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In Defense of Steve Martin’s “King Tut”
On the latest Ricochet podcast, Minnesotan segue-master @jameslileks impugned Steve Martin’s classic “Saturday Night Live” performance of “King Tut” thusly:
“It’s not a funny song, it just isn’t. It’s not a funny bit, there’s nothing really to it that requires anybody to look at it now. Only, sort of, their late Boomer betters saying, ‘oh, Steve Martin is the bomb, you must watch this, this is brilliant,’ but it’s not. You were stoned in college when you watched that and you thought it was funny but it isn’t.”
Lies. Damnable lies. Now, defending any joke is like dissecting a frog: you’ll figure out what makes it tick, but the patient dies in the process. With that said, here’s the bit:
To modern eyes, “King Tut” was cheesy and lame. But in 1978, that was the point.
That decade served up a slew of “important” stand-up comedians who were edgy, cynical, and highly political. George Carlin issued diatribes on capitalism and religion. The far-funnier Richard Pryor was laser-focused on racial injustice. Andy Kaufman intentionally alienated club crowds with his anti-comedy. Robert Klein and David Steinberg were high-brow intellectuals. And nearly every comic lectured America about Vietnam, Richard Nixon, and the hollow hypocrisy of bourgeois life.
Then along came Steve Martin. Sick of the conventional joke formula, he spent years crafting a stand-up act without punchlines. And the way to make audiences laugh sans jokes was by acting silly. He paraded around in bunny ears and a fake arrow through his head, embarrassingly contorting his body to sell the act. All the while, he pretended to be just as self-important and overly earnest as his fellow comics. The juxtaposition is what made it funny. (See his intro to the song above.)
The tastemakers took themselves far too seriously to risk looking silly; they had to be smarter than the audience. Although highly intelligent, Martin presented himself as the dumbest, least self-aware guy in the room. Instead of educating Americans on their evils, he brought back comedy to its actual function: making people laugh.
In a way, he was doing what the original Star Wars did in 1977. After a decade of bleak, dystopian sci-fi, George Lucas revamped the old Flash Gordon serials into a fun, popcorn-friendly escapism.
I was just 11 when “King Tut” came out and my friends and I loved it. The Egyptian exhibition had been talked about all year and kids always enjoy watching adults make fools of themselves. So add Gen Xers to the Boomers who look back on Martin with fondness.
James is correct that a millennial watching it today without context would be underwhelmed, to say the least. But as a product of its time, “King Tut” remains a comedy classic. QED.
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Published in Entertainment, Humor
The Reed College SJWs were complaining about its use in a humanities 101 class. Personally, I’d be annoyed too were I a student, not because cultural appropriation but because a Reed College education costs $2/min. At that price, I want my classes to be meat, not popcorn.
Which is why things like punk rock, and Meat Loaf (of all things) became marketable in 76-78: they positioned themselves again the commercial populism/tide.
I was 10 in 1977, and enjoyed ♫King Tut♫. And while I did, and still do, like punk rock, and Meat Loaf, I also did partake in a limited amount of Roller Disco (because the cute girls were into it).
So, Punk Rock, Meat Loaf, peer-pressure Roller Disco – Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad.
And he’s a Ramblin’ Guy
Not to upstage Kermit, but this one too:
He still does the song when he does his bluegrass concerts. Saw him three or four years ago.
Still funny!
I rest my previously rested case.
Actually, no, good defense. But to repeat what I said on the podcast: Martin came up with this smarmy comic persona as a commentary on lounge-lizard / smug hack comedians & performers. He wasn’t acting silly; he was playing a guy who thought he was being funny – i.e., the guy who thought the arrow through the head was funny. The audience responded to the character without quite getting the meta-bit.
Which is fine, I suppose. But now and then I come across his routines on the satellite radio comedy channel, and they come in two flavors: the pre-huge-fame period, when he’s doing little routines that are mildly amusing. Small crowds, indulgent, amused. Then there’s the SNL period, when the audiences are huge, and greet him like Jagger; he launches into a call-and-response routine that has one conceptual joke, and you can feel the audience’s attention leak out of the room – until he drops a catchphrase. I am a wild and crrrazy guy. Whereupon they go nuts. Because they are in the same room where the guy said the thing!
Again, it was fine for the time, and most comedy feels dated 10 or 15 years later. Except Monty Python.
And the Marx Brothers.
Seawriter
So this is positively Shakespearean compared to King Tut?
Why yes; yes it is. Tut is one joke. “Spam” is much more.
1. Imagine the description of the opening: “Morning; an English cafe. Several VIKINGS are getting their meal. Mr. and Mrs PREMISE descend from above, seated on chairs.”
That’s a rather ingenious set-up.
Terry Jones reads off the menu, which becomes increasingly spam-centric (a joke at the ubiquity of the stuff in wartime meals) ending with the ornately ridiculous “or Lobster Thermidor au Crevette with a Mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam” – read in the same crass voice. Adding “spam” at the end puts a period on the whole recitation.
The moment the bit runs out of steam, they Vikings – rather, the Fred Tomlinson chorus, who brought straight-faced manly chorale style to all the ridiculous lyrics – start singing the Spam song; add Chapman’s unhinged screeching, and it’s the complete opposite of what actually ever happens in a restaurant.
Then Cleese wanders in from a previous sketch, adds the new theme (spam) to his routine; the appearance of the policeman to shove him out the door provides the exit from the bit, which goes straight into a documentarian’s description of what we’ve just seen: part of a series of Viking victories waged at various English cafes.
But this turns out to be a ruse, and it turns out we’re still in the cafe; the overlaid text ties the skit back to the recurring theme of the show, which used Blackletter text to introduce various skits in the style of historical movie dramas.
2. The skit is responsible for a word we use every day: “Spam is named after Spam luncheon meat by way of a Monty Python sketch in which Spam in the sketch is ubiquitous, unavoidable and repetitive.” (Merriam-Webster)
Goodness.
Okay, two things.
First, I withdraw all of my numerous past snipes and criticisms of James Lileks. I was mistaken.
Secondly, James, I’ll be pre-ordering my copy of Something Completely Different: The Annotated Python Anthology just as soon as you ship the first draft off to your publisher. I’ll expect it autographed.
(But you can sign it Bruce, if you like.)
The Larch.
These pearls you cast will go unappreciated.
I should have expected that from the Number 9th District Neighbor.
I agree that it is objectively funny. To your point, we seem to be doing the same thing (being very unfunny) today. So it is almost funny in the exact same way that it was then…
You can take your apology, and you can stick it in a bottle or you can hold it in your hand.
It’s called “Howls! Howls of Derisive Laughter.”
How about I sign it to New Bruce, just to avoid confusion?
Aww, spit!
I believe that all of the old SNLs from the 1970s are available on DVD if you really want them. I dressed up one year for Halloween as a Conehead, so I found one of the episodes so I could remind myself of what their costumes looked like. I still have that rubber conehead cap. I can go all day talking like a conehead if I want to.
Is David S. Pumpkins the Funky Tut of my generation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS00xWnqwvI
I loved all the Steve Martin movies. Could you say “I was born a poor black child” today? These films were as silly as King Tut–and intended to be as light hearted–but they made me laugh and laugh and laugh.
I haven’t seen The Jerk in years though. I’m afraid it wouldn’t hold up, and I don’t want to ruin the memory of it.
Yes, Steve Martin was a Jerry Lewisesque, silly comic at a time when comedy had devolved into preachy, self-important lectures. But he wasn’t the first of his time. Every time Chevy Chase stepped in front of the camera, only to fall off a ladder and then announce “Live from New York…” we all cracked up. Maybe James wouldn’t care for Chevy’s comedy either, but he and SNL really paved the way for Martin.
In the early years of the show Steve Martin was the go to guest host. There were seasons where he hosted multiple times, often enough to be doing running skits.
Mmmm unacceptable!
100x this.
It’s funny how the reaction to self-importance can produce the most self-important nonsense of all.
It doesn’t. My friends rented it from the base exchange in the early 2000’s while I was in Korea. One of the worst movies I’ve ever had to sit through. It was so bad that it’s made me wary of other “classics” of the era like Blues Brothers because the same people expressing befuddlement at my not having seen that film routinely list The Jerk among similar “classics” that I need to see.
Lileks: Hello, miss.
Gabriel: Miss?
Lileks: Excuse me; I have a cold. I wish to complain about this comedy.
Gabriel: The Norwegian Blue comedy?
Lileks: The Steve Martin King Tut comedy.
Gabriel: Yes? What about it.
Lileks: It’s dead.
Gabriel: No it isn’t. It’s classic.
Lileks: Look here, I know a dead comedy when I see it, and I’m looking at it.
Gabriel: No, it’s pining for the fjords.
Blue Brothers still is great. I rewatched it two years ago. And my wife, who had never seen it before, loved it.
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/the-festrunk-brothers/n8662?snl=1