Comedian Demetri Martin spoke to the Voice earlier this week about his joke-creation process, comedy, and the upcoming second season of his Comedy Central show, Important Things with Demetri Martin.
How is Important Things different than your other work, such as Taking Woodstock?
[Taking Woodstock] was really challenging because … that was the first time that I had to interpret someone else’s work … [With] television I have a little more control, so I like that part of TV more. But the part I like about film more is that it moves at a different pace, and in that pace it seems that you have a little bit more time to figure out what you’re doing.
Do you think there’s a certain direction that comedy is going in, because Comedy Central has so many different types of comedy?
I think I spend so much time doing comedy that I kind of check out of it and I don’t watch that much … I try not to watch TV, and even on the internet I try to avoid comedy stuff, so ironically maybe I don’t know that much about what direction stuff’s going in.
What kind of influence do you feel that music has on a set of jokes?
You know, the first time I thought of putting music in with comedy … [it was to] punctuate the different things … so that if I were telling a story and I wanted it to have a little bit more of a sadder tone, I thought maybe if I put a certain type of music under it, it would give an emotional context to the story.
Do you write your jokes with a specific audience in mind?
When I think of a joke, … it’s just a question of, would anybody else find funny an idea that I find funny? But audience-wise it’s hard to get a handle on who your audience even is. When I tour I try to meet people after shows … so I can get a sense of who’s coming out, but in the end I don’t think I can do anything beyond what I find is funny.
How do jokes about small, everyday things come to you?
Usually it’s something that’s frustrating me or like, interrupting my daily pattern. There’s probably a joke in it, and I don’t see it as a joke, I just see it as an annoyance … So if I kind of switch my perspective, I can look at it as an opportunity … Sometimes I make believe that, like if you were from another planet and you just didn’t know anything that’s going on here, what would you conclude?
Do you have any new palindromes for this season?
I’m not putting that many on the show, but … one of the ones that I like that I came up with a while ago was “snub no man, nice cinnamon buns.”
