Review: Born Standing Up

As the current ads for the latest Inspector Clouseau film demonstrate, there's a lot wrong with Steve Martin. Why anyone thought that it was possible to step into Peter Sellers' chameleon shoes is a mystery: the latest installment features the unfortunate presence of the once-funny John Cleese (I admit that I am certain he can be funny again—his web presence suggests as much, but follow his tweets or his blog and forget the films), the too-good-for-this-earth Lily Tomlin and the always wonderful Alfred Molina and yet, I could not be paid sufficient funds to see it (get to four digits and I will reconsider).

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life gives a little insight into the mystery behind the often enigmatic Martin. There's a lot of fascinating details in the book, but it also tantalizes by cutting off just when you get to the good parts—and in so doing, tells us a lot about the real Martin. I do not envy those who have tried to get close to him.

To say he had a stunted upbringing would be to oversimplify: a stern father who resented his eventual success, a mother who idealized the movie star life, it all seems too clichéd. But add to it something that very nearly sounds like a kind of autism or Asperger's into the mix and it almost makes sense. When Martin finally moves away from his nearly silent home at eighteen, he says, "I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn't know I was supposed to." He leaves the response at the end of a section without reflection, but it seems peculiarly telling.

Likewise the rest of the slim volume caroms between insightful dissection of comedy and weirdly remote interactions with people. He waxes rhapsodic about his love for Stormie Sherk, later Omartian, a fundamentalist Christian author and musician. She got him to read The Razor's Edge and he found a deep love of philosophy through it, but their relationship fizzled without the artifice of the nineteenth century costumes they wore at the Bird Cage theatre at Knott's Berry Farm. Even when laid low by a panic attack, Martin approaches it intellectually. He says of his incipient terror at nightfall, "I suppose I was too practical to have such an inconvenient phobia." It's all so dispassionate—and fascinating, if a bit disturbing.

You can track his development of the anti-comedy comedy, to remove all semblance of the traditional punchline repertoire. It's a fascinating journey but without all the human details that make a gripping story. There's no there there. The historical details fit awkwardly into a narrative that has many friendships but no friendliness. His final nostalgic visit to Knott's Berry farm pokes at the missing element, a humanity that seems leeched from the narrative and perhaps, one suspects, from his life.

Martin devotes almost no time to the high crest of popularity he rode in the seventies, when I saw him in a huge arena at Michigan State. Once he figured out the secret, he seemed to lose all interest in the success he created. In a sense I can understand that: the puzzle once solved is no longer fascinating. But while Martin claims that those years in stand-up gave him a sense of the crowd and its laughter, crap film projects like the painful Clouseau series make me wonder what he hears in that echo. He's not bullet-proof. Maybe a few stand-up sessions might jog that memory.