Charlie Rose Interview with Steve Martin

steve martin joins me this evening for more than 30 years he has done every kind of performance you can imagine in the 1970s he was the first rock star comedian it's kind of fun for me to see the people in the audience with the amateur model arrow through the hand this of course is the professional model oh no i'm getting happy feet i'm an experienced professional don't you try this at home and one more thing if you bought my album and you came down here expecting me to do a lot of routines from the record and i didn't do them steve martin has just written a new book born standing up a comics life it is a memoir of how he got into show business and his career as a stand-up comedian he's recently stepped back onto several stages first he was a kennedy center honoree on that night he was celebrated by his friends and peers and secondly at the 92nd street y here in new york fans came out to see a candid conversation and meet one of their favorite artists here are some of the highlights i was in um uh georgia in a club no in a college and i was performing sorry uh yeah vanderbilt university and i was playing tennessee nashville tennessee it is yes they moved it yes i did my show and i finished i said okay thank you and good night and all my props are over there and my banjo case and so i start packing this up but it's all in front of everybody and they're still sitting there like this and then packing it putting putting this away and i say thank you and the show's over so thank you very much thank you and then i'd stand and just sat there yeah so i thought hmm and so i just started talking to the audience uh i don't remember what i said i just started talking you know well i guess the show is over something like that and i walked out into the uh audience and i'm leaving now i said i'm going to leave and they just sort of hung with me and we went out of the hallway and they kind of hung with me and i said yes we're going to so we went outside and and there was a drained swimming pool there yeah and so i asked them to uh get into the swimming pool and they all got into the swimming pool and then i said now i'm going to swim across you and so i you know i did that and they did this this would have been about 1971 yeah and i went home that night and i thought something just happened uh that was uh different than anything i had been doing and i um started to think in that vein that things could go a little as we say wilder and crazier i was 21 years old i was you know studying theater and i fell in love with a girl who uh made me read somerset mom's the razor's edge and the razor's edge is about the man questing truth you know in the sort of 60s sense i mean the book was written before that but of the guru on the mountain and knowing and and this just completely appealed to me so i changed my major and i studied philosophy and i and it taught me that oh um these guys are questioning everything so i turned it on my act you know instead of what does god exist it was hey how can i get some better laughs here with this act in logic class i opened my textbook the last place i was expecting to find comic inspiration and was startled to find that lewis carroll the supremely witty author of alice's adventures in wonderland was also a logician he wrote logic text books and included argument forms based on the syllogism normally presented in logic books this way all men are mortal socrates is a man therefore socrates is mortal but carols were more convoluted and they struck me funny in a new way one babies are illogical two nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile three illogical persons are despised therefore babies cannot manage crocodiles you have had this evolution from early to stand up to movies and those and you've been successful at all of these things i mean where have you failed ask my wife you like being considered a man of letters you say i like it yes yeah i like it i mean you like the fact that you're applauded for doing these things that are yeah yeah because it could be also silly you know uh when i i'm using the word celebrity i hope you don't find it insulting i'm just it's just a fact i guess yeah and um but uh recently i've i've found um yeah they get a little more get respect as a writer so i i feel good about that the best compliment i ever got is i wrote this story about my father in the new yorker and i got a letter from a woman and she said you know i read the article and i gave it to my husband and he read it and then he said sorry i hate that i'm on television no he said what's our son's phone number wow steve martin also sat with me at this table to talk about his book and his life and here is that conversation born standing up uh is a part of your life that's closed and you say it's as much a biography as it is anything else because you're writing about someone i used to know somebody you used to know the book starts really at birth i mean it doesn't deal with just what the 18 years of my doing stand up it starts uh when i was a child and goes through really uh through the decades through the death of my parents focuses on we learn a lot about your parents though was it hard to write was it i mean they both deceased they're both deceased um it was it was hard uh one emotionally uh to write about one's parents uh it can be very affecting at times uh i had written about my father before so it wasn't new to me um but you you i guess the question is would have written the same thing if they were alive and someone asked you that i read your response yeah and i probably would have negotiated a little bit but i think it would be basically the same because the story has a happy ending so in fact you describe it a relationship with your father's almost like a bell curve yes exactly meaning that when you're born you are infinitely close and then as i got older we grew apart and then at the end of his life we grew back together again to be infinitely close tell me about growing up well i was uh i was born in texas in waco texas and i lived there until i was four and we left for california uh when i was about five uh we moved to englewood or hollywood actually and my my father was interested in acting and my mother hated the heat in texas and she was very excited to move to to california where there were movie stars and a different life for her i think your dad ended up in real estate he ended up selling real estate yeah the the opportunities then uh it's funny that i didn't really realize he wanted to be an actor until much later in my life uh because the only time i ever saw him act well it's two times one i was about five i guess and i went to a play i had no idea what a play was and we waited my mother and i sat there and then my my second act or something my father brought on a teacup and served somebody and walked off but then the i didn't put this in the book and i i'm sorry i didn't i actually forgot about it when he was he for the church our baptist church our local garden grove baptist church remember this would have been 1955. he uh wanted to put on a show i i think probably for the same reason i did when i was in high school that i organized a vaudeville show so i could do my act you know but i had to put on a whole ship in order for me to have five minutes my father organized a uh minstrel show which you could actually buy from samuel french and it had all the which now would be considered highly racist although it was really affectionate at the time and i was employed i was probably eight and i uh wore blackface with uh white lips and sat on the side of the stage eating a watermelon that was it that was my my role this is so embarrassing i'm so glad there's no photos you think he was he never got over never becoming an actor well i it's hard to say because we never talked about it well toward the end of the book i won't go into that because it's quite emotional but i i i can only think who wouldn't rather be in show business [Laughter] you know than uh now selling real estate is fine is um but i think his heart would have certainly preferred that but i always thought that he he must have felt the pressure to put food on the table and actors unless you're you know it's hard a pressure you didn't have no i uh what as uh to put food on the table so to speak i mean otherwise no i didn't have the same kind of economic demands that he might have had the white in fact i wonder if that's why i you know i wasn't married till i was 38 or something you know i because i knew i would put stress on my hopes and dreams you wanted show business early i did i i sho yeah show business that's what i'd call it i know i really wanted to i'm taking it out yeah i really wanted to be up in front of people and i i was so inspired by uh comedians i saw on television red skelton and jerry lewis and uh jack benny jack benny i loved and um and i just loved trying to do what they did what's amazing about the book and it is that jerry seinfeld on this show you i don't know if you know this said it's maybe the best book ever written here it is right now take a look at this jerry seinfeld but all good comedy i think is intellectual you know even um uh somebody like um steve martin who's written this fantastic i think the best book ever written about comedy that's coming out i think in a couple months called the comics life yeah which is his memoir is it it's his memoir of his life as a comedian now there's a guy i think a lot of people would think well he was just silly you know he was silly no he was incredibly intellectual and when you put intellectualism with an arrow through the head that makes you laugh just an arrow through the head does not make you laugh so it's the it's the head behind the joke that makes the audience laugh it was very nice but he's right too well i i guess about the arrow between you well i think that was part of my approach too was that it was multi-layered i hate to be pretentious about it but my little mind at the time felt funny and smart and stupid at the same time it seems in reading this that your job i like to say about jerry seinfeld that he is the best reader of this book that we've ever had well no i resent that all right disneyland was a great place for you to work yes it was i was 10 years old we had just moved to garden grove california and i didn't really know much about disneyland it was just opening it was 1955 the summer of 1955. and a friend of mine his name is emote collins i found out since um told me they're hiring kids i said what what did they're wearing kids to sell guidebooks and i got on my bike and i went down there and somehow just landed this job and it was you know you walk you walk up to disneyland you're 10 years old you park your bike and you look up and there's a train coming in and there's mickey mouse and there's trams and rockets to the moon and a rocket to the moon and i was hired and i that was really the beginning of my show business career i always felt in what way well i was out in front of people and even now they refer to people who work there as actors and you're backstage when you're not out in front of people and um you know i was at first it was the first time i could be vocal really in front of people and and i sort of uh migrated through disneyland uh first selling trick ropes at disney at the in frontierland doing actual cowboy tricks with a rope and then i got a job at merlin's magic shop and that was the my big break but what's interesting about those are the two of the aspects of what later became your act well magic and yeah i didn't do trick roping in my act but i did everything i learned there i used juggling right um i didn't learn banjo playing here's what's funny about it you say you had to resort to those kinds of things because you did not have talent well it's true i you know i i knew people in high school who could sing so beautifully and people could dance i i couldn't do either any of that or play an instrument even in high school i couldn't play an instrument and i really had no gift in that direction my mother played piano well and my father sang but i inherited neither um i guess i sang like my mother and played piano like my father that's so good and uh but in the world of vaudeville and doing stuff of doing tricks you know you can just go buy a trick and you rehearse it and put two or three of them together and you're in show business you know to anybody who'll watch and i also uh watched a comedian too in uh disneyland named wally bogue worked at the golden horseshoe review and he was fantastically funny he's still around he's a great guy but you begin to learn what about performing well i think uh from wally bogue i learned a secret lesson that i i'm just remembering that i learned from him which was be likable he was so likable and i thought how's he doing that i guess i guess you could be likable yes but uh i didn't know how to do that yeah so i kind of imitated him and you don't know how you became life but you just knew i don't even know that i am i'm just saying that's what i i attempted to do there was a kind of friendliness about him and there was a very devil may care don't you think your character on stage had that uh i don't know i always thought that he was likable because he was so unlikable but um i hesitate to talk about my character in the third person because it sounds weird but um what was that that character on stage was a very selfish egocentric you know person who was angry all the time how did how did you learn the banjo i got interested because i heard uh recordings of earl scruggs playing the banjo i had a friend in colle in high school named john mcewen who played the banjo he's now in the nitty-gritty durban plays a lot on his own now too he's a great banjo player but mainly i slowed records down which i found out was the uh standard way that most people learned the banjo in those days there's only two ways you take a lesson and i didn't even know what a lesson was or how to get one there was a book that pete seeger did called how to play the five string banjo which we all got and the other method was to take 16 33 rpm records and slow them down to 16 down to the banjo so you're in in tune with it and pick it out note by note literally you know why the banjo uh i just fell in love with it i just i don't know why uh it just struck me somehow and uh the banjo's actually i don't even know what the public think of there's two kinds of banjos a quick little history there's a four string which is that sort of dixieland and then there's a five string which is more bluegrass hard driving but also it's a very melancholy instrument believe it or not you can play hard and fast or you can play soft and quiet and has many many tones music i love it what was it that you won the grammy for you and earl together ah well i that's what i call one of those right plays at the right time you know uh earl scruggs asked me to play on his 75th anniversary album uh to accompany him with many other players i would play five string banjo along with him and uh and it won it won a grammy and i i have a grammy that says steve martin best country instrumentalist which is just hilarious because i know so many people who are maybe a thousand times better than i am don't have it but you must take great pride if you didn't feel like you had any talent to learn to play a musical instrument yes i well i knew at the time i i remember first getting the banjo and reading the book and said here's how you make a c chord and i'd put my fingers down to play the c chord and i couldn't tell the difference between the g chord and the c chord uh but i just stayed with it and i kept saying to myself well if i just stay with it one day i will have played for 40 years so the goal is just to keep playing 40 years one day you'll be playing 40 years and you'll be able to play somehow because anybody who's six or something for 40 years will be able to play it why did you put it in your act oh just to fill time seriously i mean i when i first went on stage i i all i needed was material i had to do 10 minutes you know i i i had a little magic act i had my banjo i had poetry that i learned in college to fill up enough time to actually be on stage and i had a few jokes you know too but yeah where do you learn timing well uh i i think if you're in front of an audience you learn it so quickly um because you don't want to one step on your last and you don't want to like wait too long for the next one they lose interest it's just a matter of instinct but basically i think i learned timing from watching other comedians well you also did this i mean you began to examine your performances i mean you really almost were like somebody who takes a notebook you know and and knew exactly what laughs what god laughs what didn't and began to understand the nature of the audience well first of all it's vital that you remember what god laughed and what didn't so that's not such a miracle yeah but you did it with a more studious aspect you know i think in the book it comes off that way because i was actually doing what i was told in a book that i read about being a magician so i said okay the book said to write down every trick in order and then note how it goes but when i was doing comedy i didn't necessarily do that i had a sheet of paper and if i went off and sometimes i'd be in bed i went oh i remember that thing gotta laugh and and write it down and uh that's really how material was developed was just out there and and it's very uh darwinian because a mistake uh can lead to a success so if something goes wrong uh it's actually a an avenue to something going right later tell me how you developed your sort of the philosophy about uh what you wanted to do on stage well because there's a lot in here it's the most interesting i think jerry science was exactly right of all the comedians i've it's more interestingly expressed in this book than anywhere else i've ever seen well thank you i first of all just wanted to make people laugh and then as you when i start to get older say i'm 20 and 21 and i'm in college at this point and i'm being introduced to new artists new writers philosophers you know a whole other level of sophistication i'll say um i started to examine uh my act or comedy and at the time comedy was with some great exceptions like bob newhart um was basically set up and punchline and they were told by people there was sort of a cliche of the nightclub comedian of ratatat ratatat and then bob hope was great at that was great but he was he was genuinely funny too but you could also be a comedian and not be funny you could just tell the jokes and still get laughs but not really be funny and i was i had grown up uh with some close high school friends and we laughed all the time because the kind of laughter that you know your whole i think a lot of people grow up when you're young holding your sides and your your hope wishing you could stop laughing because you're almost sick and i thought gee that's where's that kind of laugh where are the comedians who get that kind of laugh and what creates that kind of laugh i know it's not we weren't telling each other jokes and i i thought uh i i think what creates that kind of laugh is inexplicable in other words you had to be there if you're laughing crying dying on the floor with your high school friends and then you go try and tell someone what happened and they go uh-huh and you have to say you should have been there yeah you had to be there so i thought what if i gotta have an act where you had to say you had to be there and to appreciate it and understand it yes that it would be so kind of personal at that moment uh that that is almost inexplicable to someone else and and that's what i i started to go for and so i took out the sort of standard jokes of set up in a punch line and and tried to come around it come around around tell me what that means though when you try to come at it in a way that well i i i thought it was a combination of thoughts it gets a little uh smarty pants you know collegiate thinking uh but i thought well what if i never delivered a punchline exactly right and so now they're sitting here they're waiting for me to do something that would indicate to them that it was time to laugh because i watched comedians and i think okay they're when they do the punch line then everybody knows they're supposed to laugh at that point and they kind of do like like you applaud at the end of a song so i started taking out the punch lines and doing things that seemed like they were going somewhere and kind of never did and pretty soon eventually people were left kind of hanging but laughing at the process not quite i i found that they would laugh when you went on to something else and they were kind of stuck there in the last bit going what was what was that oh i it's go it's over oh oh it's over yeah you know and there was a kind of peculiarity that kind of delayed that not the way it's not like it's like a delayed laugh it could be a laugh that night when they're home it could be never uh but i just started playing around it wasn't one thing either it sounds like it was one idea but there are a lot of little different ideas and there i was as you begin to create this character um and and you began not to have punch lines you know was the banjo or magic punctuation still filling time and were you becoming more of a comedian than a whatever you might have been done just building well the the magic act enabled me to express uh that kind of silliness uh but with actual stuff you know and and the banjo i i just loved having it one uh maybe as a prop but i worked up some bits with it too like uh sing-alongs that no one could sing along with expecting to see a professional show so let's not waste any more time here we go and uh professionals let's go ahead i would do long lengthy tuning tuning things and then finally get in tune and walk into the mic and you're crazy are you surprised by how the audience would react i mean would they react would they at some point once you had fine-tuned this thing did they all do what you expected them to do or did they differ from night to night well there was a there was a uh yes every show is different i i always say that when you do six shows a week there's two that are great there's two that are nice there's two that are fair and one that is lousy and what's the difference in those that are really good and those that are really lousy well the audience um it could be that it's just that uh the ignition wasn't there and it could be you know i i read an article about jerry lewis one time and he said he said i was standing backstage in las vegas about to go on and i listened to the audience and i knew i was dead and i've i think all comedians have felt that there's just a kind of innervation you can feel it it's going to oh it's going to be quiet but the hard thing to learn is because they're not laughing it doesn't mean you're not going over come back to this to read this and to like it so much you get the idea that you have been very very curious about the craft of putting together an act and that you've thought about it and you've read about it and you know that book called showmanship for magicians which taught you something about being on stage entertaining people making them laugh well it might sound that way but still i was desperate by accident never it didn't start to cohere until you know for 10 years so what was that 10 years like well it's you're still doing a show you know i i you know it sounds like it was all silence and then it was giant laughter but obviously i had enough happening that i'd get retired and keep going and uh you know but just sometimes those very quiet nights and and that desperation to sort of get them in some way leads you into an experiment what was the breakthrough for you well i think it was probably out when i was touring in the early 70s uh touring colleges things are starting to come together playing every dump and every nice place and every kind of situation and you're just so experienced at this point and you go okay that was a bad joke there's this you know um and there's a a confidence that comes out you know a real deeper confidence that i think the audience smells the commercials that breakthrough for you is where when well i would say it's a tough one because i'd say i have to give it the three elements one would be the tonight show right second would be my first record and the third would be saturday night live let's talk about this these are escalating yeah i mean the the uh remembering saturday night live last the uh first record the first record was it your manager or somebody said why don't we start recording these and it became like a huge success as a comedy album one of the best selling ever yes well not quite that easily but yeah we did we started recording the the act yes and uh my manager bill mcewen would sit there with his nogger and with tape and you could hear him laughing all the time in the background on the records but it's so really weird yes it's almost famous they're both commentable double platinum albums double platinum what does that mean it means they sold over two million copies the saturday carson in the beginning you only were there when there were guest hosts yes i went on a couple of times with carson and i did all right i was you know this is like early 1972 i think yeah and uh it didn't have that much material and so you go on with your best stuff and you do well and then you don't have any more best stuff [Laughter] and then the second time you go on is a little bit less and then uh johnny felt he said put him on with guest house for a while so i went out with guests that's what he said yeah yeah i went out with guest hosts and did well and then i uh he said yeah bring him back on you have the record for the number of guests hosting on saturday night live yeah i mean i mean it's not a big big prize well it's a big deal i mean you know yeah but i've been i've been there since the beginning you know people haven't yeah how did that happen um i was just starting to break as saturday night live was starting to break and so uh i think george carlin hosted the first show i didn't it was not until the second year really and uh lauren was a friend or not nope didn't know him didn't know it no no he became a very close friend and uh in fact i'll mention his name lauren michaels how close we are uh yes and it was a strictly an agent agent but i had enough stuff going on that i was yeah you know the young comedian who could host the show you may have told me this or someone else may have told me this you're one of those people who prepare really hard knowing you know that that if you do this well it's great for you some people just sort of take it lighter than others do i'm told and maybe you told me this you really concentrate on that week that you're going to host on set well i do i find it very stressful i uh because i it to go well you know so uh you know i i do like to work hard on it yeah or at least feel comfortable um but i do i prepare for the letterman show and let's put it this way prepare but everybody prepares for those shows they you know they're you're interviewed ahead of time a second we can talk about this we can talk about this and we do a little bit of that and then i might have an idea hey what if you know we do this and you know it's just yes tell me about him what you thought of him what he meant to you because he wrote this famous piece when he died in the new york times uh i i'll tell you here's what i think about him as a performer when i was first on the show i think it's 1972 or something my manager and i had a one of the first video recorders reel to reel and so he taped my performance off the air and uh so now we're all excited we're going to watch it and so we're we're watching it i'm watching myself remember and then we start watching carson and i realized we ended up watching carson then we started we slowed it down and played it back because look at his take look at this take he goes out like this he comes back he gets the lat he looks at me because i said something's you know oblique and he comes back again it was just masterful and he was just the simplest kind of artist no art you know he was uh you know i i just he always helped you out too you could tell his love of comedians his love of you know little old ladies you know who came on and you know sewed log cabin quilts and um there was a real generosity there i always felt especially he he loved comedy and you could see him you know you always remember him just falling over laughing at rickles or you know whoever and he wanted to help you out yeah he always he always um you know he always knew not to step on your joke when did you do your last stand-up it would have been 1981 this is three years after the tape we saw yes and i was well i was working in i think in somewhere in atlantic city or somewhere a different kind of venue sort of uh one of those you know supper club type situations and i just i hadn't taken any bookings i just finished the jerk and i hadn't and it had come out and had been a hit and i didn't know i didn't really didn't know if i was still a stand-up comedian or not but the fact that i wasn't taking any bookings was telling me to tell you you want to join it anymore i already become routine it became routine and i i guess you know you don't enjoy it anyway because you know you're you're it's hard it's hard and you're on you're thinking about it all the time you're working it's a it's a real it's an artistic job and it's like like a ballet i mean i wonder if i i don't know if a ballet dancer you know does a giant leap and is actually free in their mind or they're thinking you know um was it satisfying for you to write this book and look back very satisfying and by the way just to say my i did enjoy doing it there were times it was just magic out there and uh magic like you've never felt before in any other kind of performance well performing was fun it was all the other stuff that was you know age-related you know as you get older you don't want to go to a different town every night yeah and when i made my first film i thought oh i stay home and the movie goes to their town oh this is good but you have never david geffen said you should go back oh in the 80s yeah in the 80s he called me and he said you know what you should do i said what you said let's go back on the road and i said david i don't have anything to say i have nothing i want to say yeah i mean there's no reason to go out there just to do comedy i mean with that act i actually had some i think that's one reason i quit the act i felt i actually had something to say and it i don't mean truth is life and beauty i mean it was just something artistically to say you had created something that you wanted to chair yeah yeah yeah or try or experiment see if it worked and it worked and then it was done but you you keep keep moving you know i think in the at the end of the book i make the point that um i was having a discussion with a friend of mine eric fishel the painter he was saying that we were discussing the similar similarities between therapy and making art that you're both exploring your subconscious right and he said but there's a difference he said in art in therapy you try to retain your discoveries in art you abandon them have you ever done a performance this is as good as i'll ever be um you know probably when was it it would have been somewhere around 1975 uh i mean it wasn't downhill from there so but looking back now i go that that's when i was really funny and i think the reason i was really funny is the act was unknown to people it had not been exposed like it became exposed like by 1978 the act you saw it everybody's way ahead of it yeah you you argue here in in this in the book in this book that in fact failed that our failures are more interesting than our successes yes getting there is more interesting yeah i i wrote the book when i first started writing a memoir i really didn't know where to stop i i hadn't even started writing i was just thinking about it i thought well i think i want to write about the 80s it's just a movie and i did another movie then i did another movie you know another movie and then i met another movie uh but there was something about the genesis of something that is i think worth writing about one of one for people who are starting their own careers or own genesis in something um but it's before you make it because i'd read show business autobiographies or autobiographies in general and i i'd say well you left out this one part here like how did you get that audition for that thing that exactly yeah suddenly you're working at the copa yeah you know wait how'd that happen and i think that's the really interesting part that's the part i think that people at least people with aspirations at show business really want to know about you've had people who are interesting people in your life like mitzi who made a difference missy trumbo yeah the daughter of dalton trump right yeah right what difference did she make well she she was uh uh i was 20 and you know remember i'm from orange county california i was not uh i was i was in college but i wasn't really well by that point i was a habit but um i met her and we dated and then she took me home to meet her parents and her father was dalton trumbo the blacklisted notorious screenwriter and he was an intellectual and the whole family was intellectual and i didn't know that existed and i didn't know you could have a dinner where people want i'm gonna tell you something you know arguing about politics and this and you know and it was just a free thinking household and and uh they had paintings and they had nice you know taste and uh you know the food came from behind closed doors and was served and it was just a new experience yes writers writers talking yeah as an art where do you put stand up as a performing art uh well okay here's here's van gogh here's stand up no i'm kidding but actually it's a performing art you know it's a performing world those things stand i don't think it's it's very hard to judge because some people say it's the hardest thing you could possibly do make people laugh it's much easier to be an actor well much easier they say i i think it's it's hard to answer because i always think of the best metaphor in the world which is the briar patch which is i have no idea it's what i did all the time i don't know how hard it is people say is it harder to play the banjo or guitar i don't know i only play the banjo i don't know yeah i don't know you have love art for a long time yes paintings you said you said for example there's something i can pretend to have learned from modern art is that you can't make something beautiful by trying to make something beautiful it becomes beautiful in the process of being something else i said that you did you said that at new yorker magazine i think wow that's pretty good though uh that was pretty good but it is nice to ideally believe it i mean life you could almost say life is like that uh yes yeah if you were trying to make a perfect life you probably couldn't do it if you're just trying to to live life yeah uh and you know from day to day you'll probably end up having john lennon said i mean life happens when you know there was something when you did something else looking the other way right yeah right what happened to the relationship with your father as you're becoming more and more successful well we it was it was complicated because i i i began to notice something that he was not complementary this is toward my career not complimentary at all and uh i think it came from that he actually didn't like what i was doing you know he wrote a review for the real estate journal of something yeah he gave me a better review which was you know and he had he told me later he was ashamed about it he had written this bad review of my first appearance on saturday night live and he said his i think he was kind of confessing that he'd done the wrong thing and he said his best friend came into him with the newspaper in his hand and he put it on his my father's desk and he went [Laughter] um but then he got to see the movies yes the movies he was not particularly pleased with he only started being pleased when i was started writing uh like but like i say you know my material in my stand-up act it was a young person's act it was generational it was you know parents would go what do you like that stuff for you know uh and the kids will be going what are you talking about is fantastic you know and he was an older generation so he couldn't really uh appreciate it if people said you're silly you would love it pardon me oh yes if they describe you as silly i would say exactly you get the point that's what i am silly my father got he he started to help me in certain ways he was he was in real estate so he knew how to handle my property he uh handled my fan club for a while when i had a fan club and uh so he was and he would handle autographed pictures and things to sign this sign that sign this you know i would sign let me present them to me and and so how did you come back together so that in the bell curve well i started uh taking them to lunch every sunday first together first together i said i i want to find out about our past first of all yeah and um so i would take them out to lunch and i would probe them and ask them questions and then i realized that every time my mother would say something or vice versa or my father would say something the the spouse would say well that's not what happened and they would get into a fight so i started uh taking them out one at a time and i would get all the stories that way and you know that makes you closer to someone you're seeing them every weekend how was it when he was near death he uh he he started to change uh he always was a um um taskmaster you know he uh he was very opinionated let's put it that way but he did start to soften especially near near the end he became he was very strange he could become very emotional just sitting in a chair just start crying especially he would cry with joy if he started laughing he would start to cry he was a very emotional man but i think it was he was raised in a time when it was not very cool to be emotional how old was he when he died 83. how you made movies now you've never wanted to direct you don't want to direct it's too hard well you know what it is it's like you you you love your life too much yeah isn't it you love your art and you love your writing and you love all this other stuff and that takes uh i i i'm being a general i have a fan yeah yeah i have a fantasy maybe that something if i had the right thing or something but you know as soon as you as you do that you say goodbye to friends and family i and i've seen other people manage it but i don't think i could um i like the actual uh with directing there's a lot of of superfluous decisions i won't call them superfluous because every decision matters but it's a big it is a general's job and i really like if i could direct the actors in a movie that'd be great um what is it you want to do well that's a good question that's that's really open right now because here i am uh i've written this book i'm getting the kennedy center on her next week and i do think what what should i be doing i i've sort of uh if i wanted to think about it as a closed circle i could i could say um okay i did it but i know i'm not gonna do that because i do have ideas that keep coming so i don't know quite what they are you're most of all a writer well no i really deeply enjoy writing but i would say i'm a comedian and i probably always be a comedian as a label and probably inside my head but i know most of my books are serious and well received well-received yeah do you think you are more prodigious than you are smart you know that you really are it's your work ethic and your powers of focus and your ability to leave no stone unturned that makes you i mean i i have friends that i i think are uh supremely intellectual and i sit and just listen and i think i'm an idiot i uh you know but i do think diligence had a lot to do with it but but it wasn't diligence it was it wasn't um it was just kind of this weird it was actually like shutting out other things rather than being focused on one thing it was like by eliminating peripheral interest somehow i was able to stay um focused on my comedy act or banjo playing someone stood up in an audience somewhere and said to you you know how do you be successful and you said you have to be undeniably good at something well it really is this when people ask me say how do you you know how do you make it in show business or whatever and what i always tell them i've said it many years and nobody ever takes note of it because it's not the answer they wanted to hear what they want to hear is here's how you get an agent here's how you write a script here's how you do this here's it but i always say be so good they can't ignore you and i just think that if somebody's thinking how can i be really good people are going to come to you it's much easier than doing it that way than going to cocktail parties born standing up a comic's life by steve martin um this is a terrific understanding of one person's life and i thank you for coming thank you thank you for joining us see you next time

Channel: The Ritchie Ritch Project

Views: 25,990

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Id: uD12OyIp7pA

Length: 48min 20sec (2900 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022