Cruelty to Animals

FOR A COMEDIAN who isn't funny, Steve Martin has made quite a career for himself With the money he's made from Saturday Night Live, movie appearances, and records, you'd think he could finally afford to hire writers to make his material funny, but no--Martin is an individualist, and insists on continuing his frantic pursuit of the banal on his own.

His latest offering to an adoring public, Cruel Shoes--this pissant of a volume--is a milestone of the publishing industry; the perfection of the minimalist approach to writing. We have what is, ostensibly, a book. It's nicely bound, has an attractive cover, and won't fall apart when you pick it up; some high-priced graphic designer took a lot of time designing its contents, its fuzzed-out photos, well-spaced lines and wide margins. The choice of typeface is tasteful.

But the words--those words! There are more of them in a 25* comic book, and funnier, too. For your $6.95, you get 125 pages, many occupied by identical-looking photos, the rest as underpopulated as the Gobi Desert.

Martin can't sustain one narrative idea for more than two of even these decimated pages, anyway. And, unlike his stage appearances, he can't just spreadeagle and say "Excuuuuse me!" when things go wrong. Even so, you had a right to expect more from Martin's book. Maybe one funny piece. Or one funny line.

But his style precludes that. Even when he gets a potentially funny idea, he puts it in his title, warning you, and then decapitates any rising titter by tacking some flat line at a moment when a curious twist or jab might have released a legitimate laugh. Martin bypasses the sublime, hurtles through the ridiculous and lands with a splat in the pitiful.

Here, for example, in its entirety, is "Cruel Shoes," called "the hilarious title piece" in the book-jacket blurb:

Anna knew she had to have some new shoes today, and Carlo had helped her try on every pair in the store. Carlo spoke wearily. "Well that's every pair of shoes in the place."

"Oh, you must have one more pair..."

"No, not one more pair....Well, we have the cruel shoes, but no one would want..."

Anna interrupted, "Oh yes, let me see the cruel shoes!"

Carlo looked incredulous. "No, Anna, you don't understand, you see, the cruel shoes are..."

"Get them!"

Carlo disappeared into the back room for a moment, then returned with an ordinary shoebox. He opened the lid and removed a hideous pair of black and white pumps. But these were not an ordinary pair of black and white pumps; both were left feet, one had a right angle turn with separate compartments that pointed the toes in impossible directions. The other shoe was six inches long and was curved inward like a rocking chair with a vise and razor blades to hold the foot in place.

Carlo spoke hesitantly, "...Now you see why...they're not fit for humans..."

"Put them on me."

"But..."

"put them on me!"

Carlo knew all arguments were useless. He knelt down before her and forced the feet into the shoes.

The screams were incredible.

Anna crawled over to the mirror and held her bloody feet up where she could see.

"I like them."

She paid Carlo and crawled out of the store into the street.

Later that day, Carlo was overheard saying to a new customer, "Well, that's every shoe in the place. Unless, of course, you'd like to try the cruel shoes."

What does one do, faced with an entire volume of such curiously written items? You might ask what Martin or anyone else finds funny about them. There's a flat-footed doggedness to the way Martin takes tired jokes and tries to recycle them. Unfortunately, he has lost the ability to write a punch-line, and in Cruel Shoes he frequently gets around that simply by reprinting the title of the piece at the end--but this time, in italics. Witness "The Children Called Him Big Nose":

The innocent cruelty of children is something each of us has to face. Their simple honesty sometimes compliments, but more often hurts us. Each person has to accept the verdict of the children, and know that they are right. For example, a friend of ours is known to the children as "big nose." They refer to him in the most casual manner, "Big nose, pass the butter," or "Thank you for the dolly, big nose!" Although he doesn't show it, I think secretly inside he is hurt by it. The adults, of course, tactfully call him "abundant nose," and even young Thomas just out of high school has the courtesy to call him simply, "The Nose."

O, sometimes I wonder why children can't be born with an innate sense of respect. But at least one person has learned something about himself, because the children called him big nose.

The closest approaches to the humorous Martin's eccentric orbit makes are when he delves into scatological jokes. This fertile soil, tilled years ago by satirists as nimble as Jonathan Swift, most often supports the locker room ho-ho's of nine-year-olds and Mel Brooks. Martin could take lessons from them; even his toilet humor festers.

Reading this book can induce paranoia. You'll sit there, turning pages, wondering why you're not laughing, wondering whether it's something wrong with you and not Steve Martin, wondering whether the editors at Putnam have really lost it this time, hoping that the next two-page piece will be a little better.

It won't. Cruel Shoes's degenerative disease is one that reaches the speech centers of the brain before it finally kills off the victim, and the end of the book wanders off into a cloud of incoherent poetry. Whether it's serious stuff or deliberate satire of high-school literary pretense, only Martin and his confessor know. Here's an example:

Several hours later, and quite significantly so we were quiet; again we were quiet, (more than before)

The horror, the horror.

In the end, this book may leave you a little scared. There are people out there who did find it funny, whose patronage has brought it near the pinnacle of the New York Times Bestseller List. You can't know whether they're the harmless people who make Disney World profitable or the types who giggle as they pull wings off dead flies in their basements.