(The following is a modest essay I'd love to turn into a full-fledged monograph for Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series of books about "classic" albums. I'm not insane enough actually to send this, but it sure is tempting.)
"Mind if I Smoke?"
"Not at all. Mind if I fart?"
I'm pretty sure that's the first joke i heard from Steve Martin's landmark debut comedy album, Let's Get Small. When it came out I was ten; there were a couple of guys on the block a few years older than I was who'd had a copy of the record and would quote it. Not too long after the album was released, Martin had become a big star: his appearances on Saturday Night Live were pivotal in making the show a legend, and he was working on his first film, The Jerk, with his screenplay and Carl Reiner's direction. By the time the film was released, I knew many of the bits off his second LP, A Wild and Crazy Guy, and borrowed a friend's copy of Cruel Shoes, the absurdist paperback published to cash in on Martin's success. (One of the pieces in the book is called "How to Fold Soup." Nuff said.)
But sitting down and listening to the entire record? That waited a long while. Hell, I actually bought his final standup album, The Steve Martin Brothers, before I'd got to listen to Let's Get Small. (An awful contractual obligation record; half the album consisted of a few funny bits recorded at the Comedy Store, but the other half was Martin performing straight, on his banjo.) And even when I got to listen to it, it was on my friend's 8-track tape, which presented the album out of sequence from the original LP release. So Let's Get Small has always been about hearing only snippets of routines, inflected by the imitations of so many friends. But eventually, I knew every line, every intonation, every note played on the banjo, including that chord that you're supposed to play part of with your nose for the bass.
Growing up in SoCal, Martin was well-acquainted with the showbiz milieu; he worked at Disneyland and learned juggling and other side-show tricks. He also went to college and majored in philosophy. (No joke. Really.) Eventually, he got a job writing on the legendary Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, making occasional appearances in some of the bits. He was part of a team that won an Emmy for best comedy writing during the show's final season, the one that was clipped by CBS over disputes with Tom Smothers. While the Smothers Brothers show had been an edgy satiric program, Martin's own standup act never went for controversy. Rather, he sought a tone that embraced two separate modes of thought: the silly and the esoteric. (In an interview from Scenario magazine, Martin cites Monty Python as a model for that diversity of tone, though again, Martin's comedy is rarely satiric.) Mastering the banjo was one of his gimmicks, as was balloon-folding (and wearing an arrow through his head).
After working on his act for many years, his manager arranged for some of his shows to be recorded, at the Boarding House in San Francisco. At one point, Martin even tells his audience: "you guys are gonna be on a record!" But after the cheering dies down, he retorts, "maybe, someday, not mine, of course!" Thus, we have Let's Get Small.
Martin's act was a playful sendup of "professional show-business." He spoke about the idea of entertainment, and at times called his own act into question, though never as biting as Letterman and certainly never as daring as Andy Kaufman, whose performance art wholly deconstructed the very notion of what could be entertainment. The humor was surreal: "to open the show I always try to do one thing that is impossible, so tonight I'm going to suck this piano into my lungs." When explaining how come he's so funny, he says, "before I go on I put a slice of bologna in each one of my shoes, that way when I'm on stage, I feel funny." The banjo was used in service to this silliness: as he plays the thing for a minute, he points out that "you just can't sing a depressing song when you're playing the banjo... you can't just go, 'oh, death, and grief, and sorrow, and murder.' ... I always thought the banjo was the one thing that could have saved Nixon." In a funny bit prefacing his rap on Vegas, Martin tells his audience, hey, you paid four bucks, four-fifty? I might come out here, and do a 4.75 show!
At different parts of his act, he talks about the kinds of jokes he tells and doesn't tell. He tells the San Francisco audience, "I don't do any fag jokes" because he doesn't want to offend people, and then asks, "well how many fags do we have here tonight?" It's a variation on Lenny Bruce's famous routine about racist epithets, though it's not intended to provoke in the same way. The joke may seem in poor taste in 2013, but I hear it as another example of Martin's sending up the idea of what a comedian is supposed to do.
His most brilliant example of this is the plumber joke. "I don't like to gear my material to the audience," he says, but, having heard a convention of plumbers was in town and in attendance, "I've worked up a special joke" for them. It's an hilarious, jargon-laden joke that probably wouldn't make sense even to the plumbers, and when the audience merely chuckles at the stupidity of the bit, he says, "were those plumbers supposed to be here this show?" We've been telling this joke for years; a friend of mine once told the joke the night he hosted a dance at college.
Martin was capable of straightforward bits, like the title track, which begins with a joke about a drug that gets one "small" instead of "high." The grandmother song is as hilarious as it gets in its absurdity: "be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant..." The bit "one way to leave your lover" is a joke about an ex-girlfriend and why Martin is correct to "kind of blame [him]self for her death." But the best bits are about the entertainment world: his summary of the opening act in Vegas is dead-on for its smarmy-ness and speed. The classic "Excuse Me!" line comes from a bit where he's not getting a spotlight when he wants one and tees off on the backstage crew. The most brutally honest moment comes when, after singing a few lines about "having some fun here at the fabulous Boarding House in San Francisco in California," he explains that he's playing a difficult chord, then goes back to the song:
but you know,
I see people goin' to college for fourteen years, studyin' to be doctors n lawyers,
I see people gettin' up at seven-thirty every morning, going to work at the drug store to sell Flair pens,
but the most amazing thing to me is...
I
get paid
for
doing this....
What makes Let's Get Small succeed, beyond all other elements, is Martin's delivery. He is a twisted game show host, one part panderer and one part deconstructionist. His explanation of how he ended the fight with his girlfriend succeeds because of how he delivers it. The way he says "I'm sorry" after his "excuuuuuuse me!" is perfect in its mock-penitence. "How many people are here tonight?" he asks at one point.
Let's Get Small is not Carlin's Class Clown, nor is it Pryor's Bicentennial Nigger. But it may be as much of its time as the works of those iconoclasts, and perhaps tells the story of the seventies even more clearly: it was a smarmy, superficial, semi-professional time.
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