Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
by Steve Martin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Steve MartinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-02
ISBN: 1416553657
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Book Reviews of Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Book Review: "Doing comedy alone on stage is the ego's last stand."
Summary: 4 Stars
Looking back twenty-five years to his eighteen-year stint as a standup comic in the 1970s, Steve Martin analyzes how he became "the biggest concert comedian in show business, ever." His difficult childhood and hostile relationship with his father lead him to find a job at Disneyland, where as a young teen he practices magic and card tricks, becomes a juggler, and learns rope tricks, but by the age of twenty he has moved out and moved on, eventually acting in melodramas at Knott's Berry Farm, and traveling to New York, Cambridge, and Aspen in an effort to find his comedic "voice."
Comedy does not come easily to Martin and it is not until he studies philosophy at Long Beach College and decides to write all his own material that he finds a personal direction. Working as a writer for the Smothers Brothers and Glen Campbell, he eventually teams with Rob Reiner, but for all his outward success, he suffers. Anxiety attacks, hypochondria, and phobias about nightfall, plague him for twenty years, and often make his life a misery.
A college psychology class changes his life and his act in an unexpected way. After reading a treatise on comedy and what makes us laugh, Martin decides to take the opposite approach: "What if there were no punch lines?" he wonders. "What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax?" With this revolutionary idea, Martin's style is born. His phenomenal success, with concert audiences of up to twenty thousand people, however, makes him feel like a party host, not a comedian. Traveling to eighty-five cities in ninety days, he never has time for a regular conversation, he has no privacy, and he has no natural way to meet people. By 1981, he knows it is time to walk away.
Though Steve Martin's narration of the audiobook, is, according to friends, very amusing, the book itself could not be more serious. Martin's approach is intellectual, analytical, and extremely thoughtful. His comedy is not spontaneous but cerebral, and his own evaluation of what made his comedy so successful in the seventies is enlightening. Giving no juicy tidbits about Hollywood, Martin remains as private in this short book as he is in life, providing little information about his professional life after standup, and almost nothing about his personal life. A huge star who has managed to create a life of his own, Martin shares his past but not his present. "These events are true," he says, "yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else." he says. Mary Whipple
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