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Book: Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Quotes of Book: Born Standing Up: A Comic's
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  1. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    In logic class, I opened my textbook-the last place I was expecting to find comic inspiration-and was startled to find that Lewis Carroll, the supremely witty author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was also a logician. He wrote logic textbooks and included argument forms based on the syllogism, normally presented in logic books this way: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. _________________________________ Therefore, Socrates is mortal. But Carroll's were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way: 1} Babies are illogical. 2} Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile. 3} Illogical persons are despised. __________________________________________ Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles. And: 1} No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste. 2} No modern poetry is free from affectation. 3} All your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles. 4} No affected poetry is popular among people of taste. 5} Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles. __________________________________________ Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting.
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  2. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    career in the irrational world of creativity not only made sense but had moral purpose.
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  3. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    In psychoanalysis, you try to retain a discovery; in art, once the thing is made, you let it go.
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  4. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    Carl Reiner. He had an entrenched sense of glee; he used humor as a gentle way of speaking difficult truths;
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  5. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration. AT
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  6. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years.
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  7. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    Everything was dragging me toward the arts; even the study of modern philosophy suggested that philosophy was nonsense.
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  8. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    These word games bothered and intrigued me. Appearing to be silly nonsense, on examination they were absolutely logical-yet they were still funny. The comedy doors opened wide, and Lewis Carroll's clever fancies from the nineteenth century expanded my notion of what comedy could be. I began closing my show by announcing, "I'm not going home tonight; I'm going to Bananaland, a place where only two things are true, only two things: One, all chairs are green; and two, no chairs are green." Not at Lewis Carroll's level, but the line worked for my contemporaries, and I loved implying that the one thing I believed in was a contradiction. I also was enamored of the rhythmic poetry of e. e. cummings, and a tantalizing quote from one of his recorded lectures stayed in my head. When asked why he became a poet, he said, "Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement." The line, with its intriguing reference to comedy, was enigmatic, and it took me ten years to work out its meaning.
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  9. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    When I moved out of the house at eighteen, I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn't know I was supposed to.
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  10. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    Both scary and down-to-earth, he {John Belushi} once told me, 'I never yell at the staff, only the department heads'.
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  11. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    Now that I had assigned myself an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing"
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  12. Steve Martin _ Born Standing Up: A Comic's

    MY FATHER , GLENN VERNON MARTIN , died in 1997 at age eighty-three, and afterward his friends told me how much they had loved him. They told me how enjoyable he was, how outgoing he was, how funny and caring he was. I was surprised by these descriptions, because the number of funny or caring words that had passed between my father and me was few. He had evidently saved his vibrant personality for use outside the family. When I was seven or eight years old, he suggested we play catch in the front yard. This offer to spend time together was so rare that I was confused about what I was supposed to do. We tossed the ball back and forth with cheerless formality.
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