Steve Martin's Pleasure of My Company - Book Review

Steve Martin starred in The Jerk, one of the funniest and most successful comedies in history. It's consistently ranked in the top 100 comedies of all time by movie magazines; it's sometimes ranked in the top 20. The 1979 film was hilarious.

In The Pleasure of My Company (2003), Martin has written an amusing novel that is at times poignant. It was a New York Times Bestseller. The book cover describes it as the chronicle of a neurotic yearning to break free.

Set in Santa Monica, it begins with Martin's disappointment over being rejected by Mensa (a genius society) because of a simple error.

"This all started because of a clerical error."

"Without the clerical error, I wouldn't have been thinking this way at all; I wouldn't have had time. I would have been preoccupied with the new friends I was planning to make at Mensa, the international society of geniuses. I'd taken their IQ test, but my score came back missing a digit. Where was the 1 that should have been in front of the 90? I fell short of genius category by a full fifty points, barely enough to qualify me to sharpen their pencils. Thus I was rejected from membership and facing a hopeless pile of red tape to correct the mistake."

At times Martin sets a tone that seems to delve into realism: "I wondered if the reason that I was crazy, the reason that I had no job, that I had no friends, was so at this particular moment of my life I could leave town on a whim with a woman and her baby, saying goodbye to no one, speeding along with no attachments to earth or heaven." Even in moments like this I found myself having a melancholy chuckle.

Whenever I think of Martin in The Jerk I start laughing. And that's not to mention the Saturday Night Live skits that were a riot.

How do you follow performances like that? They are tough to match, but Martin does so with Pleasure of My Company. In classical Martin wit he writes:

"Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events. Like the morning the toaster popped up just as a car drove by with Arizona plates. Connection? Or coincidence? Must the toaster be engaged in order for a car with Arizona plates to come by? The problem, of course, is that I tend to behave as if these connections were real, and if a car drives by with plates from, say, Nebraska, I immediately eyeball the refrigerator to see if its door has swung open."

Martin understands Wilder's adage that brevity is the soul of wit-the book is only 163 pages. Time spent reading it is time well spent.