"Steve Martin Once Really Pissed Me Off"

Comedy genius Steve Martin came to mind, because I recently saw him costarring in The Big Year, where his low voltage performance conjures the image of a world-class jockey who retired and now rides the merry-go-round.

Steve Martin in The Big Year was uncharacteristically tame. Which reminds me of the time when I was working with him where he really pissed me off.

Oh, yeah. I was steaming!

(My sarcasm comes only in hindsight. At the time, I was legitimately upset.)

I was consulting on a show called the George Burns Comedy Week, (1985) toiling two days a week fixing scripts for an anthology comedy series, hosted by legendary comedian George Burns. (Who I got in a fight with, but that’s another story.)

An anthology series is a series, like, say, The Twilight Zone, in which, unlike a regular TV series, every episode is stand-on-its-own distinct, like an individualized, twenty-two minute movie. A comedy anthology series is an anthology series that, unlike The Twilight Zone, is funny.

The Executive Producer of the George Burns Comedy Week was Steve Martin. Steve supervised the show, his celebrated name and track record most likely getting it on the air. Comedy anthologies on TV are extremely rare. The last one before George Burns that I remember was the Damon Runyon Theater, and that was in the fifties.

Comedy anthologies are excruciatingly difficult to pull off. Every week, you are starting from scratch – a new concept, and an entirely new cast (all of whom require network approval.) The George Burn Comedy Week lasted just fourteen episodes.

Okay.

So we are at a rewrite meeting, struggling to repair a script that was about to be shot. A bunch of ideas are tossed around, including a few from yours truly, the Creative Consultant.

Our progress is painfully slow. Then, I hear Steve Martin say this:

“I’m hearing a lot at this meeting, ‘The character wouldn’t do that.’ Let’s make the character do that.”

At this point, I reflexively groan and roll my eyes. Well, not exactly “roll my eyes.” The way my eyes function, my right eye rolled, while my left eye watched, thinking, “I wish I could do that.”

Given my training as a writer – specifically by the gifted practitioners on the Mary Tyler Moore series and Taxi – “Rule Number One” was

“The character must always behave in character.”

Well, maybe that wasn’t “Rule Number One.” But it was “Rule Number One” after

“The star must get the most lines.”

My training drummed into my brain that “character” was sacrosanct, and must, at all costs, remain consistent with its acknowledged parameters. Otherwise, it was stupid. For a character to do anything the writers made them do – “The Three Stooges” are suddenly college professors (without accidentally falling into a vat full of “Smart Juice”), and the audience is supposed to buy it? That’s Laverne and Shirley talk!

Steve Martin was saying, “Let the character do whatever’s funny, whether it’s in their ‘natures’ to do thing that, or not.”

To which, I outragedly rolled my eye.

Afterwards we were outside, with me, still fuming over this calumny to the “Sacred Rules of Riting.”

Suddenly, Steve Martin appears, he heads down the stairs, and walks straight over to me.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” he says, either sincerely or mock sincerely, with Steve Martin, I am never able to tell. I memorably responded, “That’s okay”, and that, undramatically, was that.

Later, when I rethought things with a cooler head, it occurred to me that Steve Martin’s entire career was premised on his characters’ behaving “out of character.” That’s what he did for a living – the thing I had groaned at. And a very good living it was.

In The Jerk (1979), Martin’s deceptively brilliant stupid movie, Martin’s character, “Navin R. Johnson” – a white man raised as their own by a poor, black family – is all over the place, acting throughout the movie in no way predictable to anyone familiar with regular, normal, human behavior.

And it works!

Why?

I don’t know for sure. But it seems to relate to Martin’s visceral commitment to the integrity of that character, as bizarre and unlike a regular person as he is.

At his comedic best, Martin’s characters – be it his “wild and crazy guy”, or “The Great Flydini”, where Martin produces a series of objects out of his fly, from eggs, to a telephone to a lovely bouquet of flowers – are reflective of an identifiable character type, but they’re presented in an exaggerated form, outlandishly and hilariously larger than everyday life.

(At a party I once attended at Steve Martin’s house, I noticed a number of actual Picasso paintings hanging on his wall. After wondering how much they were worth, my next thought was, “This painter preference is entirely consistent with Steve Martin’s surreal {comedic} vision of the world.)

Years later, I constructed an answer to

“...the character wouldn’t do that. Let’s make the character do that.”

My answer was,

“We can do that. But only if the actor playing that character is you.” (Or perhaps the equally brilliant Peter Sellers, who realistically would have been fired if he’d bumbled as catastrophically as Inspector Clouseau, a character, not coincidentally, also portrayed by Steve Martin.)

The vast majority of actors – and writers – cannot play – or write – things that emanate from somewhere other than their actual experience. An exceptional few, like Steve Martin, can.

As a rule, it is best not to set down conditions that apply only to those exceptional few.

Unless those exceptional few are participating.