Steve Martin:
Life After Brains

Interview by Jamie Masada.

Laugh Factory: Is there anything you prefer not to discuss and what would you like to say about it? 

Martin: I would prefer not discussing the fact that I am shrinking at the rate of 2 to 3 inches per year. 

Laugh Factory: Do people mistake you for any other celebrity? 

Martin: Absolutely not. They always say, "Look, it's Steve Allen!" 

Laugh Factory: Do you have a fan club?

Martin: I am told I have a fan club that spans the globe. I am trying to find out what "Spans" means. I think it has something to do with "Spic and Span," and means I have a fan club that completely cleans and waxes the globe. 

Laugh Factory: What's the biggest problem with being famous? 

Martin: The money. The most fun part is signing autographs and being nice to everyone you meet.

Laugh Factory: What kind of underwear do you wear? 

Martin: The regular "sock" underwear so popular with many of today's male entertainers.

Laugh Factory: Have you ever been arrested for anything involving a Labrador Retriever?

Martin: As I said in my statement to the police, I have never known a Labrador Retriever and I believe my acquittal should be enough to stop this kind of question. 

Laugh Factory: What do you like better, girls or oven-fresh pastry?

Martin: There's a difference? 

Laugh Factory: What's your favorite line for picking up American girls? 

Martin: Is that a flashlight in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? 

Laugh Factory: What about Iranian girls? 

Martin: Is that a billion dollars in your pocket or is your flashlight just happy to see me? Laugh Factory: What do you think of women’s lib?

Martin: I support it one hundred percent, as long as the people running it realize it's all a big joke and they should stay in their place.

Laugh Factory: Would you enjoy playing women's roles? 

Martin: Only if I felt I was keeping a more talented person than I from working. 

Laugh Factory: Would you enjoy playing animal roles? 

Martin: I think every actor would like to play the classic animal roles like a Lassie or a Rin Tin Tin. But I would not like to create an animal role from scratch; right now I would like to remain in the human or alien realm. 

Laugh Factory: How about inanimate objects? 

Martin: Let's give them a big hand.

Laugh Factory: We've noticed that you no longer do "happy feet" in your act. Are you seeing a podiatrist? 

Martin: Happy Feet was retired in 1980 and I am happy to say is living very well in Mexico.

Laugh Factory: What would you like to see on your tombstone? 

Martin: Steve Martin, born, 1945; died, 2083.

End of interview.

Movie poster "The Man with Two Brains" staring Steve Martin.

The Unauthorized History of Steve Martin

Steve Martin was born on a mountaintop in Tennessee and began performing shortly thereafter. According to legend, he "killed 'em" in a local bar when he was only three. As a young man he played the Bible Belt Circuit, earning himself the title "King of the Wild and Crazy Frontier". He was justly celebrated for his penetrating monologue on black-eyed peas as well as his pungent one-liners on how to pick your teeth with swamp grass. 

Woodchopper

Young Steve was known far and wide for his uncompromising honesty and his polka-dot underwear. When he was barely old enough to publish a treatise on the ontological argument, he cut down his father's cherry tree and ate it. "It was," he later recalled, "sort of an existential statement." 

Steve's father, a one-legged sailor who wore a patch on his shoulder and a parrot over one eye. summoned the lad to the woodshed and pulled out three of his front teeth.

"Son," he said. "Before I rip off your arm and beat you to death with it, there's something I want to know. What happened to my tree and how come you leave splinters in the outhouse instead of number two?" 

"Well excuse me" Steve explained. and set out to earn his fortune, taking with him only a block of provolone and a major credit card of his mother's to remember her by. 

Ox Lover

At first he whiled away the hours by singlehandedly steel-driving all the track for the great Transcontinental Railroad. But show business was in his blood, and soon he found himself playing club dates in various Mexican border towns, sharing the bill with his blue ox, Babe.

Little is known of this period in Steve Martin's life except that he developed his now-famous routine on the circadean rhythms of snails, discovered nuclear fission, and had an unhappy love affair with a 300-pound Druid whom he called "my blue babe, Ox".

“It was sort of a transitional period," Steve later commented. "I wandered in the desert for forty days and forty nights. I was looking for my roots. I finally found them in a vacant lot behind a 7-11 in Elco, Nevada. They were all gnarly and full of knotholes. It was a really big disappointment." 

Steve Martin was next seen publicly at a swap meet in Encino, where he traded his life savings for a handful of beans. He spent the ensuing few years travelling the country on foot, planting beans and waiting for apple trees to sprout.

Heard Voices

One day, while poking a bean into a hardening cowflop, Steve was surprised to hear voices in the church bells tolling out from the nearby Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Morning Sickness. 

"Steve," sang the voices. "Save France! Save France, Steve!" 

Steve was puzzled. He took two aspirin, ate a tuna fish sandwich and went to bed.

The next day the voices were back. "Steve!" They sang. "Save France!" 

Still puzzled, Steve rubbed his whole body with garlic, enrolled in an est seminar and invented the word processor. 

On the third day he heard the voices again. There was a serene, otherworldly quality to these voices, a liquid delicacy of tone that reminded him of morning dew on fine crystal.

“Save France!”, they sang. “Save France, asshole!”

Steve flagged down a passing philosopher and asked for advice. “I hear singing”, he explained, “and there's no one there.”

The philosopher mulled this over. 

“Do you smell blossoms?” He asked finally. “When the trees are bare?”

“Only if she’ll smell mine first,” said Steve.

Found Grail

It was shortly after this that Steve Martin found the Holy Grail in a box of Cracker Jacks. Unable to pawn it as a bowling trophy, he tied a rock to it and threw it off the Tallahachee Bridge. 

The smell of the greasepaint was back in his nostrils by this time. He scrubbed out his nose with Liquid Plumber, but to no avail. The thirst for immortality had taken possession of him. 

"I wanted the name Martin to become a household word," he later explained. "Like ‘john’. Or ‘loo’, if you happen to be British." 

He entered a period of creative fever. Locking himself into an ice chest, he developed some of his finest material, including his wacky routine on logarithm tables, his outrageous send-up of Wittgenstein and his hilarious spoof of Hodgkin's Disease. Steve Martin emerged from obscurity at a Dodger game over the Labor Day weekend. The entire team was mysteriously struck blind and Steve was forced to volunteer his services. He pitched a perfect game, hit sixty-two home runs and ate a Dodger Dog without mustard.

Cured Lepers

In the weeks that followed, Steve cured several lepers, freed the slaves, served briefly as Pope, and did a guest shot on Carson.

“What the heck," Steve later explained. "You don't get a booking in Vegas without some kind of a track record. Those guys play hardball." 

Sure enough, the casinos were soon clamoring for Steve Martin and his zany opinions on Brown v. Board of Education and the teleological suspension of the ethical. Steve signed a whopping contract to play the main room at Caesar's and quit his job at Pup 'n' Taco. But Fate had one more curve to throw this wild and crazy guy. On the day he was to open, he awoke with a massive Labrador growing out of his nose. Emergency surgery was performed, but Steve was too weak to go on. 

The dog took his place and knocked ‘em dead.

His contract cancelled, Steve wandered aimlessly until at last he found himself shuffling disconsolately across an archery range. This, however, was not just any archery range. No, not by a long shot. This was the private archery range of Carl Reiner. The Great Director was in pre-production for his movie version of Bury My Trash At Tennis Elbow and he was testing the bows and arrows to be used in the climatic duel between Running Sore and Broken Water. Mistaking Steve for a non-union extra, he launched an arrow which passed directly through the comedian's brain, lodging in his head like a pair of high-tech earmuffs.

“Excuse me,” the director called out, politely suppressing a giggle.

“Excuse you?”, cried Steve. “Well, excuse me.”

What a jerk, Reiner said to himself.

And the rest is history.

The end.

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What's a Classic Article anyway?

This article originally appeared in the September 1983 printed edition of Laugh Factory Magazine.

Laugh Factory Magazine cover from September 1983, featuring Steve Martin.