The Jerk

Steve Martin is one of the few comics clever enough to come up with a story about an awkward white guy born a poor black child. His character, Navin, can't quite clap to the rhythm of the gospel music his family loves so much and he usually prefers Twinkies and tuna sandwiches to his mother's fried chicken. And so he finally tells his mother that he feels as if he doesn't belong in the family, to which his mother, played by Mabel King, finally relinquishes a simple fact: that he was left on their doorstep as a child and they've raised him ever since. "You mean I'm gonna stay this color forever?" he asks in shock. But his mother assures him that she would love him even if he were "the color of a baboon's ass." Still, he needs to explore the outside (of Mississippi) world; he takes his father's advice (the Lord loves a working man...and don't trust whitey) and sets off. This is how "The Jerk" opens.

From there he comes across a wide variety of characters, including a circus daredevil named Patty (Catlin Adams), whom he writes about to his family--"My friend Patty promised me a blow job." What a kind soul she is, Natin's naive family says out loud.  Navin is a character so stupid yet so content and kind. He's Chaplin's Tramp, only less politically correct and more sexually aroused. (The Tramp never asked his ladies if they would imagine him the next time they slept with their boyfriends.) He has a desire to "be somebody" and is excited when he has accomplished this task by appearing in the phone book. From the beginning, we are audience to Martin's remarkable comfort for a total embrace of awkwardness. His movement, seemingly so difficult for anybody else but undoubtedly easy for him, fits perfectly.

Unfortunately, the humor becomes too obnoxious at times. Most audiences probably found the obnoxiousness of some scenes--like the shooting cans moment and the scene where Navin insists he doesn't need anything (except for essentially every item he passes on the way, including a chair and remote control)--to be the high points of the film. To me, they were not. But I did enjoy Martin's performance, which set the stage obviously for the rest of his movie career. I also liked its Mel Brooks-style bravery and desire to make audiences squirm in a fashion Sasha Baron Cohen now utilizes. I also appreciated that Martin and director Carl Reiner understood that it was sometimes necessary to slow down the tempo (something quite a few comedies fail to do today), as was the case with his sweet scene with Martin and Bernadette Peters singing "Tonight You Belong to Me."

There's something thought-provoking about much of Martin's work (though I couldn't figure out any allegorical meaning behind the cat juggling scene and now don't think I was supposed to). Martin is America's famous philosophical comedian; an Emmy-winner by age 23, a man who spared himself of the celebrity drug excess of the 1970s, and while it may be a while since "The Jerk," "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," and "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," he is still remarkable, even if he's the straight man in a romantic comedy like "It's Complicated." On a personal level, it was one of the great joys of my life to direct a production of his play, "WASP," at university. A comedian acting as a rock star, with a combination of philosophical absurdism, fake hubris, and downright sophomoric silliness, Steve Martin is, as Steve Carell humorously put it, a national treasure.