Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"My most persistent memory of stand-up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next."

The third autobiography of a stand-up comedy performer (after Eddie Izzard's Believe Me and George Carlin's Last Words ) that I have read very recently, Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, is another great read. Particularly for me: my job of teaching mathematics at a university has a lot in common with a stand-up performance. Math is perceived as a difficult subject by many students so teachers must often go out of their way to make their lectures captivating. I identify with almost everything that Mr. Martin writes in his autobiography about the stand-up techniques. The phrase shown in the epigraph above is particularly fitting: when I teach math I often do not think about math - this comes automatically or, perhaps, subconsciously - but instead I observe, analyze, judge, worry, and decide when and what to say next.

Of the three autobiographies Mr. Martin's is by far the best written (no wonder, he is a successful writer himself: I quite liked his novella Shopgirl ). On the other hand, it is less passionate than Mr. Carlin's book, and certainly not as bitter and cynical about human nature. Instead, it is more technical, and one might say even more scientific. Mr. Martin writes a lot about techniques of making people laugh. In one passage he quotes an observation from a psychology 'treatise' on comedy

"explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it."

He then relates how this banal observation might have led him to develop successful comedy routines that lacked punch lines. I wish he dwelled more on the technical side of the art of stand-up comedy, which to me would be more interesting than celebrity name-dropping.

Naturally, the main parts of the autobiography are dedicated to the story of Mr. Martin's career, to his growth as a performer and a comedian and his professional evolution with various emphases on different stages: verbal, visual, physical. From this entertaining and captivating account we learn about his first performances in the third grade when he was doing magic shows, through employment in Disneyland and then as an entertainer in Knott's Berry farm, to his professional breakthrough at the Boarding House club in San Francisco. Then came TV (Saturday Night Live), movies, and the peak of popularity in the late 1970s, until as Mr. Martin writes himself he "exhausted" his act in 1981.

Again, naturally, there are many hilarious passages in the book, of which I will quote two. When in college, Mr. Martin had an opportunity to interview Aaron Copland. When he and a friend arrived in the composer's house they noticed "a group of men sitting in the living room wearing only skimpy black thongs":

"[we] got in the car, never mentioning the men in skimpy black thongs, because, like trigonometry, we couldn't quite comprehend it.

Among many comedic gags the author describes I particularly like the one when he asks the audience during the performance:

"'How many people have never raised their hands before?'"

The autobiography is much richer than just the account of the author's career and remarks about techniques of stand-up comedy performance. Mr. Martin offers a moving, tender thread about his relationship with his father. It adds a deeper dimension to the text. So even if I do not totally subscribe to the "Absolutely magnificent..." blurb on the cover (courtesy of Jerry Seinfeld) I agree that it is a very good book. Strongly recommended.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.

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