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Q: Why isn’t Björk allowed to be a tennis judge?
A: She doesn’t believe deuce exists.
Q: What’s Tony Soprano’s favourite Hallowe’en treat?
A: Gaba-ghoul.
Ball in the Dirt
Comebacker
Soft Hands
Choking Up
“The way he grips the ball…”
Switch Hitter
“He went around…”
The Mound
Swiping the Bag
oodles of poodles
a smidgeon of pigeons
bowls of owls
a quant of elephant
rows of crows
an ounce of pounce (kittens)
finger-lickins of chickens
a course of horse
*not the American experimental pop band formed in Baltimore, Maryland in 2003
In July, 2017 Donald Trump gave a speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree which, at the time, seemed like the craziest speech ever. Now it’s barely remembered. I wrote this poem the day of the speech, and I think the title continues to hold lessons: don’t ever be surprised by what this man will do, and always be prepared.
Be Prepared, America words mean things it's different to say that someone told you that your bloated, fake- tanned face just gave the best speech ever given to the Boy Scouts of America than that you gave the best speech ever given to the Boy Scouts almost the same words not the same sense it's the difference between a President who has a grip on reality and one who merely hears what he wants to
This review was originally published in the University of Toronto Bookstore Review in 2008.
For those too young to remember Steve Martin much before his work in such pedestrian Hollywood fare as Cheaper by the Dozen and Bringing Down the House, it may be difficult to imagine what a huge and innovative force he was in American comedy in the 1970s and 80s. At the time, Martin not only broke new ground in stand-up comedy, he stomped all over it and marked it as his own unique territory–giving it, in the words of his wild-and-crazy persona, his “own individual odour.” Born Standing Up, Martin’s entertaining memoir of the path that led him to become the most successful stand-up comedian of his day, acts as a reminder of just how strange, funny, and wonderful Steve Martin once was.
Steve (I take licence to address him intimately, as per the approved response to his opening-bit cry of “Hi, Crimestoppers!”, which was and will always be “Hi, Steve!”, forever granting his fans the boon of using his first name) occupies a special place in my comedic upbringing: his best-selling album A Wild and Crazy Guy was one of the few records my family owned, and I would come to listen to it innumerable times over the years. Certain portions were deemed too naughty for my tender ears and were censored by turning the stereo down just in time for me to miss the punchline. (Forbidden fruit is so tempting, and without a doubt this censorship only fuelled my interest in hearing more Steve… ideally without adults or siblings there to spoil the fun.) Steve himself would acknowledge the taboo side of his comedy when he told audiences that he did his act for his parents only after “taking out the dirty parts.” In truth, he was a cerebral comedian and rarely lurid: inspiration was as likely to come from Jack Benny as Ludwig Wittgenstein. Steve writes that the philosopher’s investigations “disallowed so many types of philosophical discussions that we were convinced the very discussion we were having was impossible. Soon I felt that a career in the irrational world of creativity not only made sense but had moral purpose.” I’d lay odds that not many comedians have rationalized their careers through philosophy. This breadth of range may not be the reason I was drawn to Steve’s comedy in the first place, but it is what has kept me coming back to it.
Steve didn’t follow trends and urged his audience to do the same by repeating The Non-Comformist Oath: “I promise to be different! I promise to be unique! I promise not to repeat things other people say!” There were always a few audience members who didn’t get the joke in time and would mindlessly repeat every word. His stand-up routine was like no other, and was crafted through years of hard work and constant touring: “I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. I was not naturally talented–I didn’t sing, dance, or act–though working around that minor detail made me inventive.”
Steve spent a decade toiling in relative obscurity before becoming an overnight sensation, finding himself suddenly thrust from small clubs to 10,000-seat arenas. His comedy, which relied so heavily on timing and small gestures, had to serve venues where for many in the audience he was a tiny dot in the distance. This led him, at the peak of his success, to walk away from comedy suddenly and decisively in 1981. He had come to a realization: “over the last few years I had lost contact with what I was doing, and I was suffering an artistic crisis that I didn’t know I had a capacity for.” He would never return to stand-up.
If it’s true that there ain’t too much sadder than the tears of a clown, Steve proves it with this book, and that is its real and unexpected strength: not just a funny book by a funny man, Born Standing Up lays bare a life off the stage that was at turns sad, neurotic, and lonely. Growing up, his home life was as tense as so many others were behind the happy facade of 1950s America, and it was punctuated by a single violent outburst that forever coloured his relationship with his father. After telling this story, Steve closes the chapter: “I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.” His dedication to his career estranged the comedian from both parents and his sister, a divide that continued until he decided well into adulthood (and fame) to try to reconnect. Drugs and their abuse, a topic of his comedy, turn out to have been almost a non-factor in reality–at least after a bad trip left him with panic attacks that continued to plague him for years after he swore off drugs. And contrary to the notion that celebrities lead hedonistic lives filled with ready sex, Steve exhibits a certain reticence, exemplified by this story about Linda Ronstadt: “Linda and I saw each other for a while, but I was so intimidated by her talent and street smarts that, after the ninth date, she finally said, ‘Steve, do you often date girls and not try to sleep with them?’ We parted chaste.” What emerges from the book are the details of the complex man behind the jokes, a complexity that any fan could have guessed at, but is only now able to understand more fully.
Steve Martin writes with remarkable candour about the creative process and about his own life, making his memoir an extremely pleasurable, affecting, and funny read. Born Standing Up will be highly rewarding not only for fans of his comedy, but for those interested in the behind-the-scenes struggles of artistic creation as well.
“Are you beautiful? Happy and content with your life? Certain of your future? Financially secure? We have little or nothing in common. Perhaps you have a friend who is more human. Please point out this ad to her. I’m a 26 year old graduate student in Arts, interested in film, books, cooking, and music and if you share some or all of these interests, that’s a good start. Write to me…”
Not surprisingly, I didn’t get any responses. These were the dying days of the personal ad, soon to be superseded by phone ads and the internet. The fact that I placed the ad in a campus newspaper that didn’t otherwise carry personal ads didn’t bode well for its success, but back then I occasionally had moments of boldness and spontaneity. What a catch I would have been for someone willing to take a chance, and ignore the obvious signs of desperation!
The bird’s beak is opened:
wider wider
too much to cry.
I reach down its throat
like a mother feeding it,
but I aim to take
and pull out
a hard, dark shell
that breaks apart like lettuce.
Pink flesh within reveals
the finest tiny pearl.
The following is my review of Woody Allen’s Mere Anarchy from 2007:
Woody Allen is famous–and–in a career spanning nearly fifty years: a prolific director and actor since the 1960s, and at the centre of personal scandals during the 1990s, Allen is no stranger to the public eye. While his greatest renown has undoubtedly arisen from such films as Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Sleeper, Allen began his career as a gag writer in the 1950s, and his published writing is a lesser-known but highly worthwhile pleasure. His last collection of stories appeared almost three decades ago, and so it was with some surprise and much excitement that I spotted Mere Anarchy on the bookshelves. (By the way, The Insanity Defense, which collects his stories from Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects, is well worth seeking out.)
For those familiar with Allen’s films, and especially the characters he plays in them, the humour on display in Mere Anarchy will seem a more concentrated version–imagine if Allen’s screen nebbish played every role in his films and you get an idea of the verbal dexterity on display in every line of this book. Yiddish and Catskills Borscht Belt jokes (“…causing my net worth to disappear like the lox at a bris”) and unusual character names (Max Endorphine, Nestor Weakfish, April Fleshpot) abound, as well as the kind of intellectual and cultural touchstones that Allen drops so casually into the conversation that it’s easy to forget how esoteric his references are (how many writers could pen a story like “Sing, You Sacher Tortes” and populate it with so many fin-de-siecle Vienna personalities like Mahler, Freud, and Gropius while making it hilariously funny at the same time?). Gustav Mahler begging for “just one more strudel… I need the blood-sugar high to keep me from sinking into my quotidian preoccupation with mortality” presupposes a level of cultural literacy that Allen takes for granted. He doesn’t explain his references; a sentence like this one is a throwaway line in a story replete with others just as amusing. Allen’s writing rewards second and third readings, as well as study: there are plenty of references I’m not afraid to admit that I only understood on second reading, and no doubt others that I won’t appreciate for years, but it won’t be from a lack of effort. The more you learn, the funnier Woody Allen becomes.
The inspirations for many of the stories are apparent, and are sometimes quoted directly, as when an excerpt from the New York Times about a record-breaking auction price for a rare white truffle introduces a send-up of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, which here is transposed to a hard-boiled search for the elusive and priceless Mandalay Truffle. Other targets include The Nanny Diaries, the Three Stooges, summer camp, and string theory, the last of which includes the oh-so-Woody line “I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me.”
A recurrent characteristic of Allen’s first-person narrators is ineptitude in their chosen fields, whether actor, writer, or detective. Witness the actor in “Tandoori Ransom” who, despite his claim that “it has been said that I can do more with the raising of an eyebrow than most actors can do with their entire bodies”, also admits that “the downside of a histrionic life is that beneath a certain minimum figure, the number of calories required each day to postpone starvation demands that I bus the tables at Taco-Pox…” He is a failure, despite his self-described brilliance, and uses language in an attempt to obscure the reality that he is in fact supremely untalented. The proof is revealed when he refuses to let his pride stop him from the most demeaning (and only) work available: lighting double for a much more popular actor. Similarly, in “This Nib for Hire”, the serious novelist justifies his decision to write novelizations of Three Stooges movies not on the grounds of survival, but with the notion that he’d been “chosen to legitimize with depth and dignity this runt of the literary litter…” The reader, however, has no illusions about the desperate straits that lead Allen’s narrators to debase themselves: starvation is the mother of necessity. As the narrator of “Glory Hallelujah, Sold!” says: “Integrity is a relative concept, best left to the penetrating minds of Jean-Paul Sartre or Hannah Arendt.” In other words, the truly talented.
As a stylist, Woody Allen has a marvelous talent for not saying what he means, at least not openly: a combination of Yiddish, Allen’s own brand of wordplay, and obscure name-dropping makes for a unique verbal melange that rivals the most erudite writers or rappers. My one criticism is that in a book of only 160 pages, there is no need to repeat the phrase “agglomeration of protoplasm.” But that is a small quibble in a book that had me laughing out loud more than once.
Most of my dreams are visual, but I also have very literate dreams in which I’m reading a book or a newspaper. If I’m lucky I can remember what I’ve read enough to write it down upon awakening.
“No man ever became a legend by skipping his appointment with destiny.”
“No one becomes a hero without taking a first step to cross the road.”
A different man might call the source of such wisdom divine, but I am the one supreme being of my dreams, and I maintain that dreams arise from thoughts the brain was too busy to process during the day. If there’s any genius in my dream books, I am the ultimate source.
Center for Poor Karma & Pain 