Sick In The Head: Conversations About Life And Comedy Part 42

Judd: Did the breakup soon follow?

Stephen: We did not last the summer. But I turned the job down, because I was like, "What? You don't pay? How can I go to New York and not-what? What do you mean I move to New York and you don't pay me? What do I do, live in a trash barrel?"

Judd: See, I would have lived in the trash barrel.

Stephen: It would have been fun, but again, it wasn't on my radar.

Judd: And when did you-just so I understand the trajectory a little bit, you were attempting serious theater at this point?

Stephen: Yeah, I was studying at Northwestern University's theater program, and you know, I was doing Stanislavski and Meisner and I was sharing my pain with everyone around me-it was therapy as much as it was anything. I met a guy there who said, "Hey, have you ever seen comedy improv?" I said no. He said, "Well, I'm going down to see these guys in Chicago do something called The Harold. Do you want to go see it?" I said sure. So I went down to a place that doesn't exist anymore called CrossCurrents, which was beneath the Belmont L in Chicago, right near Ann Sather's. Best Swedish cinnamon rolls in the city.

Judd: Yeah.

Stephen: And I went and saw people improvise one-act plays based on a single word, and I was immediately hooked. I went, "I don't know what that is, but I have to do it. I have to get onstage and perform extemporaneously with other people." I loved the ensemble feel of it. I continued to do straight theater, kind of avant-garde black box kind of theater, but I was getting paid to do comedy. And then realized I really like it actually. I really love these people. I met Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello at Second City. They changed my life. If I hadn't met Paul and Amy, I don't think I would have gone into comedy. They became my family.

Judd: But before that, you didn't think, I'm a comedy person in high school? That wasn't- Stephen: I didn't know what it meant to do comedy in high school. I didn't even perform until I was a senior.

Judd: Wow.

Stephen: On anything. I was just a kid in the back of the room, you know?

Judd: Let me just switch topics here. The one time I was a guest on your show, which I enjoyed a great deal- Stephen: I'm glad to hear that. You came on pretty early, when we hadn't had many entertainment figures on. I wasn't sure how to adjust. I'm glad you had a good time, because I was very nervous to have you on.

Judd: The background of it is very strange, which is, I was in the car on the way to the show, and my mom, who has since pa.s.sed away, called me right as I'm pulling up to the studio, to tell me that her chemotherapy didn't work. It felt like I had just been told that she was going to die.

Stephen: Oh G.o.d.

Judd: Then I had to get out of the car and do The Colbert Report with you, and I was just white as a ghost- Stephen: I'm so sorry.

Judd: It was an out-of-body experience.

Stephen: I have performed after someone I love died. Like finding out moments before and having to walk onstage. It's possible.

Judd: Oh, it is. I actually felt I did much better as a result of it because it freed me up to not be nervous and roll with it. It was actually a great thing to do, and you were so nice and came into the dressing room beforehand and said, "Okay, I'm about to be really awful to you. Enjoy yourself!" It's one of my strangest s...o...b..z moments.

Stephen: I can imagine.

Judd: I need to look back and look at it.

Stephen: Twice I have performed having just found out that someone I loved pa.s.sed away, and I had to go on immediately, and I can't watch-I haven't watched either one of them and it's been many years. I just can't bring myself to watch whoever that guy was that got through it.

Judd: And in the middle of all this- Stephen: I just know that n.o.body knew. I also said to everybody, "It's important that no one knows this happened. I don't want to be a brave person, I just got to do my job."

Judd: That's why I didn't tell you.

Stephen: I'm glad you didn't. I probably would have burst into tears and threw my arms around you.

STEVE ALLEN.

(1983).

Steve Allen was the first interview I ever did. We met at the St. Regis hotel, in New York City. I had no idea what I was doing. He was someone I had seen on numerous talk shows, and I had a sense that he was somehow integral to the history of television and, more specifically, late-night comedy. He didn't have to be kind to me, a pimply kid with a tape recorder, but he was. He sat there for an hour, in his suit and tie, answering all my questions in great detail and with total respect. I remember thinking, Oh, so this is how you're supposed to behave in the world. He was a man of manners and generosity.

I was too young to know much about his show, beyond some clips I'd seen on TV, but I was aware that many of the things I loved about Late Night with David Letterman and The Tonight Show had been invented by, or influenced by, Steve Allen decades before. And this sweet old man was actually this subversive creator, the one guy who would have Lenny Bruce and Jack Kerouac on all the time. Who's cooler than that?

Judd Apatow: So what is the point of rereleasing these old comedy alb.u.ms?

Steve Allen: None of your business, Judd. I can't go around telling every Jack, Tom, and Harry what I'm up to. It's for me to know and you to find out. Ha, ha, ha. The point of rereleasing these records, Judd, is to make a bundle. I used to be in the laundry business and I miss all that bundle making. No, I'll tell you why: It's a public service. We did the alb.u.ms originally-well, I did the calls on the air, back in '62, '63, '64-and the alb.u.ms were big hits at that point. Funny Fone-Calls and More Funny Fone Calls. And I have been annoyed to the point of tears ever since by whippersnappers like you coming up to me and saying, "Where can I get a copy of those alb.u.ms?" I say remarkable things such as, "Ever try a record store?" And for the first year or two that worked. Because they were in record stores. But all alb.u.ms go out of print eventually, so they were not available. And the Polygram people finally realized that since there was this untapped market, and if they got a market tapper, they could go around and rap a few knuckles.

Judd: Do you have a lot of other alb.u.ms?

Steve: I haven't done many comedy alb.u.ms over the years. There was, besides Funny Fone-Calls and More Funny Fone Calls, there was one called Man on the Street, which consisted of tapes from another comedy show I was doing-a weekly prime-time sketch comedy series, in which I interviewed three supposed men on the street. They were, in fact, Louie Nye, Don Knotts, and Tom Poston. That was a funny alb.u.m. And I've done a few individual comedy recordings, forty-fives and seventy-eights in the old days. We've recently been taking inventory of old tapes and films, videotapes and so forth that I have, and discovered there's a lot of pure gold there.

Judd: One thing I noticed about the alb.u.ms was, when I listened to them-I have to say that I went home one night and listened to both of them straight through and I was up till four in the morning because I was wide awake from laughing- Steve: (Laughs) Judd: I was up, hysterical. And the thing that I noticed was that the laughter in the background-I never hear laughter like that on TV, ever.

Steve: Yeah. That's a very important thing you put your finger on. It has nothing to do with me, because on some of the calls I hardly make any contribution at all. Jerry Lewis was ninety-eight percent of the funniness there. But you're absolutely right. There was something about television comedy in those days. The laughter was fresh and genuine and real and warm. Those shows were never sweetened. That started with Laugh-In. Laugh-In was all done with, you know, Scotch tape. They had to do seventeen minutes of this and two minutes of that and tape it all together. And for the most part, there was no audience, and therefore most of the laughter you heard was canned. That was unfortunate. It may have been the only way, technically, they could do that kind of a show, so as not to keep an audience there for fourteen hours. But it was unfortunate. Because, as you say, you don't hear laughter like that very much now. There was nothing forced about it, and n.o.body even had to bother to warm the audience up. Some nights, we had to cool them down. They laughed so much, they covered up jokes.

Judd: The thing I noticed was that everything you did, you originated. And now everything that they do has been done already.

Steve: Yeah, that's it. First of all, it was new to the audience. They hadn't seen it fifty-seven times. Whereas now-in a talk show or a comedy talk show setting, it's really quite difficult to do anything totally unlike stuff that's been done before. It's not that I'm so much more creative than any of the other guys. It's just that I had the good fortune to do it first. But at the moment, I can't think of any feature of those shows which was not originated on one of our early shows.

Judd: Right now, most shows on TV are formulized. Johnny Carson comes on, does his monologue, does a skit or his little thing, and interviews three people. There's nothing like what you were doing. Do you think they could reproduce what you did today?

Steve: I don't think most people could, no. I don't say that in any conceited sense. It's just that I prefer to work loose. In the case of Johnny, it's hard to criticize him personally on this, because he's been there for twenty years. Why should he bother to be inventive now? It'd be as pointless as Bob Hope suddenly doing inventive things. It could hurt them, you know. But it would drive me nuts to do the same thing every night. I'm not saying I'm better or worse than they are, it's just that I don't work that way. For my own piece of mind, I had to do new stuff every night, and I learned very early in my career, even before I was working in television, that the biggest laughs in show business, for me, came the same way the biggest laughs in reality do: out of whatever the reality of a given exchange of a social situation is. One example that pops into my mind was back-oh, when was it? Forty-eight, let's say. In addition to a regular late-night comedy and talk show I was doing in L.A., I was doing some evening network things for the CBS Radio Network. And right in the middle of a live show one evening, there was an unG.o.dly noise, an annoying noise, just behind some closed doors at the back of the stage. And I knew it could be heard all around the country. I mean, what was this (loud whisper voice) "chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck-a-chuhhh..."? We had to stop everything and-you know, we were on the air live so we couldn't say, "Stop tape." So I just did what I think was the sensible thing. I didn't do it because it was funny, I did it because it was sensible. I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, um, obviously those of you at home can hear this annoying distraction in the background here. I don't know what it is and-" I said, "Do any of you know?" And n.o.body on the stage knew, so I said, "Well, let's find out." So I took the mike with the long wire on it. And we had somebody open the doors, and there was an old man, an old Italian gentleman-or with an Italian accent, I should say-who was using a cement mixer, a small portable cement mixer outside those doors. To this day, he does not know he was on the air for ten minutes. I went in and whistled and screamed at him to, you know, turn it off. So he finally got the point, and turned it off. And then I asked him, I said, "What are you doing here?" And he said, "I lay the cement, you know." And we talked and had a lot of laughs and he-I don't know if he could hear the people laughing in the other room or not, I don't remember anything I said to him. But it was just funny, live on the air, with maybe nineteen million people listening all over America. That's not one of the great moments in the history of comedy, but the point is it's an example of looseness. I think everybody ought to do that.

Judd: One of the things you originated was talking with the audience at the beginning of your show, which they do on other shows now. How did that come about?

Steve: I didn't originate taking a hand mic into the audience. There were noncomic fellows who did that before me. Notably Tom Breneman and a fellow named Don McNeill. They were very popular on the radio in the mid-1940s chiefly. They were sort of genial masters of ceremonies. And sometimes Art Linkletter would go into the audience with some specific gimmick in mind. Like, let's see who has the most outlandish thing in her purse. "All right, madam, will you stand up and open your purse? Oh, look here, it's a dead mouse," or whatever, you know. Except that's a funny joke. They wouldn't say that. They would just talk about whatever was really in the purse, and "Thank you, here's fifty dollars" and sit down. So they had done that before. But I was the first comedian to do it.

Judd: And you had regular audience members that were there all the time.

Steve: I don't know how that came about. I guess it was just that they were lonely people who had nothing much else in their lives and they could go to this party every night and have a few laughs and be given some recognition. I used to love to talk to the regulars, as they were called, on the old Tonight Show. The cla.s.sic instance of this, which people over fifty still remember, was a woman named Mrs. Sterling. She was what we would call a bag lady. She usually had a couple of big paper bags with her, and she dressed quite poorly. She usually wore a man's khaki army overcoat and tennis shoes. And she was in our audience every night. And I don't think I ever saw her laugh at anything. It was all very serious for her. But you know, she would be given attention. Her motivation, chiefly, was greed. Because at the end of the interviews we used to give away prizes, toasters or a pair of silk stockings or salami or something. At the time one of my sponsors was Polaroid cameras. She never could get the name straight. I would interview her; the interviews were very much the same. She didn't seem to hear my questions very well. But she knew that if she could get to talk to me at all, she was good for a toaster or a fan or a deep-fry pot or something. She must've had a room full of all these things. Probably sold them out on the street after the show. So she would resort to flattery. I'd say, "Good evening, Mrs. Sterling." She'd say, "Mr. Allen, you're wonderful." I'd say, "Well, the degree of my wonderfulness is irrelevant, but how have you been?" And she'd say, "Oh, we love ya. Everybody loves you, you're great, Mr. Allen. Give me one of them Palmeroid cameras." She always called them Palmeroids. And she never knew why the audience was hysterical. I never even had to do jokes. I just turned around and it was funny. So, she was like a known quant.i.ty. I knew that I would get laughs if I talked to her, so I talked to her practically every time I went into the audience.

Judd: Didn't you turn one of your audience members into a movie reviewer?

Steve: His name was John Fisher. He was-I guess now we would call him a hyperkinetic personality. He talked sort of uncontrollably fast and effusively. He was an upstate farmer type. And I asked him one question when I first met him one night. It was something like, "h.e.l.lo, sir, what's your name?" And most people say, you know, "Charlie Feldman," and just hang there. Which is really more sensible, because I only ask that, I didn't ask for their serial number, you know. And he gave me about a nine-minute answer. He just couldn't stop his mouth. "I'm John Fisher, and I live up in Solo, New York, and I have a potato farm up there and I just come to talk, because I seen the movies, the one with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy." And he sort of reviewed the whole movie for us. Obviously that's hysterically funny and I have nothing to do with it. He's the one that's getting the screams, did not know why he was getting laughs. So when he finally shut up, I said, "Well, John, that was a very interesting movie review, would you like to come back and join us from time to time?" He said, "Yeah, sure," and gave me another six-minute answer. So we signed him up and we would get tickets to the new movies and he would go see them and come in and give us these dumb reviews of them. You know-it's funny. And he never knew why it was funny.

Judd: And you used to do remotes from the street in the beginning of the show?

Steve: I've always loved the idea of getting cameras right out into the street. Sometimes I was out there with them, but more often I was not. More often I was just onstage looking at a television screen. So I could see what the cameras were seeing, and just saying, I hoped, funny things about them. And there again, people would say, "Boy, you were funny." It was nice of them to say that but what often was funny was the situation. My contribution may have accounted for only, you know, fourteen percent of the funniness. Some years back, when d.i.c.k Cavett was doing his talk show on ABC, he took a week's vacation and asked me to fill in for him, so I did. And we did the camera on the street every night and had tremendous luck. First of all, you see different things on the streets of New York than you do in Hollywood. And you have the advantage in New York that you're generally right on some street. Whereas at NBC Burbank, if you open the back door, you just see part of the parking lot. In this case d.i.c.k was-I guess up at Forty-eighth Street. Anyway, one evening, we punched up the camera, just at random. And just in time to see one of those city trucks that hauls away illegally parked cars. It was a mystery thing and the whole audience went, Whoa boy, who's going to get hauled away? So I was doing a play-by-play and the truck stopped right in front of the theater and the guy jumps out and, you know, does the thing with the hook and the chain, and suddenly from the balcony you see a guy say, "Oh no"-it was his car that they were hooking the b.u.mper up. I said, "Is that your car, sir?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, "Well, come on, run down!" And the band played chase music, and we had a shot of this poor guy running down from the top level of the balcony. And he runs out into the street, now he's on camera and it's like a silent movie and he's pleading, you know. And the guy says, "No, it's just my job." He flicked his cigar all over him, and took his car away. Well, that was sad for him, but hysteria for the audience.

Judd: One thing I read was that they dressed you up as Superman in the street. And people just looked at you like you were just anybody and you just flew away and they didn't even say anything.

Steve: That was when we were doing the talk show in the early sixties from Hollywood. We were opposite a crazy hangout for Hollywood eccentrics, an open-all-night place called the Hollywood Ranch Market. And we did our show late, so it was kind of a pretty zany neighborhood-perfect for our purposes. And I had done a number of Superman sketches over the years. Because anybody with gla.s.ses, dark hair, an old fedora, and a gray suit looks like Clark Kent. I never looked that much like Superman, but I did a great Clark Kent. However, as soon as I put on the Superman suit, it never seemed to fit trimly, it always looked like baggy underwear. So right away it was funny before I did anything. So I had the Superman suit and the Clark Kent attire over it. One night I ran out and the cameras were there and they had a phone booth set up across the street-you know, so I could change clothes like Superman. I ran in and I tried to change like I did in my dressing room, where I had plenty of room, but you don't have much room in a phone booth. If you're not Superman, it's tough. I need a lot of elbow room. So I couldn't get my pants off. I looked like a jerk. A man trying to take his pants off in a phone booth. At this point a guy walks by carrying a bag of groceries, coming out of a grocery store. So I say, "Hey, Mack, you got a minute?" He says, "What?" I say, "Can you give me a hand here?" He puts his bag down. He says, "What's the problem?" I say, "I can't get my pants down." So I sit down on the little seat in the thing and I stick my legs out and this guy pulls my pants off for me. And then I stand up and I throw the hat off and now I'm dressed like Superman. I say, "Thanks a lot." He says, "Don't mention it," and he walks away. Now, if that happened in Cleveland, the guy'd say, "Hey, what are you, some kind of a nut?" But in Hollywood and New York, they don't even notice. Because they see craziness around them all the time.

Judd: They used to make you do those weird things all the time. I remember I saw one sketch where you were made into a human tea bag.

Steve: Yeah, they had a big-I don't know where it came from-but they had this big plastic tank. See-through plastic. It was about maybe seven feet deep and six feet wide and four feet the other way. They filled it with warm water and then they attached about a hundred tea bags to my body, and so I made tea for the whole neighborhood. They would never let me know-by "they" I mean the production staff-exactly what was planned. Sometimes just at the last minute, you know, I'd have to find out because I would see what I was getting into. But whenever they could keep it from me, they would. Because they had discovered that I was much funnier if I did not know for sure what was going on. I would often have a hint that it would be messy. They would come to the dressing room and say, "Underdress." So I would wear a pair of swimming trunks or a tight kind of a jockey short thing or something underneath. And sometimes they would say, "Wear one of your Hong Kong suits." They meant, we don't want one of your nice suits to get cream pie on it or dog food or mustard or whatever they were gonna hit me with. But beyond that, I did not know what the heck was up.

Judd: What do you consider the highlights of the show? Comedic highlights?

Steve: My weekly check was hysterical.

Judd: (Laughs) Steve: I don't know. It was funny every night, actually. Just recently, I was listening to one particular show, because we're putting together the comedy alb.u.ms. And it's remarkable how many of them hold up, if you can just hear them. Often, we're just describing what's going on. Once we had a woman-a nurse-come in from the blood bank and just take my blood. The point of it was to show how simple it is and that all of us should give blood. That's not an inherently comic notion-certainly there's nothing funny about giving blood. But when you do it in front of three or four hundred people, it somehow becomes funny, especially if you're a comedian.

Judd: What was it like having Lenny Bruce appear on the show?

Steve: Lenny was a brilliantly inventive and original comedian, as the world now does not have to be told. There was never any fear in my mind that he would say or do anything in poor taste, although at the time he was saying things that would've been construed as poor taste in a club. But he was very intelligent and we were friends, and he would've never done anything of that sort on the air. And in fact, he did not.

Judd: The last time he was on, didn't they have to cut something out, something he was talking about?

Steve: I don't know. Sometimes there would be discussions about production details, which did not come to my personal attention because I was usually busy enough the day of the show. What Lenny did do at the time-and n.o.body censored it because n.o.body knew what it meant-is a little routine about glue sniffing. This was probably the first time sniffing of glue was mentioned on a nationwide basis in the comic context. In fact, the nation as such knew nothing about that at the time. That there were just a few weird kids sniffing airplane glue. But anyway, Lenny did about four lines on that and n.o.body cut them out, because it would be like today somebody wrote a thing about spaghetti sniffing. You know n.o.body would cut that because they think, What's the harm in sniffing spaghetti?

Judd: What kind of man was he?

Steve: He was neurotic and self-destructive, but absolutely brilliant in his comedy. A true original. He was the first guy-first comedian, I should say-to speak the language of musicians. Which is now common. Even squares now say "hip" and "cool" and "I dig" and "you know, baby" and all that stuff. But in the thirties and forties only jazz musicians used that language. And Lenny was the first of the comedians to do so in his performing. He had sort of a musician's sense of humor. It was very hip and courageous. He would discuss politics or religion or s.e.x or social att.i.tudes. And he was a true pioneer.

Judd: How do you choose the subjects for your books, Funny People?

Steve: Very much at random. It's all a matter of personal judgment. For the most part I write about people I personally think are funny. And that solves one problem, because the world does not need Steve Allen explaining why Joe Dokes is terrible when he does comedy. Therefore, when I write about somebody, it's because I like their work and it's very easy to make the appropriate compliments. There was one exception to that, but I did it only after the performer had died. He was a great performer, a great song-and-dance man. A very important figure on Broadway and in films, an old comedian of the 1920s and '30s named Eddie Cantor. In my opinion Eddie was a cute, likable, lively, vivacious personality. But I never thought he was terribly funny. So I took about twenty-seven pages to say that. But again, since he was already dead, I couldn't hurt his feelings.

Judd: You did the same with John Belus.h.i.+. That wasn't very complimentary.

Steve: On the contrary. If you'll reread it you'll find it was highly complimentary. But it gave both the bright and dark sides of it.

Judd: You said other performers were a lot more talented.

Steve: I considered Aykroyd funnier, I considered Bill Murray funnier. I considered Chevy Chase funnier. But there are a lot of compliments for John in the chapter. But I could not avoid discussing John Belus.h.i.+, simply because Belus.h.i.+ himself sort of forced that on the public consciousness. It was not anything particular in my own reaction to him. I'd already discovered that, although I could laugh at what was funny in his work. I liked a lot of what he did in the Blues Brothers movie, for example. In this, I was very much alone in the over-fifty generation. Now, it is generally true that people over fifty don't laugh that much at comedians, let's say, under forty. Whether they should or not is a separate question. I'm simply reporting the fact that they do not. I, on the other hand, do. Some of the funniest people in the world are young guys in their twenties and women in their twenties. I don't care how old a person is. If he's funny, that's all there is to it as far as I'm concerned.

This interview appears by permission of Meadowlane Enterprises, Inc.

STEVE MARTIN.

(2014).

I don't think anybody has made me laugh longer or louder than Steve Martin. When I was young, I loved him without even understanding the premise of his act. I didn't realize that he was poking fun at the self-importance of s...o...b..z personalities, or the cliches of comedy. There was this whole meta thing going on that was completely over my head. As a ten-year-old kid, I just thought he was insanely weird and funny, and I didn't know why, and I didn't want to know why, because it didn't matter to me.

I can remember my dad bringing home Steve's Let's Get Small alb.u.m, and then us listening to it for fourteen hours straight as we drove from Long Island to South Carolina on vacation. Okay, maybe we didn't listen to it the entire time; I do remember hearing a lot of the Little River Band on the radio, too. But I remember laughing, as my parents laughed right along with me, and thinking, I am beginning to understand a little more about how the world really works.

As I entered middle school, my obsession with Steve Martin only deepened. I had a grandmother who lived in California, and when we would go visit her, I would beg her to drive by Steve Martin's house. (Yes, I'd found out where he lived.) It was this solid white house with no windows. I imagined it as this bunker filled with light. I begged her to drive by not because I thought I would see him-although I badly wished that would happen-but because I just couldn't believe there was a structure that actually contained him. It seemed impossible to believe he existed and was somebody you could talk to.

Then one day in the summer of 1980, as we drove by his house, I saw him standing there in his driveway. I can't quite remember what he was doing; maybe he was was.h.i.+ng his car, maybe he was raking leaves. All I know is I yelled for my grandmother to stop the car. My brother and I got out. I ran up to Steve and said, "Hey, can I get an autograph?" And he said, "No, I'm sorry, I don't sign autographs at my house." "Well," I responded, "then can you sign it in the street?" (Which, looking back, was not a bad joke for a thirteen-year-old.) No, he said, sorry, he didn't sign autographs at his house, because if he did, then everybody would walk up to his front door and ask for things and that wouldn't be good. I did not understand this logic at the time. (I understand it today, however: If you knock on my door, even if you are from a charity, I will call local security.) I wasn't done yet, though. I started begging him, "Please, please, I'm from out of town, I won't tell anyone where you live, I'll never bother you again...." But he wouldn't break. He smiled-and kept to his policy.

So I ran straight home and went to my room and wrote him a long, crazy letter, the spirit of which was: I have bought everything you've ever made, and you wouldn't live in that house if it weren't for people like me. And then I demanded an apology.

I went back to his house a few days later and slipped the letter into his mailbox. (Notice that I didn't mail it, for that extra stalker touch. Yes, Steve: I know where you live.) I'm pretty sure it was several pages long.

About six months later, long after I stopped thinking about how I was wronged, I received a package in the mail, which contained two copies of Cruel Shoes, his seminal collection of essays and short stories. In one of the copies, he wrote: "This is for your friend. Steve Martin." That friend, of course, was my brother, who did not appreciate Steve Martin on nearly the same level as I did, and has since turned into an Orthodox Jew and lives in Israel. I still have his book. The other one said, "To Judd: I'm sorry I didn't realize I was speaking to the Judd Apatow. Your friend, Steve Martin."

This story always gets a laugh, but to me, it's more meaningful than that: This moment with Steve made me think I must have made him laugh, or he wouldn't have gone through the trouble of sending me that book. And if I could make Steve Martin laugh, maybe I was funny enough to go into this comedy business I'd always dreamed about, after all.

Decades later, I met Steve Martin-formally, in a non-stalkish way-for the first time at a work-related meeting, to discuss a project he was kicking around. At the meeting, I was urged to tell that story, and so I did. When it was over, someone said to Steve, "Is that how you remember it?" And Steve responded, "Actually, I believe I was the one who knocked on Judd's door."

Judd Apatow: It takes a lot to get up onstage and perform. What drove you to try it?

Steve Martin: I didn't even know what stand-up was in the beginning. I started off in magic so I liked the idea of performing onstage and stand-up-I kind of defaulted into it because, at some point, I realized the magic thing was a dead end and stand-up had a future. So I started to pare away the magic tricks. I fell into stand-up because it seemed like there was opportunity in it. It was the path of least resistance.

Judd: What about before that? When you were a teenager, did you just want to get out of the house and be in front of people? For me, my parents got divorced. And so, as a teenager, I thought, These people are crazy. Whatever advice they're giving me, I shouldn't listen to. It made me ambitious. But it's a big leap to get out of the house, isn't it?

Steve: I definitely wanted to get out of the house and I wanted to have a job. I don't know why, but the idea of working at Disneyland-that was, you know, fantastic.

Judd: You lived near there, as a kid, right?

Steve: I lived two miles from there and I would ride my bike there. Two miles seemed like such a long way to a kid of ten.

Judd: You did it at ten? Wow, times have changed. Most people today won't let their kids leave the driveway until they're seventeen years old.

Steve: Yeah.

Judd: My parents never knew where I was. My whole childhood, they would have no idea how to find me, from after school until seven at night.

Steve: I had the same thing.

Judd: What did your parents do?