MAY 16, 2016
The first time I heard of Steve Martin was when I was at WRNW in Westchester, a lowly disc jockey doing fill-in shifts, just working my way up. A copywriter for our sales department walked in one day and said, “Excuuuuuse me.” I found that hilarious and thought, “Wow, this guy is really funny.” Then I heard another guy at the station say, “Excuuuuuse me,” and I thought, “Oh, the copywriter ripped this guy off.” Eventually I figured out they were both doing a bit from Steve Martin’s debut comedy album, Let’s Get Small, which won a Grammy in 1978.
I followed Steve’s career with fascination. After walking away from stand-up in 1981, he starred in movies, wrote screenplays and books, hosted Saturday Night Live, became a celebrated banjo player. That willingness to branch out made him one of the entertainers I looked up to most and tried to model my own career after. You would think most of my influences would come from radio, and while I found some inspiration there, most radio personalities when I was coming up tended to think narrowly. Radio was the bastard child of show business. It wasn’t treated with the same respect as film or music or television, wasn’t considered an art form like those other mediums. In fact, many disc jockeys themselves shared this disregard for the profession. They approached the job as if they were washing dishes in a restaurant. They clocked in, spun some records, read some commercials, clocked out, went home, and didn’t think about it until the next day’s shift. I believed radio could be bigger than that, and I was convinced the radio personality could be a much more prominent fixture in people’s lives. I envisioned workers going into their jobs and parroting lines I had said on the air in the same way my colleagues at WRNW had swapped Steve’s jokes. One of the things I take pride in is that I’ve always considered myself a radio guy. No matter what else I’ve done—books, movies, TV—radio has always been my mainstay. Yet the way I welcome new challenges and opportunities, my refusal to be content staying in my lane, is something I learned from watching performers like Steve.
We tried to get him on the show for years. Back in 1985, Gary wrote a letter to Steve’s publicist inviting him on. We didn’t even have a typewriter in our office, so Gary had to dictate the letter to one of the secretaries. He had it typed up on official NBC stationery and walked it over to the publicist’s office. He literally hand-delivered this letter. He never heard back, so he followed up with a phone call. The publicist said we would never get Steve on the show. Ever. She told Gary he was out of his mind.
Many years later, I became friendly with Steve. He’d invite me to dinner at his home. He’s every bit as witty in person as he is in his movies and books. We’d be sitting there at dinner, and throughout the conversation I’d be thinking, “I must be the biggest bore on the planet.” When you’re listening to Steve talk, everything just sounds so brilliant.
Even as I got to know him on a personal level, I would never say, “How about coming on the show?” I just won’t do that with my friends. I can’t. I’m too self-conscious. I’m not willing to put someone on the spot. I don’t want a friend to make an appearance out of obligation.
The day finally came when Steve mentioned coming on, and naturally I jumped on it. It turned out to be a fantastic conversation—although it can definitely be tricky interviewing a friend. I think of things they’ve told me in our regular conversations. Did they tell me that in confidence? Am I allowed to bring it up? Will it offend them?
I seem to have avoided any of that awkwardness with Steve, because he’s still talking to me.
Howard: Do you feel like you’re a genius, or do you always feel like you have to be the guy working the hardest in the room?
Steve: What is a genius in comedy? That means you never fail, you never say a bad joke. I don’t know what that is. You’re just a working guy who’s successful sometimes and other times not.
Howard: In your stand-up career, which was huge, you said it was never enjoyable, it was a real job, and in fact, even to sit there, and reflect, and act like it was enjoyable would be a distraction from the actual comedy.
Steve: I’ll clarify that. It was absolutely enjoyable. But while you’re doing it, you can’t enjoy it. Because you’re always thinking. As I said in my book, it’s like your mind is three seconds ahead of itself. You’re thinking, “What’s next? What’s happening? How did that go?”
Howard: Are you always thinking about what’s going to be funny? Because it seems like everything out of your mouth is very witty, very well structured in terms of being funny. And it seems to come to you very naturally. Yet you describe in your book that it’s the hardest thing in the world, comedy. You have to work at it. You spent ten years perfecting your act.
Steve: Well, in real life, I really enjoy being funny. In real life, with friends, sitting around, I really enjoy the banter back and forth. I do like being funny, but I’ve also had many friends who are so funny that you just kind of sit back and listen.
Howard: But some guys can’t translate that to a stand-up career. There are some guys who are funny in the room with their friends and they cannot get on a stage and do it.
Steve: Well, that I don’t know. It’s a discipline, obviously. And the more you do it, the better. You just have to do it.
Howard: I would think with a family background like yours—
Steve: Here we go. Here we go. Robin, help me! Howard, I’m crying already!
Howard: No, Steve, honestly. I never bring this up when I’ve seen you personally, because I feel it’s painful. You’re born in Texas. Your family moves to Los Angeles when you’re young. Your father wanted to be an actor?
Steve: I found that out later.
Howard: He never said that to you?
Steve: No, he didn’t. First of all, my view of my childhood always was that I was very happy. Well, I was happy internally as a kid with friends and school, but maybe not so happy at home. I didn’t understand that there was an alternative lifestyle, that other people were raised in a very happy home. But it wasn’t awful at all. It was just—I had a complicated relationship with my father.
Howard: Your father was one of those guys who was just not communicative, right? He was a guy who was very isolated.
Steve: The strange thing was, after he died all these people came to me and said, “Your father was so much fun.” Who are they talking about? By the way, later in life we reconciled. He would answer fan mail for me.
Howard: I happen to believe The Jerk is one of the greatest comedies ever made. And your father was critical of it.
Steve: It was the big premiere of The Jerk in Hollywood. Four of us go out for dinner, a friend of mine and my father and somebody else—I can’t remember who. And my father said nothing about the movie. Nothing. Finally my friend said, “Well, Glenn . . .” That was my father’s name, and that’s what I called him.
Howard: You never called him Dad?
Steve: No. In fact, I remember asking my mother, “What do I call him?”
Howard: Steve, clearly that’s unusual, right? That you wouldn’t call your father Dad?
Steve: Well, later I found out it was unusual.
Howard: So you were at dinner. The Jerk has come out.
Steve: And my friend says, “Glenn, what do you think of Steve and the movie?” And he said, “Well, he’s no Charlie Chaplin.” I didn’t even regard it as an insult, because I thought, “Obviously, I’m no Charlie Chaplin. That’s fine.” But later, you know, I realized I was not getting feedback. If I said something—“I’m going to do the so-and-so show,” or “I did the so-and-so show”—he’d have a critical response to it. So I just stopped telling him what I did.
Howard: Do you think he was jealous of you, because he probably had an ambition of being an actor? Do you think that as he saw you climb, it was too painful for him?
Steve: It was hard to interpret what he was thinking. I believe that my father had ambitions, and children came into his life and those ambitions stopped, and he had to go to work as a Realtor and wasn’t able to pursue his dream. So I don’t know. Maybe he was angry.
Howard: Seemed like he was resentful. Did he ever say why he had kids? Like, why bother if he doesn’t like them?
Steve: Well, that’s what you did. That’s what you did.
Howard: Did your father ever hit you up for an acting part? Did he ever say, “Hey, why don’t you put me in?”
Steve: No. I actually did ask him. He did a small part. Not a part, really—sort of a walk-on in the movie I did called All of Me.
Howard: Do you think you gave him that because you were subconsciously aware of his jealousy and maybe you could appease him by giving him a part in the movie and then he would be complimentary?
Steve: Wow! You are good! No, no, I don’t. Because it wasn’t like he was acting. He was doing it for fun.
Howard: The other thing I heard about your dad, which really blows my mind: you hosted Saturday Night Live, and your dad wrote a newspaper article in the local newspaper about how bad it was.
Steve: No, I’ll explain that. He was the head of the Newport Board of Realtors and there was a local newsletter. It wasn’t a newspaper. And he wrote a critical article about how it didn’t help my career, which the opposite is true.
Howard: You would think a father would be so proud of his son. You’re on Saturday Night Live. You’re killing it. I mean, Saturday Night Live was just an amazing part of your career.
Steve: It absolutely was. But before we leave my father, I just want to repeat that later in life we became good friends.
Howard: How long a period of time did you not speak to him? Was it for many, many years?
Steve: It wasn’t that I didn’t speak to him. We spoke. But when I left the house at eighteen, I did not understand as I was going to college that you were supposed to call your parents and check in. I had no idea of that. I had no role model that said that you stayed in communication with your parents.
Howard: Was getting out of the house liberating for you?
Steve: Absolutely. I couldn’t wait.
Howard: You went to work very young. Like, when I think about how brave you were—and I really do mean this. I’m not saying it sarcastically. At five you moved to California with your family, and at ten you decided to go out and get a job at Disneyland, right? Ten years old?
Steve: I was living in Garden Grove, California, and Disneyland had just been built. A friend of mine who lived two houses from me said, “Disneyland is hiring kids.” And I couldn’t think of anything more exciting than to work at Disneyland. So I picked up my bicycle—these were days when you could just leave the house on the bicycle and come home at five o’clock.
Howard: Getting a job at ten is probably indicative of how things were at home. Disneyland is the ultimate escape.
Steve: As I said, I didn’t think of my childhood as ugly. I just didn’t.
Howard: So you would go to school, and then Disneyland afterward and on weekends?
Steve: On weekends I would go to Disneyland and sell guidebooks out front. You’d make three dollars.
Howard: What would you do with that money? Would you just save it up?
Steve: Oh, boy. One time I went and bought a pair of shorts. They were four dollars and fifty cents, and my father flipped out.
Howard: Because it was extravagant.
Steve: It was extravagant.
Howard: So Glenn wasn’t even proud of that? He wasn’t proud of the fact that you would earn four dollars and had the wherewithal to buy your own shorts?
Steve: Well, I guess I never thought of it that way. But thank you for phrasing it like that.
Howard: No, I’m down on Glenn. I really am.
Steve: I just want to defend him a bit, because it’s a complicated life in the thirties and forties and fifties, with these prototypes of what a man and a wife were, and how the father treated the children. There was discipline. It was just a very different time.
Howard: Toward the end of his life, you were able to sit down and have a real conversation with him for once and say, “Dad, you hurt me”?
Steve: No, I didn’t do that. But he was very kind to me toward the end.
Howard: There was a rumor that you actually killed your father—murdered him with a pillow.
Steve: I think after this he is going to come back from the dead.
Howard: So you were working at Disneyland and you got exposed to entertainers. You think about it, a guy with your background, a kid, suddenly says, “I’ve got the bug. I want to be an entertainer.”
Steve: Well, I didn’t know what it meant to be an entertainer. I knew early that I loved comedy. I’ve never phrased it like I’m phrasing it now. I just loved comedy.
Howard: You never said, “I want to be a comedian”?
Steve: No, I didn’t even know what that was. Wanting to be a comedian came later. I just wanted to be onstage, and that was a way to be onstage. I didn’t sing or dance or act or do anything. All I had was a magic act. I would go see this comedian named Wally Boag at the Golden Horseshoe Revue. It was a free show and it was fantastic.
Howard: What did Wally do?
Steve: He did balloon animals.
Howard: There you go.
Steve: And he was just funny. He did corny jokes. I saw his show hundreds of times, and he was always fresh. He never did the same show.
Howard: Like an old show-business thing. You never know who’s in the audience. Just go out and give them your best show.
Steve: He was so funny. So genuinely funny. My fantasy was, I’m sitting there in the audience watching—I would be twelve or thirteen or fourteen—and he would get sick and somebody would say, “Does anybody know this show in the audience?”
Howard: And you knew it?
Steve: I would be ready to go on.
Howard: Did you have his jokes memorized?
Steve: Oh, completely.
Howard: You knew the whole thing?
Steve: Yeah.
Howard: And you would go home and practice magic. Now, what does that mean, to practice magic, sleight of hand?
Steve: You practice in front of the mirror and you try to see if you can see anything that’s going on.
Howard: Were you good at it?
Steve: I was good enough that when I was fifteen I worked at the Magic Shop [in Fantasyland at Disneyland], and I would be demonstrating card tricks with trick decks. And one time I just thought, “I don’t need these trick decks. I can just do it with regular cards.”
Howard: Don’t you think if you’re not sure how to be a performer, magic is a way?
Steve: Absolutely.
Howard: Because Johnny Carson used to do that too. He was consumed with magic, because he wasn’t sure what the hell he was going to do.
Steve: When you’re fifteen and you’re trying to figure out a way to perform, a magic act is perfect. Because you buy a trick and then it’s got patter written in the instructions. You know, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen . . .” You memorize that and you’ve got a show. And I would do my show for my parents’ bridge parties.
Howard: Did you have a special name?
Steve: No, I didn’t think that far ahead.
Howard: And magic does not help with girls, right? It’s not something that they respond to?
Steve: I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking about girls.
Howard: You were just thinking about a career.
Steve: I didn’t have an idea for a career. I just liked being onstage, and only later did I think about a career.
Howard: You’ve got to skip ahead for one second here. I don’t understand how you get out of college and then get a job writing for the Smothers Brothers. The Smothers Brothers were the biggest act on television.
Steve: I’ll tell you how that happened. I was in college and I was working at a place called Ledbetter’s doing my little shows, ten or fifteen minutes. I had written some stories, which later became the book Cruel Shoes, and I had met at my college—Long Beach State College—a dancer. I don’t know what name she goes by now, but Nina Goldblatt was her name at that time. She was so cute and she was a dancer on television, on the Smothers Brothers show. I started talking to her. It’s the one time in my life where I actually had the courage to go up to somebody that I thought was adorable and start talking to her, and she was friendly. She was dating—not dating, had seen Mason Williams, who was the head writer of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. She heard that they were looking for younger writers, because the mantra of the late 1960s was “Never trust anyone over thirty.” The luckiest thing that ever happened to me. Because I was under thirty. I submitted my material and Mason Williams liked it, and they brought me in.
Howard: Was your mind blown that you got a job on this Smothers Brothers show out of college?
Steve: I did become very anxious about it and very nervous, and essentially I had a little bit of a breakdown. But I persevered in that discipline of learning how to write comedy.
Howard: You got nervous because you’re working with probably some of the best television writers in the history of television, who are groundbreaking. You weren’t insecure that you’d lose your job? You were excited?
Steve: I did worry about losing my job. But this moment happened. I’m sitting there and I’m watching them rehearse, and I knew I hadn’t really come up with a lot of stuff. I’d written a good piece for the Smothers Brothers at first and hadn’t written much since. But one night—this is in my book, I’m not confessing it for the first time— I was sitting there watching the show rehearse, and Tommy Smothers came up to me and said, “We need an intro for this bit. Can you go write it?” I’m like, “Sure.”
Howard: “Yeah, I can do anything.”
Steve: Yeah. And I went up to my little room and I had nothing in my brain. Not a thing. Then I called my friend Gary Mule Deer. You know who he is?
Howard: No.
Steve: Oh, he’s a great comedian. We were roommates for a while. I said, “Gary, I’m on the line here, and you have a great joke. Can I use it?” And he said absolutely. And the joke was this. It was Tommy’s line. He said, “It has been proven that more people watch television than any other appliance.” You know what? It freed me. And I was able to then just start writing and start thinking. You had to learn how to think in a certain way.
Howard: You mean it freed you because, “Hey, maybe I could write some absurd thing and it will—”
Steve: No, I felt I was over the hump of proving myself, even though I proved myself with somebody else’s material.
Howard: See, I would have felt dejected that I had to go get this other material from this guy. And yet it kind of showed you the way.
Steve: You know, my will was so strong.
Howard: Meaning that you just had to succeed.
Steve: I had to.
Howard: You’ve said that about comedy. You’ve said that you didn’t think you were the most talented guy in the room or the funniest guy in the room, but you worked harder than anybody. You put in ten years of developing your stand-up act, four years of going out and performing and kind of refining it.
Steve: Yeah.
Howard: And then four years of actually performing it and getting all those successes. And the strangest thing about all that is I figured you were a guy on top of the world, when you’re on tour and you’re already playing in Madison Square Garden. I figured this was the greatest time in your life. And when I read about it, you say it was the worst part of your life. People were laughing at just about anything you said, and it was the loneliest part of your life.
Steve: Very lonely.
Howard: Because you were one of the most famous guys in the world at that point, and it was isolating.
Steve: Yeah, it was isolating. I hated every moment. Because there was a moment right before [I had that] success where I felt so funny. I would go out and play to people who had only heard of me, they hadn’t seen anything, and it was fantastic. It was just thrilling to be onstage and to know what you’re doing. The moments early on when you get some fame and you’re onstage and you’re the conductor of laughs, that was thrilling too. Watching the audience grow, from clubs to suddenly—
Howard: What was the biggest crowd you ever played to?
Steve: I think it was twenty-five thousand.
Howard: I don’t think anybody had ever done that before. I think you were the first.
Steve: People say that. I don’t know if Richard Pryor had done it.
Howard: I don’t think to that size.
Steve: Yeah, maybe.
Howard: I do think there’s a very brave decision in there, leaving the world of television where you’re successful. Because certainly writing for Sonny and Cher, writing for the Smothers Brothers, walking away from it and saying, “Now I’m going to go be a performer,” your income gets completely shot, right?
Steve: Yeah, wiped out. But you know what I had? Residuals. I had residuals from writing, and that kept me going for a while. I remember one time I called David Brenner, who was very successful. And I said, “David, you know I get paid $300 for a show and it costs me $250 to get there. What do you do?” This was the best advice I ever got. It changed my career. He said, “What I do is I take the door and let the club take the bar. And I have a friend standing there with a clicker.” I had decided at that time to be an opening act no longer. I said, “People do not attend or perceive the opening act. They’re there for the headliner.” I decided to only headline. So I went to a little club called Bubba’s, I think, in Coconut Grove [Miami], and this was to be the first time I was going to only headline.
Howard: Ballsy move, right? Because who the hell knew you? No one.
Steve: So my income just really, really dropped. But that changed my life, because when I started headlining, people started paying attention a little bit.
Howard: Where do you think you get the guts to do that? Honestly.
Steve: Well, I think it’s inevitable. I don’t think it’s guts.
Howard: You just had to do it?
Steve: Yeah, I had to do it.
Howard: When you started headlining, nobody is coming to these shows, right? I mean, it’s very small.
Steve: I would be playing places that seated eighty people.
Howard: And there’s some point where you’re using other people’s material, comedians you’ve heard.
Steve: That was early on.
Howard: And then you come to the conclusion, “I’ve got to do my own thing, but I don’t want punch-line jokes.” I don’t understand that. What do you mean by “punch-line jokes”?
Steve: I’ll explain it. I’m in college, and I’m studying philosophy, and I’m examining everything. That’s the premise of studying philosophy in college is to examine everything that’s going on here.
Howard: Existence.
Steve: And I started to really examine comedy, and I noticed there’s two kinds of laughter. One is when you’re watching the comedian and he says a joke and then you laugh at it, because you heard the punch line. And sometimes it’s really funny and you’re laughing. And other times it’s okay, but you still laugh because you’re laughing on the rhythm. And I thought, “But there’s another kind of laughter. When you’re at home with your friends and you’re laughing so hard and you’re crying. You can’t stop laughing. And when you think about it, you don’t know why you’re laughing, you’re just laughing.” And I thought, “What if I could go for that? Go for trying to actually be funny, where people are really laughing? And you say, ‘What are you laughing at?’ And they go, ‘I don’t know.’ ” I realized that when I was doing jokes, there would be this laughter. But if I just tried slightly different material and the audience didn’t have these punch lines to laugh at, they would pick their own place to laugh. They would determine when to laugh. I wouldn’t be telling them.
Howard: It was that theory you had to test out.
Steve: Yeah, then I had to test it out. Maybe I’m twenty-one at this time or twenty. I dropped all the material that I had gotten out of joke books, and I said, “I have to write it all, otherwise it’s not going to have a stamp of authorship on it.”
Howard: Is it fun for you to speak about your life, or do you resent it? Do you not like reflecting?
Steve: It depends on the circumstance. Here, I’m having a great time. But I don’t want to go do an interview with a website where I’m promoting a specific thing and then delve back into my past.
Howard: Because sometimes reflection can kind of be sad, right? It’s just like, “Oh my God, I look back on all of this and it’s just too much.”
Steve: A lot of people think you look back and you say, “Wow, what a successful career. It’s just amazing. It’s fantastic.” But I remember the flops too. Those flops don’t go away. I remember Michael Caine told me once, “Steve”—I can do his voice—“I used to do any movie that came along. Anything. It didn’t matter, because they disappear. They were terrible. Then this thing came out called VHS.”
Howard: You’ve had so many home runs. But you’ll look at it and go, “Oh yeah, some of those things just didn’t work out.” But you were trying to be creative. That’s the problem with the film industry. There is so much riding on it now that you can’t even risk a flop.
Steve: The film industry is two worlds. It’s these blockbusters and the independent, low-budget film world.
Howard: Did you hate hosting the Oscars? Because when you wrote that open letter to Eddie Murphy when he was going to host, it was really funny. You said, “Be prepared for a bunch of assholes telling you how horrible you did.” It seemed to me that you were trying to warn him, “Don’t host the Oscars. It’s a pain in the ass.”
Steve: No, I wasn’t. I’ve hosted it three times, and the first time I said, “I’ll host under this condition: if I’m the first thing out there.” Because those moments are so valuable. That’s when the audience is hot and when the comedy is right. You don’t want to follow a big dance number.
Howard: You want to go out and do your monologue.
Steve: Yeah, that’s what I wanted. And I said no interviews. I just wanted to concentrate on what I was going to do. So the first time I was in a state of cold fear.
Howard: Really?
Steve: Yeah. Then the curtain goes up and you’re fine, because you’ve done it a million times.
Howard: But there are millions of people watching that thing.
Steve: Yeah, but you don’t think about that. I always worked to the crowd in that room. And I love the crowd. I found them very ripe for comedy.
Howard: But it’s a crowd that wants to be rewarded and praised. They are actors, and it’s their big night.
Steve: I think you’re overstating it. Everybody is a person. Of course they are nervous, but they are watching a comedian do comedy and they are fine. I like the audience.
Howard: And then you walked out and you felt in command?
Steve: Yes. But then the second time was the night the Iraq invasion started. That’s too long a story to tell you all my thoughts I went through. But that was tough.
Howard: Were you thinking, “How can I make jokes if we’ve just invaded Iraq?”
Steve: Yes, but I had some experience with that. I was working at the Birdcage Theater [at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California], 1963, and Kennedy was shot. I’m thinking, “Well, they can’t possibly be doing a show.” And we got there and they said the show was going to go on. I thought, “This is going to be awful.” And we went out and the audience was really hot for some reason. And I thought, “It must be true about some kind of escape.” So I have this understanding from twenty years ago, thirty years ago, of an audience’s reaction in times of stress. So I decided to acknowledge what was going on and then just go ahead. And it was successful.
Howard: You went on the Letterman show the night he had come back from that scandal. You were the first guest booked. That was a smart decision on Letterman’s part, because you would know how to handle something like that. If you remember, Letterman was all over the tabloid press—his personal life. He was being ripped apart.
Steve: I can’t remember what I did, but there were two segments. I sat down, and however I addressed it, it all seemed funny and fine. But in the second segment Marty Short came out.
Howard: Which made things a lot looser, and you would probably really welcome that, because there was tension, right? You were aware of it. It was his first show back.
Steve: I can’t remember what my jokes were. But I went over them with their staff, and they said, “No, I think that’s a little too much. But this seems fine.”
Howard: Steve, is there anything you want to say that you have not said? Is there anything that I missed?
Steve: I will just say, I will be a little corny and say I really have enjoyed the show, and I’ve really enjoyed your personal change over the years. Did I tell you about the first time I realized you were funny?
Howard: No.
Steve: This would be in the—I can’t remember, the eighties or nineties or something. One time I tune in and you are doing the pope. And I think you are doing a deathbed scene with another cardinal or something. And you said, “You want to know what I have under my hat? It’s a bottle of ketchup.”
Howard: You liked that?
Steve: The image of the pope’s hat with a bottle of ketchup.
Howard: Thank God I said that.