Steve Martin: The Jerk Might Get ‘Knee-Jerk Reaction’ if Released Today
Veteran actor and comedian Steve Martin sat down with the Hollywood Reporter to discuss his being selected for the American Film Institute’s 43rd Life Achievement Award, which he’ll receive on Thursday, June 4. The ceremony will be broadcast later in June on TNT.
Good for Steve! However, the interview gets interesting when Martin discusses whether or not his 1979 comedy classic The Jerk would ever work for a modern audience — considering his portrayal of a white man raised by an African-American family of sharecroppers in the South.
Indeed, how would contemporary audiences react to the film’s premise, give the recent Baltimore protests over the death of Freddie Gray and related events, past and present? As for Martin, he suspects the response wouldn’t be that bad:
I haven’t looked at The Jerk in a long time. But looking back, everyone was treated with such respect, and we had that fabulous opening with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee singing on the porch, two very well-known blues artists. You might get a kind of knee-jerk reaction, but it would be hard to get a verdict in court against it.
Nothing more than a “knee-jerk reaction,” according to the comedian. Maybe that’s true, given just how respectful Martin was (or, at least, claims to be) during the making of the film. Plus, there the fact that the character’s known by the title, The Jerk, which helps contextualize everything that happens in the film.
The problem, according to Martin, is the Internet — specifically in that it grants everyone near-immediate access to things they wouldn’t otherwise have, which are almost always out of context. For example, Trevor Noah‘s tweets:
It’s hard, but that’s the Internet. When you put something on TV or in a club, it doesn’t seem to have the same shock value that it gets on the Internet, which is really a good reason to stay off the Internet.
Martin himself was once an avid tweeter, but as he tells THR, “I’ve cut back, way back…there’s a lot of grief on Twitter and the Internet, and I just cut back to do other things.”
Not only a good idea, but probably good advice to follow. Too bad I’m terrible at taking advice.
[h/t the Hollywood Reporter]
[Image via Universal]
