What Do Tina Fey and Steve Martin Have in Common?
My mind constantly works on pattern recognition (Its hard to say where this came from) and one pattern that came up while I was writing my last post, The Big Money is Following Tina Fey is the similarity of Tina Fey’s recent success and Steve Martin’s meteoric rise to fame in the 70’s.
I was a huge Steve Martin fan growing up and had all of his standup memorized. My friends and I would quote lines back and forth from Lets Get Small and Wild and Crazy Guy all day long. Click on the links to check out samples on Amazon, he’s still funny 30 years later.
My love of Steve Martin is no secret because I still find myself doing the old bits whenever he comes up and I got his latest book, Born Standing Up: A Comics Life as a gift last Christmas. I read it and loaned it out and never got it back (Does that ever happen to anyone else?) so I have to go on memory for this story.
It was accepted in the days of Johnny that one appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ would catapult your career. 40 appearances for Steve Martin and he was still waiting. But one appearance on Saturday Night Live changed everything for Steve Martin. With several gigs on the tonight show and prior to SNL, Steve Martin had trouble selling out 90 seat comedy clubs. After SNL, he was selling out 25,000 seat auditoriums. He sold out for nearly two years starting with that one night on SNL.
Steve attributes it to the difference in audience. The Tonight Show was the Bob Hope generation and they just didn’t get him. He found his audience on SNL, the younger people got him and loved him. Steve Martin was just like Tina Fey, he embraced the speed and did standup, put out a comedy album, did more appearances on SNL and every other show it seemed like, had another hit with King Tut and more albums, did the movie ‘The Jerk’ and of course a book deal.
I highly recommend Steve’s book as a great read and a guide into how much work and years of setbacks went into his act. Sometimes you can be closer than you think and all it takes is one tweak or break for it to all fall into place.
Tags: career, saturday night live, steve martin, success, tina fey
