You see a piece of art, hear a piece of music, see a movie or read a book that cracks the shell of your mind and lets the real you emerge. It’s more than being inspired; it’s finding out who you are. There is a time before that experience and a time after that experience, and it shapes the rest of your life. It happened to me while reading Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes.
By my senior year in high school I was well-versed in the history of comedy. I had old Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner routines memorized. I knew every beat of George Carlin’s 7 Dirty Words bit. And I listened to The Buttoned-Down Mind of Bob Newhart more than I listened to Nirvana’s Nevermind — and this was in the mid-90s so you know how cool I was.
But of all the great comedians, from Richard Pryor to Robin Williams, the one that spoke directly to me was Steve Martin. His standup was unlike anything else. He wasn’t telling jokes or even telling funny stories. He was simply being funny in an abstract, hard-to-define way that was both silly and smart. How do you even analyze a Steve Martin bit in which he holds up a gas pump handle and arrogantly says, “I paid $50 for this.” That’s it. That’s the whole bit. Is that a joke? What is that? It’s brilliant — that’s what it is.
Steve Martin retired from stand up soon after I was born in the late 70s. By the 1990s most people knew him more as a family-friendly movie star from films like Parenthood and Father of the Bride. Those movies are fine, but if that’s all you know of Martin, it’s like saying, “Paul McCartney, from the band Wings.”
By the time I was in college, I was a Steve Martin fanatic, telling all of my friends that Martin was like a one-man, American version of Monty Python. I had all of his albums on CD, and even bought them on vinyl despite my lack of record player because I could hang the art on my dorm walls. At some point, I paid $10 for a life-sized Steve Martin cardboard standee that advertised his album Comedy Is Not Pretty.
Yep, I was a little crazy.
But there was one thing missing from my Steve Martin collection. I knew he had written a book of essays in 1977 called Cruel Shoes, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. By the year 2000, it was long out of print. This was in the early days of the internet, when Amazon only offered new bestsellers, so if you wanted an old, out of print book you had to do the legwork, make phone calls and be your own detective.
I eventually tracked down a copy at a used bookstore in New York.
The book is a short 128 pages, and some of the essays are no longer than a paragraph, so I easily read the whole thing in an hour or two. I laughed and I nodded as I read it. I didn’t understand some of it, there are short poems that are more sincere than silly, but I had never read anything like this. I kept thinking: You can do this? You can write very short essays and that counts as comedy?!!
No one ever told me that. I thought written humor had to be hoity-toity fancy-pants crap like the long essays in The New Yorker. (Note: Martin would later write a series of essays for The New Yorker, collected in his very funny book Pure Drivel.)
The blubs and bits of Cruel Shoes showed me that it’s okay to write very short, very silly essays and stories. It showed that there are no rules. Stick a poem there, write a paragraph here…whatever.
After reading it, I began writing my own essays and poems over winter break of my senior year in college. Those essays, which I pompously titled From Left Field, were sent out to humor magazines, publishers and everywhere with a mailing address. Those essays eventually landed me my first staff job at a magazine where my career as a full-blown professional writer began.
If you find a copy of Cruel Shoes, I doubt it will have the same impact. Reading the essays now, they’re a little…weird. I love them, but it’s not for everyone. And I’m glad I read it in college when music sounds better, movies look better and books are more mind-shattering.
