New York Magazine has this great bio on Demetri Martin, whose show, Important Things With Demetri Martin, premieres this week on Comedy Central (W @ 10.30); his site.
Martin became a hero to law students’ hopes everywhere when he dropped out of NYU Law before his 3L year to pursue comedy.
I got a chance to see him with Will Ferrell last February while promoting their site funnyordie.com — it was great. His jokes are sharp and his delivery and deadpan are perfect. The bio explains how he can turn sketches + jokes into a series.
On the New Show
So far, his act had consisted solely of one-liners, presented like Zen koans. (He has one joke that could serve as a personal credo: “Some jokes are short and elegant, like a mathematical proof, or a midget in a ball gown.”) Now he wanted to learn to connect with the audience. “Yes, the audience can sit there and say, That was a good joke about robots. Very interesting about fire hydrants. That’s true about snowmen. But how long can you do that for? We’re not robots,” he says. So he decided to write an hour-long show about himself: his obsession with wordplay, his nagging need for validation, his embarrassing arsenal of useless talents (a unicycle would make an appearance), and his habit, for a few years at least, of keeping a notebook in which he’d give himself points each week for doing things like eating vegetables, helping strangers, or demonstrating moral courage. And he decided this production would be a true one-man show, in that he’d do everything himself, right down to composing the music and sewing the costumes. The only problem with this plan was that he didn’t know how to play a musical instrument. Or sew.
On His Career
Despite appearances, as a kid, Martin was not a comedy nerd. He grew up in Toms River, New Jersey, and he liked to skateboard and solve puzzles. At a young age, for no particular reason, he decided to become a corporate lawyer and followed that through two years of law school before dropping out before his final year. The very first time he did stand-up, he told twelve one-liners. Six worked and six bombed. (One of them survives to this day: “I once tripped on an escalator. I fell down the stairs for an hour and a half.”) But the next day he strolled the city listening to his act on a tape recorder. “I kept rewinding it to the jokes that worked, walking around with headphones on, thinking, This is amazing.”
His family, however, was not pleased with his decision. “They were like, You’re going to be a comedian? This is crazy. Just finish your last year.
I for one am glad he dropped out.
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