“I realized that comedians of the day were operating
on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience
either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The
thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that's not real
laughter.”
Steve Martin
“That Steve
Martin?!” is a frequently asked question when people find out a theatre is
producing one of his plays. Indeed, this wild and crazy guy is a
multifaceted talent with several novels and screenplays to his name in addition
to his prolific acting and stand up career.
In the meantime, he has also gained recognition as a musician and art
collector. Known for his trademark zaniness, Martin’s more esoteric work
often treads into darker territory. He was accurately described by The
Believer Magazine as “a serious person who conveys his seriousness by sending
it up.” In The Underpants, his adaptation of the 1910 German
farce Die Hose, Martin certainly embraces joyful silliness while
inviting the audience to consider the implications of what they’re laughing
at. Martin once said, “There's a lot of thought in art. People get to
talk about important things. There's a lot of sex, you know, in art. There's a
lot of naked women and men, and there's intrigue, there's fakery. It's a real
microcosm of the larger world.”
His own art typically
succeeds in exploring this microcosm, and The Underpants is no
different—especially with the sexy intrigue, fakery, and laughter. Within
the shenanigans, the audience is invited to consider gender politics, the
nature of notoriety, and even tragic historical race relations and identity, all
while laughing uproariously. His 1978 standup comedy album A Wild
and Crazy Guy includes a long bit where Martin explores the topics of
philosophy and religion by dropping very real thought bombs on his audience,
then subverting them to produce laughs before engaging further. After a
joke about waking up in heaven and thinking “ohh nooo … in college they said
this was all bulls***!” he later continues, “It’s so hard to believe in
anything anymore, you know what I mean? It’s like, religion, I mean you
can’t take it serious because it seems so mythological, it seems so
arbitrary. And then on the other hand science you know,
it’s just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method it excludes
metaphysics. And, I guess I wouldn’t believe in anything if it wasn’t for
my lucky astrology mood watch.” In four sentences, Martin summarizes
common struggles people have with trusting the meta-narrative of Religion, and
the shortcomings of replacing it entirely with Science, and then makes the
audience laugh with a non-sequitur and non-sensical “eh screw it all”
alternative to both.
His first stage play,
1993’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, reflects on the 20th Century as
shaped by art and science. Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, and a time
traveling musical guest all meet in the Lapin Agile cafe in Paris and thoughtful
hilarity ensues. His one-act satire WASP asks
existentially disturbing questions about ideals of masculinity and family
dynamics, and the potential cost of the American Dream. In 2000 he
published the novella Shopgirl, about a 20-something clerk named
Mirabelle, the 50-something millionaire Ray, and the shiftless young font designer
Jeremy and their mutual search for connection and purpose. Martin’s body
of work explores, among other things, human sexuality and gender roles,
personal identity, social hierarchy, and religion. But hysterically.
Further Reading:
More information about Steve Martin can be found
at http://www.stevemartin.com, biography.com, and his stand up can be found on Spotify, as well as his album Rare
Bird Alert, an excellent bluegrass musical extravaganza with The Steep
Canyon Rangers.
Books by Steve Martin:
Born
Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Cruel
Shoes
Pure
Drivel
The
Pleasure of My Company: A Novel
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