INTERVIEW BY LAWRENCE GROBEL
THE PLAYBOY INTERVIEW | JANUARY 1980

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PLAYBOY: We thought we’d start with your background and work our way up through your—
STEVE MARTIN: Nobody gives a shit about where I grew up and all that. That’s boring. Even I don’t give a shit. When I read an interview and it gets to the part where the person grew up, I turn the page.

PLAYBOY: What, then, interests you?
MARTIN: The only thing of interest to me is the future.

PLAYBOY: How do you see your future?
MARTIN: I have no idea. I don’t even know what my plans are. So I can’t talk about it.

PLAYBOY: Let’s get this straight: You’re bored with your past and you can’t talk about your future. The present is probably too fleeting, so that leaves us with what? Sex?
MARTIN: Well…as long as I don’t get into: Did I go to bed with Linda Ronstadt? Actually, I’m reluctant to talk about sex or my girlfriends or ex-girlfriends, because that’s really your private life and you’re affecting people who never thought they would be affected.

PLAYBOY: No past, no future, no sex. What about politics?
MARTIN: I’m not political, because I don’t know what’s going on. Get someone who knows politics to talk about it.

PLAYBOY: What you’re saying is you don’t have much to say.
MARTIN: In theory, you do an interview because you have great things to say. If I had great things to say, I’d say them onstage or in a movie, or somewhere else. In my work, I disguise what I have to say. That’s what art is.

PLAYBOY: What do you mean?
MARTIN: You can’t just say, “Life is not worth living.” You have to write a novel that says life is not worth living. In an interview, you’re talking directly; you’re not an artist anymore.

PLAYBOY: You’re forgetting that there is an art to conversation.
MARTIN: That’s true. I’ve turned down all other requests for interviews because I want this one to have meaning.

PLAYBOY: Which will be quite a feat, since you’ve put so many restrictions on yourself.

PLAYBOY: What’s your greatest pleasure in life?
MARTIN: My greatest pleasure is conversation. And wit. The most fun game in life is exploring your own wit and intelligence and feeding off someone else’s. All it takes is a little bit of your own intelligence and a lot of intelligence from the people around you. It’s like, choose your friends. If you hang around with slobs, you’ll be a slob.

PLAYBOY: What does your comedy deal with?
MARTIN: I’m dealing with a very personal side of a human being’s brain, that little tiny area that tells him if this is funny or not. The best way to hit that is to never determine that for him. That’s what I believe is the reason my comedy worked, ultimately. It became a private joke among friends. My first, initial, original thought in comedy was, If I say a joke that has a punch line and they don’t laugh, then I’m screwed. If I just start talking funny-type things and never give them a punch line, eventually their tension is going to grow so much that they will start laughing on their own, they’ll start choosing things to be funny, which is the strongest kind of humor. They have determined what is funny, not me. The laugh I like to get is, “What? I don’t know why I’m laughing.”

Laughter is the most peculiar emotional response of all. It doesn’t relate even to joy, as tears relate to sadness and terror. But laughter is really a spontaneous act. It doesn’t even mean you’re happy. It’s a very strange commodity—laughter. To be supplying that to people. I used to stand up there and act like I could not care less if this got a laugh. I’d take out the jokes and do those nonsense things. One of the first jokes I’d say was, “Now, the nose-on-the-microphone routine.” And I’d put my nose on the microphone and go, “Thank you.” Which is all very simple and childlike, looking back, but that was the premise that I first started operating on. At that time, if they didn’t laugh, you had to believe it was their fault, they didn’t get it.

PLAYBOY: Like your King Tut bit. Did that come to you after seeing the exhibition?
MARTIN: Yeah. I went to the art museum and thought it was a shameful exploitation of King Tut. So I said, What’s the stupidest melody I can think of? What’re the dumbest lyrics? That’s where King Tut came from.

PLAYBOY: While the reviews of your first album seemed mostly favorable, you were cut up a bit for the second album. A Rolling Stone critic wrote that “clean, apolitical comedy is one thing, while cartoonish mediocrity that wholeheartedly supports a decade’s social clichés instead of deflating them is another.”
MARTIN: That comment is very interesting in that he’s acknowledged that I’ve elevated mediocrity to a place of importance. That is really the secret of my act. But it’s done intentionally. He doesn’t regard it as satire when, in truth, it’s very satirical. It’s like he missed the last point of my act.

PLAYBOY: Did he also miss when he compared your “smug, emasculated, rancid showbiz condescension” to Milton Berle’s push-anything-for-a-laugh excess?
MARTIN: The point has been missed again. It’s not, for instance, that the arrow through the head is funny, it’s that someone thinks the arrow through the head is funny. It so happens that the nose glasses are funny, but my point was, it’s gone beyond the glasses; it’s the putting on of the nose glasses that is funny. I’d love to answer with such a sword that it cuts up that criticism, but I’m vulnerable to it. It’s true, in a way, if you don’t really examine what I’m doing, if you just stop there. But kids like my act because I’m wearing nose glasses. Adults like my act because there’s a guy who thinks putting on nose glasses is funny.

PLAYBOY: Were you surprised it reached the top of the best-seller list?MARTIN: That’s all a fluke. That’s a matter of timing. You know, it’s beat out two diet books. I thought it would sell well, because my albums sell up to two and a half million copies, so why shouldn’t the book, which is cheaper than an album? The book sold because it was by Steve Martin, a comedian. I know that. That doesn’t bother me. It was never intended to be a great book. I like to think that along with buying the book, a little something else goes with it: a better understanding of what my comedy means. I think I’m probably most sensitive to the criticism that my comedy is brainless, when I know it’s not. Hopefully, something like the book makes my comedy a larger world.

PLAYBOY: Not according to most of the critics, who didn’t have very nice things to say about it.
MARTIN: I knew they were going to kill me, but I don’t give a shit. It’s just like doing The Tonight Show—you’re exactly the same on every television set and you’ve got half the people who loved it and half who hated it. Cruel Shoes is like that. They say, “I loved this one,” and another guy says, “I hated this one.” There’s no sense at all to it. I know what the book is, I don’t need to be told. I know where the problems are. But they are criticizing things like the photographs or the length, which is totally ridiculous, because length has nothing to do with quality. Go review The Waste Land and then come back and tell me it’s too short. Also, they are missing the point. They are taking intentional bad writing and criticizing it on a very superficial level. Some of the stuff is criticizable—nobody wants to read a poem by a comedian; maybe that was a mistake. Who knows? Fuck you.

PLAYBOY: You sound disturbed.
MARTIN: See, I’ve read 8,000,000 reviews of me, and in the past two years, I can see them start to change in attitude. In the beginning, I thought, Oh, boy, my first review, I’ll read it. But I don’t want to be influenced by a review. And I found that you are influenced. Reading a review is like being a naughty boy—you know you shouldn’t, but you do it anyway.

PLAYBOY: Do you think part of the criticism has to do with the fact that you’ve made it so big?
MARTIN: The press’s attitude goes in a cycle. Right now, I’m vulnerable to criticism because I’m at the top. It’s now the thing to knock me down. But you know what happens? They don’t criticize me, they criticize the audience for liking me. It’s weird, it’s kind of a perverted way to criticize something. I have been misrepresented through criticism, which is the last way to understand something.

Especially something intended to be aesthetic. If we’re going to criticize, then we all have to stand next to Leonardo or Michelangelo or Mozart or Beethoven. And anything is going to look like shit next to that. So once you acknowledge that, then it’s OK to go, “Well, I make little jokes.”

PLAYBOY: What you’re saying is that you feel a backlash.
MARTIN: I sat down two years ago and I said to my agent, they’re going to love me; for a while, I’m going to be un-criticizable. They cannot criticize if there are 20,000 people there. Then the backlash will start. After the backlash is over, everybody’ll mellow out and the truth will come out. And we don’t know what the truth is.

PLAYBOY: It’s rather ironic; here you are, at the very top of your profession, and you’re sounding like an underdog.
MARTIN: I’m beginning to understand that the underdog syndrome is important. The insult is in some ways as good as the praise. Right now, I’m being insulted. I need bad reviews as much as good ones. Because every time you get a bad review, someone out there rushes to your defense. Someone more important than the reviewer: the comedy consumer.

PLAYBOY: Have you always gotten good career advice?
MARTIN: When I was with William Morris, I went in and told them I was leaving television writing to be a performer. They said, “Don’t do it, you’ll never make it.” Which I loved. I love when they say you’re not going to make it. That’s like, Jesus Christ, I’ve seen that in 18 movies. They told the guy he wasn’t going to make it and he did. That’s all part of it. I almost felt like a third person watching it: Oh, finally somebody said I’m not going to make it. [laughs] Rejection is part of your accomplishments.

PLAYBOY: You sound like a man who has a lot of confidence in himself.
MARTIN: Oh, yeah, I have a lot of confidence in my ability. In show business, if you don’t think that you’re going to make it, or if you don’t think that you’re great, you haven’t got a chance. Because there’s too much working against you. There’s too much shit to go through for seven years unless you think you’re great. You have to stand there and bomb for three years and think they don’t get it. When I started out, it was the thrill of not getting laughs. The thrill of making them go, “What?” more than getting laughs. I thought, Well, the least I’m doing is blowing their minds.

PLAYBOY: Besides the laughs, what’s the greatest rush you get when performing?
MARTIN: There’s a real thrill of timing. That’s the greatest fun of all. When you’re resting, waiting; you’ve got the next line in your head and you’re just waiting for that little intimate moment. And you know it’s right to say it, you know it’s right to do this, to move your hands this way. Really flowing. Charged. Like a ballet. Only you’re using everything. It’s not just dance, it’s words.

PLAYBOY: You don’t fear becoming a cliché?
MARTIN: I fear so much becoming a cliché that I don’t think it will happen to me. When my act started, I was a left turn from everything that was going on, and I had the courage then to do it. Cruel Shoes was a left turn from what I’d been doing. The third album was a left turn. And The Jerk is not so much a left turn, but it’s me in a completely different environment. I intend to make more left turns.

PLAYBOY: What has that taught you about success and failure?
MARTIN: That if you’re struggling to do the best you possibly can all the time, you’ll fail 50 percent of the time. See, success in comedy has to do with something other than how good you are.

PLAYBOY: When did you feel you’d finally made it?
MARTIN: To us comedians, the proof of when you’re big is when you start drawing. My manager and I have in our heads the date when I first played the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. It was 1976 or ’77. I thought they were crazy to book me there. It seated 3500 and the most I had played was 500. But it sold out. I had done Saturday Night Live, hosted The Tonight Show and then did the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But in terms of fame, Abe Vigoda is as famous as I am. He was seen by 20,000,000 people every week for however long his series lasted. No one’s more famous than TV stars. We’re not talking about quality now, we’re just talking about fame. There’s still a lot of audience out there for me to reach yet. I think a lot of people never heard of me, because I haven’t been on prime-time TV that much. Kids come up to me, their parents send them over, they say, “That’s Steve Martin, get his autograph.” The kid doesn’t know, he comes over to the table and he asks Bill McEuen for his autograph. [laughs] I know John Lennon couldn’t walk down the street. I can walk down the street. I don’t think I’m at the height of my career yet.

PLAYBOY: How happy are you, even if you haven’t gotten on that boat?
MARTIN: Happiness is so hard to define and foolish to define. Am I acting? That’s the worst thing you can ask yourself. You can be happy suddenly. It can spring on you, not when you reach a plateau. You can be happy going backward or going down. You can be happy at the loss of something.

PLAYBOY: That’s a pretty serious happiness.
MARTIN: If I could correct one thing about myself, it would be to exploit my creativity in a more jubilant way; to take everything with the old “Fuck you” attitude. It’s the idea of not taking yourself seriously.

PLAYBOY: Not being afraid to blow it?
MARTIN: The only fear I have is of blowing it all. It’s the old show-business story. You make it and you’re a flash, and then you’re sitting there with nothing left. I’ve always kidded I’d be a bum in the gutter. But that’s not going to happen to me.

PLAYBOY: You said that low.
MARTIN: I’ll say it high. It’s not going to happen to me!