Sometimes it takes serious pain to get into the funny business.
That’s something familiar to Demetri Martin, the star of Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock,” which opens Friday, and better known as a stand-up comic and overlord of “Important Things with Demetri Martin” on Comedy Central. The second season will air early next year.
By most measures, Martin was a serial do-gooder at Yale (Class of ’95). He served on the Yale College Council, ran a soup kitchen and started a youth group with a Greek Orthodox church. He was on track to become a lawyer, a goal he formed as far back as the 7th grade.
“I thought I had it pretty well figured out,” he says.
But when his father died in his junior year at age 46 of kidney cancer, Martin began to unconsciously reconsider his path.
“Seeing your dad die so young is a very dramatic reminder of how short life is,” he says. “You get to this point where you’re making a bigger life decision. It puts it in a weird perspective. What am I doing here? I’m gonna die just like everyone else, so how can I improve the quality of my experience now? What activities do I like doing? When you lose a parent at a young age, you can’t help but feel that that’s part of your destiny.”
His destiny also included stints writing for Conan O’Brien and Jon Stewart as he built his identity with oddball one-liners, sketching-enhanced punch lines and musical numbers. Signs that perhaps he would not be an Ivy League-groomed barrister crept up during his four years in New Haven.
Before Martin, now 36 and living in New York City, ascended to making strangers bust a gut as a profession, he had to break his mother’s heart by announcing that he was quitting NYU Law School a year short of graduation.
Only recently did Martin feel closure on the matter. As he tells it, he glided through midtown traffic in a cab with his mother one day, and she said, “Could you imagine being a lawyer?”
Martin finds himself carrying nearly every frame of “Taking Woodstock,” the dramatized memoir adaptation of an aspiring painter named Elliot who in his own little way helped bring about history’s most influential rock concert.
Talk about your wacky trips, man. Martin’s film experience was limited to one-day walk-ons. His break came about when the daughter of screenwriter and producer James Schamus showed her dad a clip of Martin on YouTube. Schamus, a longtime Ang Lee collaborator, invited Martin for a meeting and then an audition.
“I started hearing his voice,” Schamus said. “I started writing for Demetri.”
Despite zero thespian training and infinite misgivings, Martin hitched along for the ride.
“These guys have a lot of experience, so they must see something in my demeanor that they could work with,” he says. “Very rarely in life as a grown-up do you get to do a kind of new professional task, a whole new set of moves. It’s a rare opportunity.”
Again faced with the unexpected, Martin killed, as they say in comedy.
Co-star Liev Schreiber said, “I think Demetri’s a neurotic person, and I think that worked for him.”
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Taking Woodstock (R)
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Who’s in it: Demetri Martin, Liev Schreiber, Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Eugene Levy
What it’s about: Newly out gay artist Elliot (Martin) talks his neighbor into renting out his dairy farm to the Woodstock concert promoters.
Worth watching?
“This is the way we should remember Woodstock — a sea of people, a river of mud, a mountain of garbage and a whole lotta love.” ROGER MOORE, ORLANDO SENTINEL
