When I was young, I often got the floor or the sofa on family vacations.
I’m not here to complain, it’s a part of being the youngest and the only girl, which also meant I got away with pretty much everything. It’s cool. Also, the big benefit of getting the family room as your bedroom on a family vacation, was that I was the only one with a TV. Having a bed sheet for a door sucks, but it’s easy to avoid that reality when you can spend those evenings watching Comedy Central and the Game Show Network. One particular summer trip, it must have been 2007 or 2008, I spent hours watching television on my sofa behind a hung sheet, and it was in those afternoons that I first stumbled upon Demetri Martin.
Unlike the comedians my parents exposed me to growing up, Demetri was young and charming. He was even cute. He wasn’t a grizzled old club comic or a Vegas comedian in a suit. He felt real, unlike those personas that Steven Wright or Brian Regan wore around. I loved Regan and Wright, and at that age I could recite their jokes with ease, but I never believed they were real people. My mother had a cassette tape of Steven Wright's debut album, "I Have a Pony." Wright had a unique style of surrealist observational jokes, like, "I bought some batteries, but they weren't included, so I had to buy them again.” Wright was tall, dark, and stoic, with a thick Boston accent and a monotone delivery. My favorite of his jokes goes like this: “So I was getting off the plane and I forgot to undo my seatbelt, and I’m pulling the plane through the terminal, and the wings are knocking people over.” Such beautiful absurdity. In a very real sense, his material feels like the thoughts of a child, which might be a part of why I responded so well to it. His jokes weren't often laugh-out-loud funny, but they made me smile and there was a sense of inclusion and intelligence that I loved experiencing when I listened to Steven Wright as a child.
While Steven Wright's material was cold and cerebral, Brian Regan's humor came from a booming, ridiculous voice and the theatrics of his performance. We listened to Brian Regan's self-titled special over and over again, and the CD made its way into the hands of all of our neighbors because my mom was so excited to share it with everyone. “Where it all went wrong was the day they started the spelling bee.” He starts. “Because up until that day I was an idiot, but nobody else knew.” Regan had these huge punchlines that my parents will still recite whenever he comes up in conversation.
I loved Steven Wright and Brian Regan, but it wasn't until that summer with Demetri that I realized comedians could be real people. I was very eager to experience real people. Demetri Martin wasn’t playing a character. He had a simple smile and he reminded me of a journalist. His jokes felt like discoveries, like he was going out into the world and then coming back to report.
That summer I disappeared into his weird brain for hours at a time. His specials were these quirky little things, somewhere between a comedy special, a one-man show, and a talent show. He had a large notepad where he displayed his cartoons and drawings. He played guitar and harmonica at other points in the show, as well as drawing with both hands simultaneously in perfect mirrored symmetry. He recited a 224-word palindromic poem that he had written for a math class while he was at Yale. His jokes were smart, but they were also simple and understated. They felt like puzzles, like the puzzles I had spent hours and hours working through. Things like, "A treehouse is really cruel because it's like killing someone and then making one of its friends hold it." Before long, I had bought all his specials and I had his one-liners memorized. They proved to be my best escape yet. "The easiest way to add insult to injury," He says, "is when you're signing someone's cast." I told his jokes to my friends and anyone who would listen. I was constantly impressed by his brain. His jokes weren't showy or dramatic, instead, they traded in an economy of words and a surrealist sense of ridiculousness within the everyday. I had long been starved for a laugh and a sense of ridiculousness.
But more than that, I feel like I know them because of the fearless way they open themselves onstage. I asked my middle-school self: Why work so hard for the privilege of friends’ secrets and stories when comedians were offering them up so completely? Stand-up comedians gave me intimacy and access that I wasn’t able to find anywhere else in my life. They spoke, I listened.