Ask Lemmy

This is probably well known to many, but Steve Martin was a professional musician, magician and TV series writer before more commonly being known as a standup comic, actor, comedian, and later, film writer. Not to mention:

Inspired by his philosophy classes, Martin considered becoming a professor instead of an actor-comedian. Being at college changed his life.

It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!' Then it gets real easy to write this stuff because all you have to do is twist everything hard—you twist the punch line, you twist the non sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up.

Martin recalls reading a treatise on comedy that led him to think:

What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. --WP