, he quickly located two mentors: Jim Barlow, performing sleight of hand at Merlin's Magic Shop, and at the Golden Horseshoe Revue, Wally Boag, a comic who made funny balloon animals. From them came the raw material for Martin...
What carried Martin through the years of obscurity that followed was his unshakable sense of vocation. From childhood, he knew he wanted to do comedy and that he could be good at it if he applied himself with a monk's dedication. "I loved to work really hard," he says. One of his happiest memories is practicing card tricks all day at Merlin's. At 15, he had the maturity to realize that a career in comedy wasn't a matter of "I'm funny. Now I'll be funny in public." A disciplined apprenticeship was the prerequisite for overnight...
...Knott's Berry Farm, studied philosophy at Cal State at Long Beach and played banjo (another of his studious obsessions) with guitarist Mason Williams, who'd had an instrumental pop hit, Classical Gas. Williams helped him get a writing job on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, for which Martin won an Emmy at 23. But what he really wanted to do was stand-up--to have people laugh not at the jokes he wrote for others but at and with...
...Brooks and Kaufman were the art house of post-funny, Martin was the mall. He bounded onstage with enormous energy, madly strumming his banjo ("I'm a-ramblin'!"), working the balloon animals, exhausting the audience into submission. Even if people didn't understand that he was playing the character of a jerk, they applauded as a reward for his efforts. After years of one-night stands in cities with interchangeably bland hotel rooms, Martin and his faux-idiocy finally caught on. (Guest spots on the Tonight Show and SNL helped.) The nobody was suddenly...