Steve Martin’s autobiography, Born Standing Up tells about how he learned to become funny. On the way, he spent some time as a serious philosophy student in college. Lewis Carroll’s symbolic logic was a revelation to him in that it was a hilarious exercise in rigorous logic.
He starts to describe his early research into developing a new kind of comedy:
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. What if I could get real laughter, like the kind you have at home or with your friends, where your sides are aching.
That’s a much stronger kind of laugh …. It worked. It helped me create something new.
He gives examples of things that never had been done before a live audience before, (some later would up being adapted into The Jerk). Later, he has a startling moment when it seems a brand-new show, Saturday Night Live has developed similar ideas and is already rocketing to fame on national television.
P.S. This review of the book describes Steve Martin as the “rationalist of the absurd,” although they seem to mean mostly that he has always had a very serious and methodical approach to being wild and crazy.
Steve Martin’s autobiography, Born Standing Up tells about how he learned to become funny. On the way, he spent some time as a serious philosophy student in college. Lewis Carroll’s symbolic logic was a revelation to him in that it was a hilarious exercise in rigorous logic.
He starts to describe his early research into developing a new kind of comedy:
He gives examples of things that never had been done before a live audience before, (some later would up being adapted into The Jerk). Later, he has a startling moment when it seems a brand-new show, Saturday Night Live has developed similar ideas and is already rocketing to fame on national television.
P.S. This review of the book describes Steve Martin as the “rationalist of the absurd,” although they seem to mean mostly that he has always had a very serious and methodical approach to being wild and crazy.