I’m watching Steve Martin’s “Wild and Crazy Guy” routine, and find it hard to believe that people paid good money to watch him back then. Was he universally liked? If so, that humor REALLY hasn’t aged well:
I’ve often liked Steve Martin’s turns as an actor, both comedic and dramatic, but I never got his schtick as a stand-up. Like you, I just didn’t find it funny. I was in my 20s around that time and preferred comedians like Robert Klein, people who worked with words rather than props and bombast. However, Steve Martin was certainly different, and perhaps that was his appeal.
I have often thought Johnny Carson was only funny if one were exhausted and/or drunk and that Steve Martin’s stand-up and much of SNL only funny if one were stoned
I think you hit it indirectly. Martin is a fine actor; his stand-up is an actor portraying a comedian. He had a talent for acting like he was going to be funny, and acting like he had just been funny, but the actual jokes were not.
Wikipedia says:
Martin’s show soon required full-sized stadiums for the audiences he was drawing. Concerned about his visibility in venues on such a scale, Martin began to wear a distinctive three-piece white suit that became a trademark for his act.[31] Martin stopped doing stand-up comedy in 1981 to concentrate on movies and did not return for thirty-five years.[11] About this decision, he states “My act was conceptual. Once the concept was stated, and everybody understood it, it was done. … It was about coming to the end of the road. There was no way to live on in that persona. I had to take that fabulous luck of not being remembered as that, exclusively. You know, I didn’t announce that I was stopping. I just stopped.”[32]
It reminds me a bit of Kramer in Seinfeld. That character says things that aren’t ordinarily funny but when he says them, they are. Hipster doofus clueless stuff.
Speaking of not aging well, that song…
Martin previewed the song in a live performance during the April 22, 1978 episode of Saturday Night Live . In this performance, loyal subjects appease a joyful King Tut with kitchen appliances. An instrumental solo is delivered by saxophone player Lou Marini, who steps out of a sarcophagus—painted gold—to great laughter.
However:
In 2017, students in a humanities class at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, protested the inclusion of the Saturday Night Live performance in their coursework, calling it an example of cultural appropriation while demanding its removal. One complained that the gold face of the saxophone player was a racist exhibition of blackface.[6]
Didn’t that song initially come out when stuff from King Tuts tomb was making an appearance in the US?
To each his own. I thought Steve Martin was great. (Granted, I was in elementary school at the time.) But I never thought the Three Stooges were funny.
I have noticed that Abbot and Costello movies don’t seem as funny today as they did when I was a kid. People change. Cultures do, too. The political zeitgeist can change drastically. What once once considered edgy satire, might today be condemned as whateverist or whateverphobic.
I wonder if we could say Martin’s stage act was on the far, far more popularly accessible end of a spectrum that also contained Andy Kaufman at the other. Performance that looks like stand-up.
Yep. It was a riff on the way the Tut exhibit was being received in its world tour, almost as if it were some celebrity rocker – thus “if I’d known about all the people who’d come see him, I’d taken all my money and bought me a museum”. And of course of the way mainstream culture had looked at the whole thing for a lifetime: “Ooooh, Tut’s Tomb, how mysterious and exotic, and ooohhh, goooold, shiiinyy…”
(As for the Reed College students, well IMO the cite in the Wiki article is just some Wiki-contributor engaging in nutpicking, for which Reed would be something of a go-to source.)
I never thought the Three Stooges were funny.
Yeah. I enjoyed the Stooges up to around the age of 11 or 12, then moved on. Yet I know people my age (69) who still think the Stooges are hilarious. But one of them also thinks “Mister Ed” was the funniest sitcom ever, so draw your conclusions from there.
Abbot and Costello movies don’t seem as funny today as they did when I was a kid.
The better parts of Bud and Lou’s movies involve them doing some old vaudeville routine they had perfected over years and years, modified perhaps to fit the storyline. The “Pick and Shovel” bit in “A&C Meet the Mummy” still brings tears of laughter to my eyes, but otherwise the movie is dreadful.
Misogyny from several decades ago1937…
Every time there’s a thread like this, I feel compelled to mention Lenny Bruce. Yes, he was groundbreaking (for his time), yes, he was persecuted for his art, yada yada yada. But let’s not mince words: he just wasn’t funny. I’ve listened to his act, and it seems to my ears to be mostly about making the audience chuckle uncomfortably when he talks about “dykes in SoHo” and “queers in The Village,” without actually delivering any funny jokes.
Richard Pryor did it better a decade later.
Speaking of whom, I watched a lot of Richard Pryor standup specials last summer. I’d just finished watching a lot of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and like half of all the guests considered Richard Pryor a god. I was just a kid in the 80s so I mostly knew him as the goofy guy in The Toy and Brewster’s Millions.
Watching his old standup, I don’t get it. Some of it is I’m not familiar with the particular topic, but mostly what I’m hearing is just a lot of swearing. I understand that standup comedy isn’t just standing on a stage and telling jokes, it’s about having a tight routine and being able to deliver it in an effective way, and maybe “pros” are seeing things I don’t or can’t, but as a modern layman viewer I just don’t think his standup holds up after all these years. I suppose people will think the same thing about Dave Chappelle 20 years from now. Maybe they already do.
Two of my favorite movies from the 80s have not aged well.
Revenge of the Nerds features a heinous act of illegal voyeurism, leans way too heavily into black, gay, and Asian stereotypes, and features an actual sexual assault played for laughs.
Similarly, Sixteen Candles features sexual molestation played for laughs (“Fred, she’s gotten her boobies. And they are SO perky!”), a subplot involving crude Asian stereotypes, another joke about an implied sexual assault played for laughs, and the joke where Farmer Ted talks Samantha out of her undies and then shows them to his nerd friends – that sure as hell wouldn’t play today.
Hell no. Look at some contemporary reviews of his stand-up, or of his first film, The Jerk, which was inspired by his stand-up. Not everyone was a fan.
But that’s true of any comedian.
When it comes to Steve Martin’s stand-up, personally, I find that some of it works for me, some of it doesn’t, and some I just have to be in the right mood for. I do, for example, still appreciate “Cat Handcuffs”:
And his memoir, Born Standing Up, is worth reading (or listening to).
I haven’t seen a lot of Pryor’s standup, but what I have seen: the material mostly doesn’t resonate with me, but I appreciate the mastery of the performance.
“To the moon, Alice…to the moon…”
With Steve, there could be the odd stand-up bon mot, like:
(for crowd participation) “ok these two sevenths, now these five sevenths”
“…yeah well I got mom to bring my wieghts up to the attic.”
" Tried to give my cat a bath last night, but the fur kept sticking to my tongue"
DID NOT AGE WELL:
“So I was sitting around home the other day doing terrible things to my dog with a fork.” Admittedly, while it may have a garnered an escaped chuckle from me back in the day, the ensuing decades have a brought about a more responsible awareness, in general, of animal welfare, and that kind of joke would definitely no longer wash.
Back in the day, with everyone going “Well ex-cuuuuuuuuse MEEEEEE!” and “I’m just a wild and cuh-ray-zee guy!”, he soured quickly for me. (He was absolutely golden in The Spanish Prisoner, though.)
True – the specific details of the content of the routine is not necessarily supposed to hold up – as Thudlow_Boink says, it’s the mastery of the performance, the boldness of that sort of act in that time, and the sincerity and honesty behind it, that the professionals are admiring.
Also with some of the past stars like Pryor we have the often encountered situation of that we may be less impressed at what was so great about some act in 1970 or 75, because we have had the benefit of seeing everything that came after 1975, so we’ve seen things become improved, refined and perfected after the door was opened by what people were doing back then… which in 2021 will sound cringey. But because that happened, what came after happened and built upon it.
Lenny Bruce could apply here too.
Just because some morons at a tiny university on Oregon didnt like something doesn’t mean that it wasn’t funny. Martin was a revolutionary comedian. His shtick was original and fresh.
Yes, the performance itself is extremely important, as well as “the era in which they performed,” which I think we all recognize, but at some point the words that are actually being said are still an essential part of the equation, and the fact is, in 2021 that equation unfortunately does not still = LOL funny.