THE REVIEWER KNOWS WHAT you are thinking now: “Here is a guy who wishes he could guest-host The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, play the banjo, present his own network special, tie balloon animals, coin catchphrases like ‘Well, ex-cuuuse me!’ and have a live concert album go platinum despite its being banned from all Kmart stores for strong language.
“But all he can do is review books. All he can do is snipe at wild and crazy Steve Martin, who on top of doing all these other things has authored Cruel Shoes (Putnam’s), a five-thousand-word book of quips and quiddities that costs $6.95. Books, this reviewer probably thinks, should be written by people who can’t do anything else: by members of some dusty literary clique who sniff at balloon animals and who ideally have been dead since 1930.”
Pas du tout. The truth is that Edith Wharton could tie balloon animals, but she never did it publicly, for pay, because she couldn’t do it really well. That is, she couldn’t do it in such a fashion as to convey that she was great at it but had better things to do. She couldn’t toss off balloon animals. So she tied them at home, alone, for her own reasons, until the sweat ran down her arms.
And no, one does not review books so as to get at anyone. One does it for the satisfactions of (a) receiving free books mailed to one’s own home and (b) being able, when asked at wedding receptions what one does, to say, “I review.”
As a monologist, Martin is no Richard Pryor or Lily Tomlin (to name the two great stand-up comedians since W. C. Fields) or Lenny Bruce or Randy Newman or Bob or Ray. The best thing about his first big TV special was the New York Times’s preview of it. To read in the newspaper of record that a man was to deliver on prime-time network television a long sketch about turtle wrangling was gratifying; the sketch itself, one felt, was long. On his big-selling live album, Martin performs worn material rather perfunctorily for an audience that seems intent on getting hysterical without grounds. His appeal to the young borders on the bubble-gummy.
But Martin has done wonderful things: the original Saturday Night version of his “King Tut” song and dance (though if “Born in Arizona, / Moved to Babylonia” were the other way around, it would sound just as silly and yet have a point), his swinging-immigrant-guy character (though Dan Aykroyd is even more impressive as the brother), and various transcendent appearances on the Carson show.
Shtick detection is Martin’s prime service. So despoiled is our culture by the false selves of Entertainment that anyone who can take off on show biz dreck as well as Martin does should be recognized—perhaps by a “roast” in which Don Rickles is actually cooked and eaten. Muhammad Ali and Menachem Begin can do The Tonight Show without succumbing to it, but only Martin seems capable of simultaneously doing it up brown and doing it in.
One recalls the night Martin was guest-hosting and Bill Cosby was guesting and Martin, without seeming mean, made it clear that nothing Cosby said was tongue-in-cheek enough. Cosby was reduced to apologizing for clichés. He looked as if he wished he could go off somewhere outside Hollywood and work on his moves. In his stride on the Carson show, Martin has as nimble a straight face under the circumstances as Donald Barthelme has in prose.
Prose, on the evidence of Cruel Shoes, is not Martin’s element: “I decided to secretly follow this dog. I laid about a hundred yards back and watched him. … As I approached, I could hear the sounds of other dogs moving lightly. … I remember throwing them bones now and then, and I could recall several of the dogs seemingly analyze it before accepting it.” The syntax is not that bad throughout, but only one bit (“The Nervous Father”) in Cruel Shoes has what could be called happy feet.
Not that Martin need be expected to write as well as Woody Allen, the only audiovisual comedian whose diction knows what it is doing on a page. At times Allen’s written humor may seem derivative—it needs his face and voice to make us realize “Oh, a Jewish Benchley” or “a rumpled Perelman.” But even in its lapses, it has a ring, it is writing.
Writing is something many a book has done without. Cruel Shoes, however, lacks not only style but also character. Fields, Groucho Marx, and Fred Allen all spoke with decidedly less timbre and snap in print than orally, but each of them produced a readable book or two that at least evoke—if they fail quite to render—the author’s voice. Precious little from Martin’s slim volume would be funny, let alone original, even if fleshed out by Martin’s bunny-ear apparatus and fine awful smile.
One chapter is called “Dogs in My Nose.” It is three paragraphs long and seems to go on and on and on. Further nasal whimsy appears under the heading “Comedy Events You Can Do”: “Put an atom bomb in your nose, go to a party and take out your handkerchief. Then pretend to blow your nose, simultaneously triggering the bomb.” The reader who does not know five fourth-graders with better nose jokes than that is not traveling in a fast enough crowd.
Now, drolleries that do not quite come off may yet be estimable; sometimes not quite coming off is the better part of coming off. But some of these brief sketches suggest Richard Brautigan on a particularly languid day. There are several apparently straight, though furtive (but not furtive enough), poems. There are jibes at leaden philosophers that—although or because Martin was once a serious student of philosophy himself—are leaden (though thin). “Cows in Trouble” and “The Day the Buffalo Danced” are topics worth developing, but what Martin gives us is surely not the way discontented cows would act and definitely not how buffalo would dance.
An item about a nationality called Turds approaches risible flatness, but why “Turdsmania” for the country’s name? Turdsey, perhaps. Turdwana. There is something to be said for this sentence from “Poodles … Great Eating!”: “The dog-eating experience began in Arkansas, August, 1959, when Earl Tauntree, looking for something to do said, ‘Let’s cook the dog.’” But “experience” is not quite the word, the town in Arkansas should be given, there ought to be a comma after do, and “Tauntree” is not a funny name.
In this reviewer’s estimation. Which is not to deny that one would perhaps give up all one’s estimation for the ability to tie a balloon buffalo. And make it dance. Like a buffalo.
Since this review originally appeared, Martin has become a movie star. For the record let me state that I, unlike many tasteful Americans, loved The Jerk, and I think Martin can dance like a son of a bitch. And let me say in all fairness that Bernadette Peters, with whom Martin has a close personal relationship, makes Edith Wharton look like Alfred, Lord Tennyson.