Steve Martin: You'll use everything you ever knew.

“I was able to maintain a personal relationship with Johnny [Carson] over the next thirty years, at least as personal as he or I could make it, and I was flattered that he came to respect my comedy. On one of my appearances, after he had done a solid impression of Goofy the cartoon dog, he leaned over to me during a commercial break and whispered prophetically, ‘You’ll use everything you ever knew.’”

- Steve Martin, Born Standing Up

I often worry as a writer, that I reveal too much about myself in my work, either intentionally or unintentionally. But as an artist or a creative, there’s kind of no way to avoid it. These words from Johnny Carson to Steve Martin carry a really sinister but also strangely inspiring implication: that when you truly dedicate your life to an artform (comedy, writing, music, visual art, etc) everything you know and are will eventually make it into your work. 

Wherever we go, we always take our whole selves with us. All art is about what it means to be human, but more specifically, it’s about what it means to be our own particular version of human. Steve Martin’s version of human, at least back in the 70s, was wacky, exaggerated, and absurdly meandering. Some might think that what he’s doing is strictly character work. I mean, how could a persona so over the top be in any way autobiographical? But all art is in some ways autobiographical, right? Even when we pretend to be someone else, that persona still comes from the inescapable vessel that is our own mind. But this vessel, and the world that pours into it and out of it, is so much more vast than we might realize. 

Standup comedy and writing are similar in a lot of ways. They’re both essentially solitary artforms. No matter how vast your audience, you’re ultimately alone up there, on that stage, behind that desk, gripping that microphone or that pen, so how could you not use everything you had? The world is pouring into and out of you, and you want to make the audience feel something. What that something is exactly, you might have to figure out along the way. 

Steve Martin wasn’t just interested in making people laugh. What was more important to him was creating an experience strange enough to leave a lasting impression, one that spectators still thought about even after they’d gone home. Ideally, it’d go something like this: You see something at the show that confuses and captivates you and you can’t stop thinking about it. You mull it over and knead it into different shapes in your mind, and then one day you finally get it. This brings you closer to the core of the work. You’ve now shared a joke with Steve Martin. You understand what he’s poking fun at. You’re finally in on it. 

I think his comedy holds up. It catches you in a weird place. At the time, it was so unlike any other comedy out there, that it shocked the audience out of autopilot. It made people consider how strange the act of watching a show is. Why do we do this? What are we hoping to get from this? Why do we need to be entertained?

All comedians (well at least all good comedians) interrogate the world through their comedy. They mock social norms and criticize the rich and powerful all with a wink and a nod. By being absurd, they awaken us to the absurdity of everyday life. For the writer and the comedian, all experience ultimately becomes material. Then we get to agonize over if we’re incapable of living authentically because everything we experience makes it into our art in some way. Isn’t life beautiful? 

Yes, it is. But it’s also absurd. It should be impossible for us to get up and meet our lives every single day, but we do it. We can because we keep experiencing things that increase our knowledge, our insight, our sense of wonder. We find new sandboxes to play in before their material is scattered to the wind. Then we follow that trail of dust to the next playground. 

So yes, maybe I’ll use everything I ever knew, maybe my brain is a machine that cycles from experience to analysis to performance, but that process is ultimately an act of transformation, one that turns an event into a malleable, almost living cultural object. 

Plus, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but life is really really hard. I don’t know how I’d let go of pain without transforming it into humor. I don’t know how I’d hold onto joy without crystalizing it in a poem. I’ll squeeze every bit of myself into my art if it means I have the chance to make something meaningful, something that makes you think or laugh or scream or cry. At least I can be sure by the end, whenever it comes, that I gave it all I got. 

So I keep learning, every day, just enough to keep myself in the spotlight for a little longer, knowing all the while that at any moment someone could whisper from the wings telling me my time is finally up. I’m not always convinced I’m real unless someone is watching, so if I could keep you here, with me, for just a moment longer, all I’d like to say is. Good luck out there, you’ll need everything you ever knew.