A comic's naked desire to make us laugh can be an embarrassment, especially if we feel that he's hanging on that laugh—that he's experiencing our reaction as a life-or-death matter. Steve Martin is naked, but he isn't desperate. (He's too anomic to be desperate.) Some performers can't work up a physical charge if the audience doesn't respond to them, but Steve Martin doesn't come out on a TV stage cold, hoping to get a rhythm going with the people in the studio. He's wired up and tingling, like a junk-food addict; he's like a man who's being electrocuted and getting a dirty thrill out of it. Steve Martin doesn't feed off the audience's energy—he instills energy in the audience. And he does it by drawing us into a conspiratorial relationship with him….
When Martin comes onstage, he may do, say, just what Red Skelton used to do, but he gets us laughing at the fact that we're laughing at such dumb jokes. Martin simulates being a comedian, and so, in a way, we simulate being the comedian's audience. Martin makes old routines work by letting us know that they're old and then doing them immaculately. For him, comedy is all timing. He's almost a comedy robot. Onstage, he puts across the idea that he's going to do some cornball routine, and then when he does it it has quotation marks around it, and that's what makes it hilarious. He does the routine straight, yet he's totally facetious….
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