The last time audiences heard from comedian Demetri Martin, his first feature film Dean — which he wrote, directed and starred in — was hitting the film festival circuit. Two years later, the comic has returned to his stand-up roots with The Overthinker, his second comedy special with Netflix and his fourth overall.
The return to form is rife with allusions to comedian Steven Wright and cartoonist Gary Larson, both of whom Martin has cited as seminal influences on his particular brand of deadpan comedy. While The Overthinker is indeed chock-full of one-liners, playfully hilarious drawings and deadpan jokes accompanied by a guitar and harmonica, however, it also represents the next stage in Martin’s comedy career.
His experience behind the camera on Dean has put him in league with other comedian-turned-directors, like Bobcat Goldthwait and Bo Burnham, and if The Overthinker is any indication, whatever Martin pulls out next from his “bag of ideas” may prove as revolutionary as it is funny.
Andrew Husband: Correct me if I’m wrong, but The Overthinker is the first major project you’ve released since Dean, right?
Demetri Martin: Yeah, I think that’s right.
AH: Writing, directing and starring in a feature film like Dean is obviously very different from making a stand-up comedy special. That being said, did that experience alter how you approached The Overthinker?
DM: Yes, and I actually co-directed the special. I guess they changed the rules. I was going to just direct it and I was told there was a new rule that you can’t get a director credit if you’re… They somehow worded it so basically you can’t get the director credit if you’re onstage. So this guy Jay Karas, who actually directed my specials Person and Live *at the time, was cool and said “Yeah, we’ll share the credit.” Because I wanted to do some stuff in the edit, and I had some ideas for shots going into it. So to answer your question, it did have an effect.
After making the movie, which is obviously not stand-up, it gave me a little more confidence. It made me realize a lot of this is about the edit, for me, and the choices I make with the footage. And in this case, going into the special, I wanted to get some coverage. I wanted to get a couple of shots that I knew I could use in the edit, because what I did in this special that I haven’t done before is, there’s a little bit of voiceover. You get hear my thoughts. You hear my thoughts seven or eight times in the show. I thought that could be a fun thing to add.
I thought it was a fun bit to do, where you could almost hear someone’s thoughts while they’re doing stand-up. What was interesting about it for me was that I didn’t do it on the road. I knew I wanted to do that in the edit, but I didn’t want to mess with the timing. For most comics, what we do is we just do a bunch of shows on the road and, eventually, you’re doing a dress rehearsal for your special. Then you shoot your special toward the end of the tour, because you’ve been able to refine the show and practice it a bunch. I knew I wanted to have this voiceover thing, but it’s not like the live audiences were hearing my thoughts. I was trying to find the right spots where I could have a little bit of space to do that without ruining the flow of the jokes.
AH: You say you had the idea for doing the voiceovers, the thoughts while performing, early on. How early? Did you have this idea before the tour started, or sometime during the tour itself?
DM: Well, it’s weird because I have a kind of a grab bag of ideas at home. What I do is, a lot of times I will write jokes, like sit down and write them or, since I have a treadmill desk at home, I’m usually walking in place, which is a perfect metaphor for being in Hollywood right now. I’m trying to make movies. That’s when I’m just like a gerbil in my cage here, just trying to write. So depending on what deadline is the closest, if I’m home and not on the road, I’ll get up, go to my little treadmill desk and say the jokes and the date. I’ll make myself write one page of jokes, or if I’m working on a book, I’ll try to write part of an essay or whatever thing it is that I’m doing.
So sometimes what I do is I work on ideas for ways I can spice up my stand-up a little bit, or just try something that’s a little bit experimental. I have lots of notebooks, but once I do something on the computer that becomes a Word file, and now I have a folder of this stuff. I print it all out and put it all in these binders I keep around. So if I’m making something new, I can look through these binders and say, “Oh yeah, I wanted to do a thing with voiceover, so how’s that going to work?”
AH: It almost sounds like you think about these things a lot.
DM: I didn’t have the title to the special, if that’s what you’re referring to, when I went on the tour. I didn’t know that that would quite be it. But one of my things in the grab bag was doing a voiceover. I haven’t been able to pull it off yet. In 2006, I did my first hour and that has a couple of subtitles, I guess you’d call them. They’re little notes on the bottom of the screen. That was the first time I pulled from the grab bag, and when I had my Comedy Central series, Important Things, I did it a little bit more in a couple of the live studio bits we shot.
I tend to overthink things. I think a lot of people do, but I get lost in the analysis of stuff. I wouldn’t even say it’s anxiety, so much, but it can sometimes be crippling when you’re just trying to figure out the puzzle and nobody else cares. Even when there’s not really a puzzle there. It’s just like spinning my wheels. I’ll keep asking myself why I get so stuck on one-liners, or why I like jokes so much, and it’s basically an exercise in overthinking.
AH: Your comedy specials are rife with these kinds of extra-performance moments, like when you joke about wanting to get your guitar in Live *at the time while not burdening the viewers at home with the image of you walking across the stage, so you edit it out.
DM: Yeah, you’re right. That’s something that, over the years, I’ve learned to play with. I think early on I was more worried about it because you really are kind of disrupting the rhythm of the stand-up show, but then you become very aware that you’re filming something. That this is a TV production. A Netflix production. It’s a little different than just doing the straight stand-up.
One thing that tends to work in my favor is I’ve been in this for a while now. When I had my series, I realized we would have to stop and start a lot, and I’m trying to do stand-up in this small room and transition into the next video clip or something. I learned these things should be much more fluid than some sort of formal presentation of jokes. It should be more of a conversation with the audience. People are so savvy now too, so it’s pretty cool. Even for this, it did get awkward because I asked the audience at the end, as a kind of favor, to stick around while I got some coverage.
I got coverage of some other things that didn’t make the cut, so I wasn’t sure what was going to work and what wasn’t. They did start to get a little restless, which I understand. People came, they saw a whole show and then I was standing with a cameraman onstage. Things like that can really test people’s patience. A couple people actually started to shout out things and I was like ”Okay, that’s about it. They’re going to turn on me soon.” So it was like “Thank you, good night!” and we were out.
AH: I was wondering about that, actually. There are several long cuts of you standing onstage, not saying anything, while the voiceover speaks, and I wasn’t sure if those were intentionally shot that way or not.
DM: It was a little bit of both, because that one was hard. I ended up making that thought kind of longer. I kind of sacrificed a joke. One of the jokes we cut is maybe in that footage, or maybe it’s the tag to the actual joke, because you can see me talking but you can’t hear me. I’m figured I could buy some time with it. I had a little bit of coverage already, but I definitely had to go looking around for more to fill the gaps. You can’t just stand there in front of a live audience like that, being quiet and saying nothing. People will think something’s wrong. Plus, I didn’t tell them I was going to do voiceovers until the very end.
Luckily it all worked out. I think it’s natural enough. But yeah, I had to find some other pauses. It’s nice because when you have coverage with all these cameras, you can stop a couple of times if necessary, because something went wrong or whatever. Because I’m trying to find my place. It’s weird. You’re looking at yourself. You’re looking at the footage. Sometimes in the edit, I would just look with no sound on so I didn’t get sucked in the joke or whatever was happening.
AH: On what you said about the audience growing a little restless, I imagine most audiences, especially those familiar with your previous work, know that they’re in for various odds and ends like that. They know you do drawings and play guitar, and that you might be trying something new or weird.
DM: Which I’m grateful for. I think that’s the case. When I first started it was harder. I’d get shorter spots. My sets on stage were shorter in New York, and at the same time, it was kind of an experimental time. Especially on the Lower East Side. People were trying different things, but I still didn’t really have the space to do that. Once I put a couple of specials out and had toured around the country a bunch of times, things changed. I had found my audience, which is really nice. People generally seem like they’re up for it, and grateful even.
Considering the way the world has changed, the way media has changed with social media, and the political climate, it’s weird. I’m not talking about that stuff. I never really did. It’s not what I bring to the table. I mean, it’s in my head. I’m like everybody else. I’m worried about these things. I vote and everything. But my crowds are with me, and it’s been good so far because I think people kind of know what they’re getting. I’m almost a distraction, you could say, or a break for them. I’m not going to tell you how to fix the world. These are actual jokes.
Demetri Martin: The Overthinker is now available to stream on Netflix.
