Everyone Loves Steve Martin

Inside Comedy: The Soul, Wit, and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the Last Five Decades by David Steinberg (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021)

David Steinberg had the unbelieveable luck to be born at the right time, and more often than not, be in the right place.  The Canada-born comic/writer/director/host got into the business in the mid-60s, putting him at the cusp of seismic change in comedy and society.  Many of the most successful comics of the 1940s and 50s were still alive and active, and the comics who would upend the safe domesticity-based style of comedy and slapstick were on the rise.  Steinberg had unprecedented access to the biggest names on both sides, and, disappointingly,  we find out very little more than one could reading their biographies, autobiographies, and other non-fiction about the comedy in the 20th century and beyond (Recommended: David Bianculli's Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour).

Steinberg's writing is breezy, charming, humble, and funny.  I imagine him sitting like Groucho in his later years (or "Bernstein" in Citizen Kane) with a beret and lap robe, offering anecdotes about a particular comic or a particular time.  Nearly everybody who is or was somebody gets a mention.  For example, on one page (p. 33), you'll find Carly Simon, Dan Sullivan (reviewer), Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Harry Kalcheim (agent), Alan Arkin, David Geffen, Cis Corman (casting director), Mike Nichols, Tony Bill, Dustin Hoffman, Sidney Poitier, Robert Alan Aurthur (screenwriter), and Walter and Carol Matthau.  However, that is one of the pages where you'll also find one of the more interesting anecdotes where Geffen, then a junior agent, discourages Steinberg from reading for a part in a certain Mike Nichols movie, because "They're not going to go with a little Jew like you; they're going to go with a tall guy like Tony Bill.  So don't even bother."  (In the end, we know who got the part in The Graduate and it wasn't Tony Bill.)

Some folks get more "real estate" than others, and we get warm and funny stories about Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, Bob Einstein, Larry David, Martin Short, and Billy Crystal, for example.  And the most often mentioned performer in terms of admiration is Steve Martin.  Practically everyone loves and/or was influenced by him.

Inside Comedy would have benefitted greatly from better editing as there are sentences that repeat in later paragraphs, and an occasional typo, the most egregious being, "By 1957, Marty (Short) joined SCTV."  That would've been impossible on two levels:  Martin Short was 7 years old in 1957 and SCTV didn't exist until 1976.

I so much wanted to love this book (Steinberg was a pre-teen crush), but the best I can muster is "like."  It's a great book for those just dipping their toe in the comedy pool because they learn who's who very quickly, and for those who like to spend some time in the hot tub of nostalgia.  

This Will All Be Over Soon? We Can Only Hope

"This Will All Be Over Soon" by Cecily Strong (Simon and Schuster, 2021)

This is not a funny book, nor was it meant to be, despite the author being best known as a comic actress. What it is, is a memoir of loss and the attendant grief during the most painful year in recent memory.  Strong starts by telling us of the death of her beloved kid cousin Owen at the beginning of 2020 from brain cancer, only to be followed by the tsunami of the pandemic.  In her warm. yet anxious, "dear friend to dear friend" voice, not only does she recount the loss a relative, she honestly discusses the loss of normalcy.  She flees with two friends to an isolated Air BnB in upstate New York, a decision that seems more reflexive than thought out.  Within this bubble, she ruminates about her cousin, about her new boyfriend who comes down with COVID, and about adjusting to an existance without work, without most of her friends, and without the the life she had in general.  Strong's anxiety about COVID and feelings of grief are laid out bare, but not so heavily that it would making reading this book difficult.  It's not all gloom and doom (for example, she learns a lot about herself during this time, including that she's capable of growing her own vegetables), and the ending is cautious, but optimistic. 

What makes this book hard to read, though, is not the subject matter, but the style.  It's part diary, part stream of consciousness.  However, the dated entries are short and are best read a few at a time.

 A Planet Walks Into a Bar...

Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture by Ken Jennings (Scribner, 2018)

"Venus and Mars" may be "alright tonight,"* but Earth is downright funny, sometimes to its own detriment.  

Walking "bar bet" answer book and jokester  Ken Jennings has written an approachable, yet sometimes a bit academic look at the culture influence of comedy through the ages.  Jennings goes all the way back to early homosapiens and works his way up to the current political age.  He observes the evolution of what we value as a society and what we think is funny.  As a matter of fact, he takes an entire chapter - more like one long run-on sentence - to list the things he finds funny. (Some of his past tweets about people with handicaps, for example, have brought his sense of humor under scrutiny.  He has apologized for his "dumb jokes.")

When the book came out in paperback, the subheading was changed to How Comedy Ruined Everything. (Shades of Tru TV's Adam Ruins Everything.)  The new subhead sums up Jennings thesis that we've evolved as a society from one that valued physical strength (survival) to one that appreciated intellect (creative) to one that sees the ability to joke around as probably the most important attribute, as evidenced by practically everything and everyone having to be funny in some way to get our attention - so much so that we elected a reality buffoon as President.

*Thanks, Paul McCartney and Wings.

 Still Standing: Documentary by Elizabeth Zephyrine McDonough Shows Great Comedy Is Ageless

Some say that starting in comedy is a young person's game, what with the running from open mic to open mic at all hours of the night just to get some stage time.  Natalie K. Levant and George Saltz, the subjects of the short documentary Still Standing, show that just because you've made four score-plus trips around the sun doesn't mean you can't make people laugh, including those young enough to be your grandkids. 

Director Elizabeth Zephrine McDonough, who is also an actor and writer for The New Yorker and Full Frontal, was working on a documentary about the comedy scene in New York.  At one open mic, she was blown away by Natalie Levant, a tattooed, shaggy-haired octagenarian in sequined boots who dropped f-bombs and shot out jokes about sex, love, her kids, and more, leaving the audience in paroxisyms of laughter.  McDonough found a muse.

Enter George Saltz, another 80+ year old.  Both he and Natalie got into comedy in earnest when they became widowed.  While Natalie pursued her love of performing through community theater over the years, George first tried his hand at performing comedy in the Catskills when he was 18. (He bombed badly and became a clinical psychologist instead.)  Their approach to humor is different, but their result is the same - hysterical laughter.

Still Standing, which premiered at the Lower East Side Film Festival in New York City, will be making the film festival circuit, and will hopefully be available in the future either in theaters or via a streaming platform.  In the meantime, you can satisfy your itch for documentaries about mature merry makers with Lunch by Donna Kanter and If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast by Danny Gold.

(😁😁😁 out of five Smilies)