Judd: How do you choose the subjects for your books, Funny People?
Steve: Very much at random. It’s all a matter of personal judgment. For the most part I write about people I personally think are funny. And that solves one problem, because the world does not need Steve Allen explaining why Joe Dokes is terrible when he does comedy. Therefore, when I write about somebody, it’s because I like their work and it’s very easy to make the appropriate compliments. There was one exception to that, but I did it only after the performer had died. He was a great performer, a great song-and-dance man. A very important figure on Broadway and in films, an old comedian of the 1920s and ’30s named Eddie Cantor. In my opinion Eddie was a cute, likable, lively, vivacious personality. But I never thought he was terribly funny. So I took about twenty-seven pages to say that. But again, since he was already dead, I couldn’t hurt his feelings.
Judd: You did the same with John Belushi. That wasn’t very complimentary.
Steve: On the contrary. If you’ll reread it you’ll find it was highly complimentary. But it gave both the bright and dark sides of it.
Judd: You said other performers were a lot more talented.
Steve: I considered Aykroyd funnier, I considered Bill Murray funnier. I considered Chevy Chase funnier. But there are a lot of compliments for John in the chapter. But I could not avoid discussing John Belushi, simply because Belushi himself sort of forced that on the public consciousness. It was not anything particular in my own reaction to him. I’d already discovered that, although I could laugh at what was funny in his work. I liked a lot of what he did in the Blues Brothers movie, for example. In this, I was very much alone in the over-fifty generation. Now, it is generally true that people over fifty don’t laugh that much at comedians, let’s say, under forty. Whether they should or not is a separate question. I’m simply reporting the fact that they do not. I, on the other hand, do. Some of the funniest people in the world are young guys in their twenties and women in their twenties. I don’t care how old a person is. If he’s funny, that’s all there is to it as far as I’m concerned.
This interview appears by permission of Meadowlane Enterprises, Inc.
STEVE MARTIN (2014)
I don’t think anybody has made me laugh longer or louder than Steve Martin. When I was young, I loved him without even understanding the premise of his act. I didn’t realize that he was poking fun at the self-importance of showbiz personalities, or the clichés of comedy. There was this whole meta thing going on that was completely over my head. As a ten-year-old kid, I just thought he was insanely weird and funny, and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t want to know why, because it didn’t matter to me.
I can remember my dad bringing home Steve’s Let’s Get Small album, and then us listening to it for fourteen hours straight as we drove from Long Island to South Carolina on vacation. Okay, maybe we didn’t listen to it the entire time; I do remember hearing a lot of the Little River Band on the radio, too. But I remember laughing, as my parents laughed right along with me, and thinking, I am beginning to understand a little more about how the world really works.
As I entered middle school, my obsession with Steve Martin only deepened. I had a grandmother who lived in California, and when we would go visit her, I would beg her to drive by Steve Martin’s house. (Yes, I’d found out where he lived.) It was this solid white house with no windows. I imagined it as this bunker filled with light. I begged her to drive by not because I thought I would see him—although I badly wished that would happen—but because I just couldn’t believe there was a structure that actually contained him. It seemed impossible to believe he existed and was somebody you could talk to.
Then one day in the summer of 1980, as we drove by his house, I saw him standing there in his driveway. I can’t quite remember what he was doing; maybe he was washing his car, maybe he was raking leaves. All I know is I yelled for my grandmother to stop the car. My brother and I got out. I ran up to Steve and said, “Hey, can I get an autograph?” And he said, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t sign autographs at my house.” “Well,” I responded, “then can you sign it in the street?” (Which, looking back, was not a bad joke for a thirteen-year-old.) No, he said, sorry, he didn’t sign autographs at his house, because if he did, then everybody would walk up to his front door and ask for things and that wouldn’t be good. I did not understand this logic at the time. (I understand it today, however: If you knock on my door, even if you are from a charity, I will call local security.) I wasn’t done yet, though. I started begging him, “Please, please, I’m from out of town, I won’t tell anyone where you live, I’ll never bother you again….” But he wouldn’t break. He smiled—and kept to his policy.
So I ran straight home and went to my room and wrote him a long, crazy letter, the spirit of which was: I have bought everything you’ve ever made, and you wouldn’t live in that house if it weren’t for people like me. And then I demanded an apology.
I went back to his house a few days later and slipped the letter into his mailbox. (Notice that I didn’t mail it, for that extra stalker touch. Yes, Steve: I know where you live.) I’m pretty sure it was several pages long.
About six months later, long after I stopped thinking about how I was wronged, I received a package in the mail, which contained two copies of Cruel Shoes, his seminal collection of essays and short stories. In one of the copies, he wrote: “This is for your friend. Steve Martin.” That friend, of course, was my brother, who did not appreciate Steve Martin on nearly the same level as I did, and has since turned into an Orthodox Jew and lives in Israel. I still have his book. The other one said, “To Judd: I’m sorry I didn’t realize I was speaking to the Judd Apatow. Your friend, Steve Martin.”
This story always gets a laugh, but to me, it’s more meaningful than that: This moment with Steve made me think I must have made him laugh, or he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of sending me that book. And if I could make Steve Martin laugh, maybe I was funny enough to go into this comedy business I’d always dreamed about, after all.
Decades later, I met Steve Martin—formally, in a non-stalkish way—for the first time at a work-related meeting, to discuss a project he was kicking around. At the meeting, I was urged to tell that story, and so I did. When it was over, someone said to Steve, “Is that how you remember it?” And Steve responded, “Actually, I believe I was the one who knocked on Judd’s door.”
Judd Apatow: It takes a lot to get up onstage and perform. What drove you to try it?
Steve Martin: I didn’t even know what stand-up was in the beginning. I started off in magic so I liked the idea of performing onstage and stand-up—I kind of defaulted into it because, at some point, I realized the magic thing was a dead end and stand-up had a future. So I started to pare away the magic tricks. I fell into stand-up because it seemed like there was opportunity in it. It was the path of least resistance.