Judd: You like the challenge of bombing?
Martin: No, I don’t like bombing.
Judd: Or the challenge of knowing it could go down the tubes?
Martin: I’m not crazy about risking it, except it does feel great when it succeeds.
Judd: Were you funny as a kid? Class clown?
Martin: If you call this funny, I guess. I fooled around a lot, yeah. Some teachers thought I was a saint, others a nightmare.
Judd: The ones that thought you a nightmare: Why would that be?
Martin: I would just constantly fool around.
Judd: Did you go to college?
Martin: Yes. I graduated as a social worker. I was—I originally went into premed and then I realized I hated science. I did two years of premed. So, I switched to social work, and that’s where I met Eugene Levy and Dave Thomas—I went to school with them.
Judd: What do you think about Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas making—I guess they just finished their movie Strange Brew. What do you think about, like, all of a sudden, two characters from SCTV becoming national characters?
Martin: Oh, it’s great. It’s great.
Judd: Is that strange, when a little skit turns into a big hit?
Martin: Yeah. Dave is a good friend of mine and he is constantly amazed, too.
Judd: Okay, so when you’re doing impressions in the show, do they write sketches for you and then say, “You’re going to have to do an impression of so-and-so,” and then you have to develop it?
Martin: Well, a lot of the impersonations, you write yourself. I’m trying to think. There’s a few instances where someone will say, Will you play this person? And you’ll try to figure it out.
Judd: How do you develop the impression itself? Do you just wing it?
Martin: I look at tapes. Makeup can take three or four hours, so I sit with a Walkman on and listen to the voice, and sometimes I’ll get certain phrases that the actual person—when I was doing Huntz Hall, there were phrases he would use and I would lift those phrases out and put—even if it was just a word or two words together, a certain sound, you know—I’d put them into the script. You can mimic that.
Judd: You also did a Robin Williams impression. You did all the different little characters that he does, and it was amazing. How did you develop that?
Martin: Well, I know Robin, so there’s all different things—there’s his “ha ha,” a laugh which he rarely does on television, and I—that was from seeing him on The Tonight Show and he just never sat still, so I came up with the premise for Tang, the guy trying to get the answer out of him, and Robin wouldn’t do it. You just get into the voice, you know? I did Paul Anka one week and I could not get him at all. I was sitting in that makeup chair and I was trying—I kept staring at the makeup job they were doing and listening to Anka with my Walkman in my ears, and the longer they did my makeup, the more I become like him or sound like him. Sometimes it just evolves.
Judd: Do you have any idea what you want to do after SCTV?
Martin: My dream is to do a Broadway show. I’ve always wanted to do a Broadway musical. I like doing television. I get terribly unhappy if I’m not doing something comfortable, and if I don’t think it’s particularly good.
Judd: Are there any skits from SCTV that you’re particularly proud of?
Martin: Um, I guess the one—there are two sketches that—there are three sketches—no, there’s four, eight, twelve sketches that I feel strongly…No, I guess like a sketch called “Oh That Rusty,” which was about a child star who had been playing an eight-year-old for thirty-one years, and now he’s real old and fat; but he would wear a wig, and they would have to build the set real big to make him look young and to make the show relevant in the seventies, they fired his mother and hired a seven-foot-two black guy to play his father so he would look short in size.
Judd: I liked “The Boy Who Couldn’t Wait for Christmas.”
Martin: That’s a strange one. That’s just a short little piece about a guy who can’t get to sleep before Christmas, and that’s the kind of piece that you write and you kind of—it’s real personal, so you write it alone in your office and you hand it in and go home because you’re assuming that people are going to say, “How does this happen?” “Well, look, he’s tired.” You know? Then you get a phone call that says, “We like it.” Oh, good. Okay.
Judd: How much rehearsal time goes into something like that?
Martin: Not a great deal. But there’s a Sunday rehearsal, where we’ll sit and discuss with the director how we like things done, and he’ll say to us, “No, it’d be better this way,” and you work out the scene. Then you rehearse a couple times on the floor, two, three, four times. I like to do lots of takes.
Judd: What do you find funny?
Martin: There are not many things that I don’t find funny. I think the Three Stooges are great, but if they’re not on top of it, they’re not funny. Woody Allen is fabulous, but if he’s not on top of it, he’s not so fabulous. There’s no one kind of comedy that is synonymous with my comedy. I like physical comedy. And comedy that comes out of nowhere—unexpected twists are the most interesting to me. It gets boring if it becomes predictable.
PART THREE: M–S
MEL BROOKS (2013)
When I was growing up on Long Island in the 1970s, one thing was understood: Nobody was funnier than Mel Brooks. Yes, we all enjoyed our Woody Allen movies and our Blake Edwards movies, but there was never any real debate: Mel Brooks was the king.
He is the original gangster of comedy. His work dates back to Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner, for chrissakes. He is the 2,000 Year Old Man. He’s responsible for, at minimum, two of the top ten comedies of all time, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. (There is a legitimate argument to be made that he is responsible for more than half of the top ten.) One could say Blazing Saddles is still the edgiest comedy ever made; screamingly funny and original, yes, but all in the service of important thoughts about race. I’m not sure it could be made again today.
I hesitate to use the word important when talking about comedy, or movies in general, but Mel Brooks is important. His movies are important. And even now, in his late eighties, he’s as funny as funny gets—and a hell of a lot quicker than the rest of us.
Mel Brooks: So, what was it before Apatow?
Judd Apatow: What was it before? It was Apa-toe.
Meclass="underline" Okay, not such a big move. I mean, people from Europe, they made really big moves.
Judd: Oh, you mean before they shortened it? I think it could have been Apatovski.
Meclass="underline" Yes, it could have been that. You have no idea?
Judd: I think it was Apatapatovski. There’s this strange man that keeps sending me information about my history and I’m not even asking him to do it. He recently sent me a photo of my great-great-grandfather’s cemetery plot.