Demetri Martin: Well, yeah, and I think most of the time I’ve seen anything about my material being cerebral, it’s not pejorative, it like seems pretty positive. But I’m used to coming up in stand-up and that being somehow like a liability. So it’s weird. It’s like being called an “alternative” comedian—that somehow is disparaging to say. And you’re thinking “Okay, yeah, sure, alternative, whatever. I’ll take whatever the label is.” I think in the end—I’ve said this before in some other interview, and I’ve kind of lost track of the press stuff now—I can’t respond to it, it’s too weird. If I read stuff, there’s no response, I can’t do anything, so I guess I shouldn’t engage.
But I will say—and I don’t know if this is printed anywhere—I think comedy is very subjective. I think from person to person, it varies a great deal, and even within a person, your tastes can change. So it’s a really kind of moving, malleable, subjective thing. At the same time, when you do comedy, that night, in that moment, it’s very objective as to whether it’s funny or not to that group of people. So you have objective moments born out of subjective little pieces, kind of piled together, to give you an objective feeling. Do you know what I’m saying? I’m having trouble articulating it today, but that’s what I realized is one of the very interesting things about it for me. Tastes vary so much, yet when a person thinks something is funny, it’s like…
SH: It’s a binary response.
DM: Yeah. It’s on or off. They’re objectively, “That’s funny. That’s not funny.” But that doesn’t make it the objective final word on whether something is funny or not. The best you can do, I guess, is just keep generating and pay attention to things that work. Because my best material—the best I can say about it is that it’s kind of like a probabilistic statement. “Yeah, so far, that joke has worked. I don’t really know if it’s going to work tonight, but you know, I did it a hundred times and it worked 90 times, so that one works pretty well. This joke worked 20 times out of a hundred, but it should work tonight. But it’s less likely to.” You know what I mean? It’s so not definite, yet that moment that I tell a joke, it is so clearly definite, “That was funny right now,” or “That was not.”
SH: It’s a binary response.
DM: Yeah. It’s on or off. They’re objectively, “That’s funny. That’s not funny.” But that doesn’t make it the objective final word on whether something is funny or not. The best you can do, I guess, is just keep generating and pay attention to things that work. Because my best material—the best I can say about it is that it’s kind of like a probabilistic statement. “Yeah, so far, that joke has worked. I don’t really know if it’s going to work tonight, but you know, I did it a hundred times and it worked 90 times, so that one works pretty well. This joke worked 20 times out of a hundred, but it should work tonight. But it’s less likely to.” You know what I mean? It’s so not definite, yet that moment that I tell a joke, it is so clearly definite, “That was funny right now,” or “That was not.”
So the cerebral thing, or like the smart comedy, or brain comedy, I guess it’s just nice to get any press, and to get noticed. I do come across people who don’t like me, don’t like my comedy, don’t think it’s funny, it’s too cutesy, or whatever they hate. And it’s like “Okay. That’s your opinion. Somebody liked it, so that’s good.” Hopefully it balances out.
The A.V. Club Toronto Interview: Demetri Martin / February 25, 2009
The A.V. Club Toronto Interview: Demetri Martin / February 25, 2009
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