Demetri Martin is no traditional stand-up – his work is absurd, offbeat and wordplay-heavy, his delivery like a character from a Wes Anderson film made real. And he's no one-trick pony, as his book of gags, crudely drawn illustrations
and plans to break into film show. He talks to
DAVIN O'DWYER
DEMETRI MARTIN likes to make jokes with words – when you specialise in one-liners like he does, every word has to do a lot of work. So he writes funny anagrams, he writes funny haikus, he writes gags in which words are characters, he writes funny palindromes.
A chapter in his new book, This Is a Book, is called " Palindromes for specific occasions". One example goes "Father trying to connect with his estranged son by offering him some pizza: 'Son, I'm odd. Domino's?'" In its offbeat sensibility, amusing awkwardness and linguistic cleverness, this might be the archetypal Demetri Martin joke: a mix of the inspired and the absurd, with an undercurrent of surrealism that still manages to resonate as sincere. It's this formula that has seen him become one of the most acclaimed and beloved comedians in the US.
"I grew up in Jersey Shore; where that show takes place is precisely where I'm from," he explains by phone from sunny California. "So this was not a hotbed of comedy culture. My access pre-internet was I go to the bookstore or I watch television. There were a lot of stand-up showcases, and on HBO there was Bill Cosby and Steven Wright, and similarly I'd go to the bookstore and found The Far Side, and I thought 'Wow, there are so many ideas here'."
Both Wright, the monotone king of the one-liner, and Gary Larson's The Far Sidecartoon shared a comedic efficiency, but their tone was radically different – in Martin, the one-liner and the crude line drawing have come together to act as complementary forms.
“I think in both cases maybe I’m just really attracted to the renewable resource of ideas. It’s the volume of the premise, there’s a perspective that emerges out of the interesting tapestry of all these drawings or jokes. Years later, when I started making my own stuff, that’s the root that it all grew out of for me.”
Martin was born in 1973 to a Greek Orthodox priest. Religion only crops up in his material as brief punchlines rather than a recurring theme, though he credits his late father’s weekly sermons as an early schooling in the art of amusing a crowd. He fostered an early ambition to become a lawyer, but dropped out of law school after two years when he decided that the stand-up life was the one for him, and the notion of Martin, with his floppy hair and hipster demeanour, working as a corporate lawyer is almost as absurdly amusing as one of his jokes.
THE COMEDY CAREER was slow at first, but in 2003 he travelled to Edinburgh for the first time with his show If I . . . “Edinburgh was extremely educational for me. American comics can spend their whole career without leaving the States, so I felt lucky I got there that first time, and I wanted to get back as often as I could. Now I haven’t been back in a while, and I miss it.”
British crowds were probably well-suited to his offbeat gags and quirky delivery, like a character from a Wes Anderson film made real. In performance, he radiates a knowing whimsy, and his perfect use of the pause elevates his material, which reads well on the page, from the merely amusing to the downright hilarious. The appeal of a Martin show is seeing the world and language and human nature through his unique prism. He promptly won the Perrier Award that first year, and returned every summer for four years. It was there he became lasting friends with David O’Doherty, in many ways a kindred comic spirit. His Vicar Street performance this week will be only his second Irish date, and he says getting to hang out with O’Doherty was a prime reason for making it back here.
After the initial success in Edinburgh, he managed to get some lucrative and profile-raising work with regular appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewartand on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Stewart became a big champion, but his apolitical sensibility was slightly incongruous on such an avowedly political programme.
“I haven’t developed that part of my brain well enough. When I talk to friends at a party about political stuff I just get mad, and it does seem that the synapse doesn’t fire into satire. I just complain. It is just not for me.
“But if I sit in a park and just gaze at things and daydream, I feel ‘this is just great; I love it.’ It’s really escapist; somebody could easily accuse me of being irresponsible.”
His material might not have gelled with The Daily Show, but Stewart did produce his debut Comedy Centralseries, Important Things with Demetri Martin, which aired in 2009. The series was an acclaimed mix of his stand-up, featuring his trademark strummed guitars and flip-charts, as well as comedy sketches and animated gags. As a distillation of the quirky Demetri Martin aesthetic, it was perfect. Around the same time, though, Martin's career took an unexpected digression when director Ang Lee and producer James Schamus cast him in the lead role in Taking Woodstock, about the characters behind the famed music festival. Martin's central performance gave the slightly unfocused film a likeable substance and heart, and he has managed to nab a few small parts in subsequent films, including Steven Soderbergh's forthcoming Contagion.
He is taking the movie thing seriously enough that he left Brooklyn, a seemingly natural habitat for a comic of Martin’s hipster credentials, and moved to California.
"I'm hoping in the next year or two to finish a script of my own that I can direct. Hopefully I'd be right to act in it too. That's really exciting to me too, because essentially it's like This Is a Book– another medium – and let's see how my sensibility translates to it and if it works there."
Will he be leaving the stand-up behind? “I really love doing stand-up, I’m just exploring this stuff, but stand-up is almost like a carbohydrate, where it’s this pretty quick turnaround, pretty quick feedback loop and high, and then it dissipates pretty quickly. Writing a movie is a much larger meal and takes time. It’s like planting crops and then tending to them and harvesting them and washing them off before I get to eat them, whereas comedy is just like popping an MM in your mouth.”
It’s probably no coincidence that Demetri Martin compares his art to the sweetest little palindrome of all.
Demetri Martin plays Vicar Street tomorrow.
This Is a Book is published by Penguin, €16.99
