When the magicians Penn and Teller toured Australia in June, I had the privilege of catching one of their shows at the Sydney Opera House. Here were two supreme masters of their art performing at the height of their powers. Watching them work was an unmitigated treat, a chance to sit back and revel in what the great Aussie critic Robert Hughes called “the spectacle of skill”.
Penn and Teller are no longer young. Penn is 67 and Teller 74. But at no point in their show did they seem past their prime. When rock stars of that age go on tour, you can’t help wishing you’d seen them 40 years ago. In Penn and Teller’s field, advanced age is irrelevant. Or rather, it’s relevant in a good way. You can’t be as technically assured as they are without having plenty of years under your belt. Making things look that effortless takes a lifetime of effort.
Similar levels of maturity and craft are on display in Only Murders in the Building, the second series of which concludes on Disney+ next week. Two of the show’s three stars, Steve Martin and Martin Short, are in their 70s. Martin, who co-created the show with the writer John Hoffman, plays a washed-up actor named Charles-Haden Savage, while Short plays an even more washed-up theatre director named Oliver Putnam.
The comedic chemistry of Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez has continued to fire in season two of Only Murders in the Building.Credit:Disney+
Both characters live in a New York apartment building called the Arconia. Martin is the straight man of the duo, and Short is the clown. Just as Penn or Teller can achieve a large effect with a barely perceptible movement of the fingers, Short can sell any joke with a judicious pause or wicked vocal inflection. The man can get out of a chair in a way that makes you laugh out loud.
The show’s third star is Selena Gomez, who is 29. Gomez plays Mabel Mora, a younger and apparently much hipper resident of the Arconia. In the early episodes of series one, as the characters got to know each other, there were plenty of Millennial versus Boomer gags. Age difference, it seems, is the only form of difference that Americans still feel comfortable joking about.
Indeed, there were moments in series one when you wondered if the show’s backers had insisted on certain strict conditions before agreeing to work with two guys as unfashionably old as Martin and Short. Yes, we’ll still let you be on TV, provided there are younger and better-looking characters on hand to deliver a barrage of jokes about how lame and out of touch you are. And to ensure those jokes are funny, would you mind writing them yourself?
Hence, the first series laid heavy stress on the oldsters’ cluelessness about internet protocol and correct pronoun usage. There was an excellent running gag about the ridiculous formality of their texts. “It’s mean Mabel, who clearly has all the answers at 26,” Charles snapped at one point, when the jokes got too much for him. When Oliver called Mabel a “kid”, Charles corrected him. “She’s not a kid. We only think she’s a kid because we’re old.”
Steve Martin trained as a magician, and his work has always been tinged with magical effects. Perhaps the greatest trick he’s ever pulled is the way he’s stayed culturally relevant for half a century. Back in the 1970s, Martin was the hottest stand-up comedian in America. Five decades later, he’s still massive. The first series of Only Murders was the most watched comedy ever on the American streaming service Hulu. In Australia, it was a word-of-mouth hit among Disney+ subscribers, who must be happy the second series is just as good as the first.
Clearly, Martin is still plugged into the zeitgeist. Maybe it’s because in real life he’s a 76-year-old man with a 10-year-old daughter. Or maybe it’s because he’s just very, very smart. At any rate, he has a knack for reinventing himself to keep pace with the times. Fifty years ago, when he was huge for the first time, Martin’s shtick was almost the polar opposite of what he does now. These days his humour is dry and cerebral. In the 1970s, his act was about as broad as stand-up comedy can be. He played the banjo while wearing a plastic arrow through his head. He made balloon animals. He did daffy voices and goofy walks.
Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live during his ’70s standup days.Credit:NBCUniversal/Getty Images
And he did it all in sold-out arenas, playing to 15,000 people at a time. Watching Martin’s old routines on YouTube, you are forced to grasp two apparently contradictory things at once. The first is that people back then found him hysterical. The second is that Martin’s old stuff, by today’s standards, is close to unwatchable. It’s just stopped being funny.
Martin addresses this paradox in his 2007 memoir Born Standing Up, which must be the wisest book about stand-up comedy ever written. (I especially recommend the audiobook version, read by Martin himself.) Humour, he observes in the book, “is as ephemeral as the daily newspaper.” Looking back at the material that made him famous, he admits that even he is left cold by some of it. “Don’t ask me why, but this was funny at the time,” he says, after quoting one of his old jokes.
“The comedy I was doing was so linked to the era we were coming out of, which was Vietnam,” Martin told Jerry Seinfeld a few years ago, during an especially instructive episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. “Part of my goal was to be absurd in a very serious time. I could tell the era was ending, too. I could feel it.”
Sensing that his brand of “unbridled nonsense” was going out of fashion, Martin did something extraordinary. In 1981, he walked away from stand-up forever. He let his act go extinct so he could go on evolving in other forms. He tried his hand at novels and plays. He wrote movies and starred in them. While making The Three Amigos (1986), he met the Canadian actor Martin Short, and the pair became amigos in real life. Recently, Martin came out of stand-up retirement to do a two-man show with Short, which was filmed for Netflix as An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life (2018).
If Only Murders proves to be Martin’s swan-song, it will be a fitting one. Like Prospero doing one last trick before drowning his book, Martin has constructed a format that deftly showcases all the skills he’s developed in 60 years of writing and performing.
Martin Short, Selena Gomez and Steve Martin at the show’s second season premiere in June.Credit:AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
Not that the show is just about Martin. It’s a team effort, shot through with quality at every level. Even the credits sequence is classy. There’s a deep assurance in the writing and direction, which allows the tone to veer from funny to touching and back again without any sense of strain.
The performances are excellent across the board, with plenty of juicy roles for veteran actors. Shirley MacLaine and Michael Rapaport make brief but memorable appearances in the new series. Jane Lynch is back as Charles’ stunt double, while Tina Fey returns as Cinda Canning, the ice-queen of true-crime podcasting.
In his memoir, Martin explained why good comedians never run out of material. “Comedy is a distortion of what is happening,” he wrote, “and there will always be something happening.” So what does Martin feel is happening now? What are the trends that Only Murders sets out to distort?
Superficially, the show takes off from our current craze for true-crime podcasts. That’s what brings the three protagonists together: they’re all fans of the same podcast. Back at the start of season one, they didn’t know each other. After riding upstairs in the same elevator, they hunkered down in their respective apartments to listen to the podcast’s latest episode alone. Only when a fire alarm drove them out of the building and into a nearby café, did they discover they had this big thing in common.
Those early scenes felt like a reassuring comment about the internet. Information technology can isolate and divide us, if we let it. But it also has the power to bring us closer together.
The show delivered a similarly hopeful message about age difference as season one unfolded. To begin with, the generation gap between Mabel and the oldsters seemed unbridgeable. Before you knew it, they were just three friends hanging out together.
That first series of Only Murders was made during the thick of the pandemic, and its basic optimism felt timely. The show argues that you don’t have to leave your building to find human connection. The Arconia is a big box full of human stories, and the show is constantly shifting its attention from one apartment to another, so that a character who has previously been peripheral can suddenly become the hero of an entire episode. Martin is a serious student of European literature, and I have a sneaking suspicion that Only Murders was influenced by a reading of Georges Perec’s great novel Life: A User’s Manual – another work that peels back the outer walls of an apartment building and finds a cornucopia of stories inside.
Back in the 1970s, the keynote of Steve Martin’s humour was silliness. The silliness was an antidote to seriousness; it made sense at a time when the nightly news was all too unfunny. Now the keynote of Martin’s humour is warmth, and the warmth feels like a corrective to the coldness of an increasingly virtual world. In a divided age, the show urges us to look beyond exteriors, and see that the things we have in common run much deeper than the things that seem to separate us.
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