If you’ve ever watched any Steve Martin stand-up, you know that he was one of — if not the — most confident stand-up performers we’ve had in the past hundred years. You might have to go back to the era of vaudeville to find performers with his level of confidence. He would come onto the stage with this attitude of “I know I’m good, you know I’m good, so let’s cut to the chase.” He projected this overwhelming confidence outward. You looked at him and could feel it, and you thought, “Wow, he’s good.”
If you’ve ever watched The Jerk, his performance there is probably the closest thing to his stand-up persona. Just like in his comedy, he played a confident moron. That tone carried over into some of his other films too, but with each movie he moved further from his stand-up personality and closer to his real one. I suppose that’s a transition many comedians make.
And that right there is the interesting thing: it was all an act. Steve Martin’s actual personality is almost the complete opposite of his stand-up persona. He’s one of the most soft-spoken people around. He’s talked about this openly on numerous occasions, even admitting that he is a nervous person, so this isn’t speculation. You can see it in interviews. People who know him have said as much. He’s quiet. He doesn’t like drawing attention to himself. He’s shy, anxious. He’s said that at a party he would be the one sitting off to the side by himself not talking to anymore, and certainly not in the center of things.
That may not be entirely surprising. A lot of comedians are like this. Robin Williams, who could be overwhelming on stage, was famously gentle and soft-spoken in private. Jim Carry, who has a hyperness almost equal to Williams, has also said that it's all a mask and that the real him is much more reserved. And it’s not just comedians. Harrison Ford, who embodies confidence on screen — think Indiana Jones or Han Solo — is in real life much more reserved and uncomfortable with attention. In interviews he almost whispers, giving single word answers, clearly uncomfortable.
I once watched an interview where Steve Martin was talking with Jerry Seinfeld on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Seinfeld brought this up directly. He said something like, “You were incredibly confident in your 70s act.” Martin smiled and replied, “Yes, but that was all a lie.”
He explained that inside, he was the exact opposite. Every time he went on stage, he was terrified. But he decided for the stand-up that he had to force the people to laugh with him and the way to do that was to project this tremendious level of confidence. Because, he said, if he didn't project confidence the audience would think he was ridiculous and they would laugh at him, not with him.
Having read his autobiography, Born Standing Up, I think he was speaking from hard experience. He did stand-up for nearly ten long years before he found real success. Much of that time was spent playing to half-empty rooms filled with hecklers and people who simply didn’t care. Knowing that history, it’s not hard to understand why he went gray in his early thirties. That life must have been brutally stressful.
But then he decided that the way to win over the audience was to project confidence, even if he didn't feel it. He told Seinfeld "if I project a confidence that I know I'm funny, then they will believe me that I'm funny and they will find me funny. So that's what I did."
There's a great lesson to learn here.
That is that we have to be confident in ourselves. Let me say that again: We have to be confident in ourselves. Because if we are not confident in ourselves, no one else will be. No one, except maybe our mothers. I know sometimes we think that we don't want to be bolsterous and that furthermore people will look at us and look at our work and they will see the worth to what we're saying or what we're doing, so there is no need to boast about ourselves. Hell, I'm as guilty as anyone. I write damn good posts here, especially my haiku translation and explanation posts, but I rarely promote myself.
The truth is most won't notice you because 99 times out of 100 they will see your lack of bolsterousness as a lack of confidence and they will say, "If this person doesn't believe in themselves, why should I believe in them?" and they won't even give you a chance.
Yes, we’ve all heard the rare success stories, the one in a thousand, or one in a million more likely, where someone lacking confidence is “discovered” by a patron or agent who believes in them more than they believe in themselves. It does happen. But it’s rare enough that you can’t plan your life around it.
If you don’t believe in yourself, if you don’t project that belief outward, most people will never even give you a chance. That may be unfortunate. It may feel unfair. But, as I tell my kids all the time, life isn't fair.
Steve Martin understood that confidence doesn’t have to reflect how you feel inside. It’s a tool. A posture. A deliberate stance toward the world. His confidence wasn’t arrogance, and it wasn’t delusion. It was functional. It did the job it needed to do.
And once it had done that job, once he no longer needed to fight for the audience, he walked away from stand-up entirely. The persona had served its purpose. That's really the amazing thing there. He was the number one stand-up comic in the US, he was filling entire stadiums with people, he was making boat loads of money — and he walked away from it all. But by that point, the mask wasn't needed anymore. He had his audience and they followed him for the rest of his career — and they are still following him.
Anyway, this post was inspired by that episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. It's a good show — look it up sometimes on YouTube. Seinfeld is pretty good at making his guests comfortable and getting some interesting answers out of them.
| David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |
