33: Comedy Jokes

Steve Martin

Comedy Records

Standup comedy was the other thing I loved in middle school, and it existed on LPs, so the fit was good. The first standup special I saw on video was Eddie Murphy’s Delirious, around '85. Until then - and for a long time after - TV glimpses were treasured and rare. Our father had a bunch of Bill Cosby records, so I grew up familiar with those wholesome works; in fact, I had plenty of them memorized. On the coldest winter days in grade 5 - too cold for the daily, endless game of Sockey (sort-of soccer with a tennis ball) - I would entertain my circle of friends by reciting Cosby bits - Noah!, To Russell My Brother, Neanderthal Man - as we stood in a tight circle, kicking our feet together and blowing into our hands. Already a guilt-ridden person, I would ensure no one thought I was plagiarizing the jokes by inserting “then he says” into the bits every couple of minutes.

The first SPEECH I ever did was in grade 5, and it was on Bill Cosby. I wrote it late on the night before it was due, hiding that fact from my parents by writing it in the dark by my bedroom door, using the hallway light to see. I thought it was a good speech, but of course I never practiced it. When it came time, Mrs. Pluard called me with low expectations in her voice (which I had earned all year). I went up, blanked, panicked, and told the only part I could remember: the ending. Unable to find a way back to the beginning, I paused for ten years of apparent time, and then said “That’s all I have.” She sighed. Why did this kid do everything wrong? I sat back down.

Steve Martin

And then in grade 6, Steve Martin. Holy shit, Steve Martin!

Steve Martin was important. Many little pieces of the way I think and speak are Steve Martin. How he was funny aligned absolutely with our minds. He was super-silly, intelligent and subversive, and surreal. The migraine story - that was one of the most fun times I remember. Cruel Shoes had ridiculous short (micro) stories called things like “What to Do When the Dopes Show Up,” “Dogs in My Nose,” and “How to Fold Soup,” followed by poignant, powerful surprising poetry like this:

The above poem would initiate the process of my bombing my first year of uni, and help end my ambitions of Being a Writer. But that, as they used to say on Hammy Hamster, is another story.

The Records

Let’s Get Small inside gatefold

Between us we had three of his four records: Let’s Get Small, Comedy Is Not Pretty, and A Wild and Crazy Guy. All three are amazing, with the caveat that standup does not, in my experience, translate across generations. I showed this stuff to a very funny friend and she reacted like it was Bob Hope. But if you’re my age, it’s likely as amazing as I claim.

The Steve Martin Brothers

The nearly mythical fourth record was called The Steve Martin Brothers and featured two Steves - a hippie and a Vegas sleazebag. It was impossible to find, and was conceptually hilarious (half the album - a whole side - was serious banjo music. With no jokes.) It was deleted for a reason, I suppose.

I searched for The Steve Martin Brothers for literally 20 years. Every record shop I went into, I flipped through the comedy section looking for the record. (This wasn’t single-minded dedication to this one record: I have a mental list of things I look for in a record store, and for 20 years this was one.)

By the year 1999, having failed and failed to find it, I decided to see if it was on the new invention called “eBay.” And it was there, first time. I ordered it quickly, like I was in a bidding war (I wasn’t) and breathlessly waited for this record to arrive. (I know it sounds weird now, but this was a time when something as big as a record by Steve Martin was impossible to hear if you couldn’t get a hard copy.) This will happen all the time in the future, if DRMs and download-streaming and electronic property rights don’t get sorted out. When the grid goes down, I’ll have my records. (I can power them with an exercise bike, I’m sure.)

It’s Not Great

It’s not that funny! Apparently it’s the only one where he had other writers help with it. Plus, I was 20 years older. Some of it’s good. Nice banjo playing.

Plus, and I swear this is true: the very next time I flipped through a comedy section - in an upstairs used record store on Yonge - I FOUND it. And I didn’t NEED it. LOL.

Steve Martin Across Time

I loved that Steve Martin (artistically) aged with me. When I was 12, he was all Whoah! Whoah! When I was 17 he was doing thoughtful, literate comedy like Roxanne. When I was 19 he was doing Waiting for Godot with Robin Williams. When I was 30 he was writing for the New Yorker. In my 40s he started a bluegrass band. He’s amazing on Twitter.

He’s been funny and smart all the way through. He impresses me so much.

Shitty Bill C

Bill Cosby, on the other hand, was from my perspective just these 1960s and 1970s records - them and maybe the Fat Albert Saturday morning cartoon, also in the '70s. I thought the '80s Cosby Show was lame. He was long-gone for me in the “classic” way before he returned my vision just to savage his own legacy.

But: his ideas, his way of telling a story,- those are in me too, just like Steve Martin’s sensibilities are in me. Cosby goes even further back - I was probably four or five when I started hearing them, and so probably more of his impact on me is unconscious…Which is how he likes it, ba domp bomp.

Cultural Inheritances Are Complicated

I think there’s some interesting connection here about living with one’s cultural inheritances - especially in North America, especially at this moment. We do not pick where or when we pop into existence. We internalize the world around us to make our own worlds - our selves, our communities, our philosophies. That just happens.

So if part of your story/background turns out to include, say, a serial rapist, or a settler mindset, or an abusive and racist legal system, or just bags of shame, you might benefit from not taking it overly personally. But you do have a duty to figure out how to deal with it. Earlier generations already tried the other ways: ignoring, staying mute, pretending, hiding, lying. They don’t work. We need to look at things honestly, and talk about it honestly in order to get to get past them, and to incorporate the ugly stuff without being infected by it.

I have all those Cosby records still. I pulled them out of the shelf to consider them, but couldn’t throw them right in the garbage. Not because I love them, but because I used to. They’re a part of my life, which has its own value outside of the content of the records and the behaviour of the comedian. It’s something I collected. A dusty stack in a corner that makes me sigh when I notice it.

Sigh.

And I Have my Steve Martin Records…

…and books, and movies - proudly displayed and treasured. These contain a vivid and complete memory bundle which also contains more than just the content: the hysterical laughing Brad and Jim and I did the first times we heard the albums; his oeuvre, unspoiled by horrors of any kind; the nostalgia trip Joy and I take when we hang out; the books, articles, and ongoing decency of the man himself.

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peace out

jep