Part 30 (1/2)

Judd: How does Second City work?

Martin: It works in a-it's very organized. The set show is from nine until ten-thirty and then there's a break and there are improvisations. They are free, so if you're arriving at eleven you can watch them, and they are based on suggestions from the audience-they fall under different categories of places or current events. Then you go backstage and you put up this piece of paper with all the suggestions and you have about ten minutes to come up with a scene. You might give the lighting guy a cue, like, ”Okay when I reach this line, cut it” or ”We're going to go in this direction.” Sometimes the lighting guy is very important-he might look at a scene and take it out earlier, let it go. The scenes are taped, so four minutes later when it's time to write another show, the main bulk of the show, the part that people pay for, you sit around saying, ”Wait a second. There was a scene I did one night, an improvisation-what was that scene about a cabdriver?” And then they pull out the tape-when I was there, they were audiotapes, but now they're audiovisual tapes-and you look at it and you remember what you said. Then you start rewriting and building it.

Judd: You have ten minutes to do fifteen different pieces. How do you handle that? Does it always work or- Martin: No, often you bomb. You bomb bad. But it doesn't matter because the audience knows you're improvising, and so they're kind of with you. I mean, it's fun.

Judd: How does it work [on SCTV]? Is it all cast writers? Do you have additional writers other than the cast?

Martin: Yes, we do. The cast writes but there are five additional writers. You come up with an idea, you write it out, and you take it into weekly or biweekly meetings where everyone sits around in a circle over a big desk and reads the material. The material is voted on, whether they wanted it in the show, and sometimes, very few times, a sketch is totally thrown out. Usually what happens is suggestions are offered from everyone in the room about how it could be better, and that sketch is taken away and improved, and read again, and pa.s.sed, and put up on a bulletin board, and through that a show is a.s.sembled.

Judd: Do you have an audience?

Martin: No.

Judd: Does that help the show, you think?

Martin: For the kind of show SCTV is, yes. You know, Sat.u.r.day Night Live has the advantage of that energy that it gets from being live, but it has the disadvantage, too, of only being able to do a take once.

Judd: Do you have a laugh track?

Martin: Yes.

Judd: And do you think that hurts the feel of the show? Because sometimes those are not so good.

Martin: It's like anything: If it's done well, it doesn't. If it's done badly, it does.

Judd: Anybody that we would know who you worked with on Second City?

Martin: You mean, onstage?

Judd: Yeah.

Martin: Well, Catherine O'Hara and Andrea Martin, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas...

Judd: They were all doing that at the same time they were doing SCTV?

Martin: Some had left and some would come back for a month. That's what was great about Second City. You could go back if you wanted.

Judd: How do you become part of Second City? Isn't there an audition where they make you do characters?

Martin: There is a system. There's an audition where you have to do five characters coming in a door and then you leave and you come through the door again as another character. If you're good at that, you usually get into the touring company, and you do resorts up north, like any touring company. From there, you go to the main company.

Judd: Did you ever do stand-up comedy, like in a club?

Martin: Yeah, I played with that a little bit in California, but it's just not as much fun. When I was doing The a.s.sociates, I would go down-Robin Williams was a friend of mine, and he was doing Mork & Mindy in the next studio and he would go down every Monday and join the Comedy Store players at the Comedy Store, and so I started doing that. It wasn't the greatest improvisational atmosphere, because the Comedy Store is primarily for stand-up comics, so I would watch, and tried it a couple of times, but it was just not as much fun.

Judd: You like the challenge of bombing?

Martin: No, I don't like bombing.

Judd: Or the challenge of knowing it could go down the tubes?

Martin: I'm not crazy about risking it, except it does feel great when it succeeds.

Judd: Were you funny as a kid? Cla.s.s clown?

Martin: If you call this funny, I guess. I fooled around a lot, yeah. Some teachers thought I was a saint, others a nightmare.

Judd: The ones that thought you a nightmare: Why would that be?

Martin: I would just constantly fool around.

Judd: Did you go to college?

Martin: Yes. I graduated as a social worker. I was-I originally went into premed and then I realized I hated science. I did two years of premed. So, I switched to social work, and that's where I met Eugene Levy and Dave Thomas-I went to school with them.

Judd: What do you think about Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas making-I guess they just finished their movie Strange Brew. What do you think about, like, all of a sudden, two characters from SCTV becoming national characters?

Martin: Oh, it's great. It's great.

Judd: Is that strange, when a little skit turns into a big hit?

Martin: Yeah. Dave is a good friend of mine and he is constantly amazed, too.

Judd: Okay, so when you're doing impressions in the show, do they write sketches for you and then say, ”You're going to have to do an impression of so-and-so,” and then you have to develop it?

Martin: Well, a lot of the impersonations, you write yourself. I'm trying to think. There's a few instances where someone will say, Will you play this person? And you'll try to figure it out.

Judd: How do you develop the impression itself? Do you just wing it?

Martin: I look at tapes. Makeup can take three or four hours, so I sit with a Walkman on and listen to the voice, and sometimes I'll get certain phrases that the actual person-when I was doing Huntz Hall, there were phrases he would use and I would lift those phrases out and put-even if it was just a word or two words together, a certain sound, you know-I'd put them into the script. You can mimic that.

Judd: You also did a Robin Williams impression. You did all the different little characters that he does, and it was amazing. How did you develop that?

Martin: Well, I know Robin, so there's all different things-there's his ”ha ha,” a laugh which he rarely does on television, and I-that was from seeing him on The Tonight Show and he just never sat still, so I came up with the premise for Tang, the guy trying to get the answer out of him, and Robin wouldn't do it. You just get into the voice, you know? I did Paul Anka one week and I could not get him at all. I was sitting in that makeup chair and I was trying-I kept staring at the makeup job they were doing and listening to Anka with my Walkman in my ears, and the longer they did my makeup, the more I become like him or sound like him. Sometimes it just evolves.

Judd: Do you have any idea what you want to do after SCTV?

Martin: My dream is to do a Broadway show. I've always wanted to do a Broadway musical. I like doing television. I get terribly unhappy if I'm not doing something comfortable, and if I don't think it's particularly good.

Judd: Are there any skits from SCTV that you're particularly proud of?

Martin: Um, I guess the one-there are two sketches that-there are three sketches-no, there's four, eight, twelve sketches that I feel strongly...No, I guess like a sketch called ”Oh That Rusty,” which was about a child star who had been playing an eight-year-old for thirty-one years, and now he's real old and fat; but he would wear a wig, and they would have to build the set real big to make him look young and to make the show relevant in the seventies, they fired his mother and hired a seven-foot-two black guy to play his father so he would look short in size.

Judd: I liked ”The Boy Who Couldn't Wait for Christmas.”