Comic efficiency

Mar. 3—details

—Demetri Martin: The Joke Machine

—Lensic Presents

—7:30 p.m. Friday, March 3

—Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.

—Tickets are $35-$149; 505-988-1234, lensic.org

Editor's note: The Lensic has announced that Martin's performance is postponed. Tickets will automatically be transferred to a new date, which will be announced shortly. Refunds may be requested by calling the Lensic box office at 505-988-1234.

Demetri Martin only remembers a few things about his first trip to Santa Fe: The stars seemed to hang closer to the ground than he'd ever seen before.

And he spent at least two days really sick in his hotel room.

"I remember it being beautiful. And I remember walking down the street and seeing the moon like sitting on the road," Martin says. "I remember the people being really warm, and it being a really great experience that way. The bad end that I remember is I think I might have gotten altitude sickness or something. If that's what it was."

Now, two decades after that epic case of indigestion, Martin, 49, returns to Santa Fe as a comedy headliner, and he'll be playing the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Friday, March 3. Martin has charted an enigmatic path through the industry that saw him drop out of law school and turn down an audition at Saturday Night Live in favor of chasing his own comedic muse.

He later starred in his own eponymous show on Comedy Central, Important Things with Demetri Martin, and has published collections of essays and drawings. He's also preparing for an exhibition of his paintings in Los Angeles — when he isn't touring. That exhibit, which is planned for June, is the end of a natural progression for the comedian. For decades, Martin's been obsessed with writerly economy and getting his jokes to be as punchy as possible.

Now, he wants to make you laugh without opening his mouth.

"The constraint I've given myself is to do all the works with no words," he says. "I thought it would be cool to basically do jokes without words and see if they work in that medium, which is just flat on a wall on a canvas. My fantasy was that if it's a success, you could take that show to any number of countries. You don't have to speak English to get the jokes."

Strangely enough, Martin's creative instincts originally took him in a more ornate direction. During his undergrad years at Yale University, Martin constructed a 224-word palindrome poem for a class called Fractal Geometry for Non-Mathematicians. The poem read the same backward and forward, and it swung on a line in the middle — Be still if I fill its ebb" — that formed a palindrome by itself, albeit with one extra letter.

That palindrome found its way into the early days of Martin's comedy act.

And even then, he says, he was playing word games of his own making.

"It's just the idea of a constraint imposed on the creative process and then to see how you work with the constraint," he says. "The palindrome is such a weird, restrictive constraint; it should be able to read the same forwards and backwards, and you can go as long or as short as you want. Hopefully, it kind of makes sense. But with a one-liner, I'm trying to get a joke to work, and it's fun to try to get them to be as short as possible. Now, with the paintings and drawings, I think, 'How can I get that to work without any words?'"

Martin, who grew up in Toms River, New Jersey, says that his earliest comedy role model was Steven Wright. But if he had to be more precise, he'd narrow it down to his father, Dean C. Martin, who wasn't a comedian but a Greek Orthodox priest with a flair for public speaking.

"My dad was really funny," he says. "Every Sunday, he'd give his sermon, but it wasn't fire and brimstone or quoting the Bible. He was pretty anecdotal and kind of loose in a very accessible, warm, and humanistic way. I didn't realize it at the time, but when I look back, he was kind of doing a little bit of standup — if you want to call it that — in front of the congregation every Sunday. It was an inclusive, silly but smart, and interesting way that he was funny."

Martin's career — and everything he's done in the public eye — hinged on two decisions that he made early in his professional life.

First, when he was just one year away from graduating law school at New York University, he made the weighty decision to drop out and pursue comedy full time. He was bored by the law, he says. Comedy, though, he was passionate about.

And then, after five years of working temporary jobs by day and polishing his comedy chops by night, Martin got a job writing for Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

It was a career-making job, a position that gave him a spot in the Writers Guild of America. Martin said he loved working there and that it was a comedy finishing school, but the hours were late and sometimes interfered with making further headway in the standup world.

One year into his tenure there, he made the decision to move on.

"In hindsight, it always looks a little different because things end up the way they end up. It worked out. I'm a comic," he says. "But at the time, there's no guarantee that anything is really going to pan out the way you hope. It was a big risk. And certainly tricky. There were so many unknowns. Because even as a standup, even if it works out for you, you have to keep generating material. And there's no guarantee you'll keep coming up with stuff."

Martin, who enjoyed guest starring acts on The Daily Show and Flight of the Conchords, also had an opportunity to work for Saturday Night Live around this point in his career, but he decided he wasn't able to make a commitment.

He had been fast-tracked to an audition, he says, and was preparing to go in and perform. But then, Martin says, he learned from his manager that if he succeeded, he'd be signed to a seven-year contract with SNL.

All of a sudden, he saw the same pattern playing out.

His success as a comic writer would stand in the way of his ambitions in stand-up comedy, and that was a price he wasn't prepared to pay.

"I had friends who were writing there. When I was writing at Conan, it was in the same building," he says. "It was Will Forte. Kristen Wiig. Fred Armisen. Rachel Dratch. That era. I thought it was super cool to have access to that world. But as a standup comedian just wanting to do standup, I always had to check with myself. What are you after here? What do you want? And it always came back to, 'I want to do standup and write material and perform it.'"

Eventually, Martin found an outlet at Comedy Central, where he was contracted to put together his own sketch comedy show that debuted in 2009.

Important Things with Demetri Martin ran for two seasons, and the comedian says it was an exhausting process to bring it to life.

"By the second season, I was so worn out," he says. "When the show got canned, I remember feeling relief. I was like, 'Oh God, this is not sustainable.' Some years later, I was like, 'I wish I did a third season.' I would've probably been able to enjoy the third one a little more than I did the other two."

Martin, at this point in his life, says he has a better perspective than he did a decade ago. He's learned to be more comfortable with his skills and with his limits, and now he knows that everything he makes doesn't have to be perfect. But back then, with his name on the line, it felt like a lot.

"The stakes felt really high. If this sucks, then I suck. And maybe I don't get to work again," Martin says. "Now, being older and looking back, most people don't even know about that show. It's funny to me that it mattered so much to me. And of course it should; I put a lot into it. But I kind of wish that I knew at the time that, 'Look, in 10 years there's going to be so much content and media and Comedy Central will be lost in an ocean of other streamers.'"

The last decade has seen Martin dipping his toes into even more creative endeavors. He says he's written a number of scripts for pilots, but none has come to fruition. He wrote, directed, and starred in his own feature film, Dean, in 2016, and he is working on a collection of short stories, 19 1/2 Stories, that has been delayed from completion by the pandemic.

Martin says he has a backload of comedy albums that haven't been released. He's working on one comedy special that will probably be released on Netflix in the fall. And as soon as that one comes out, he says he's going to start working on another special immediately on its heels.

"It's a nice thing that I have different things I can work at," he says. "But it's hard because it's all self-initiated. It's all like homework. And I have two kids. It's a bit of a balancing act."

Martin says that he's now lived in Los Angeles for as much time as he did back on the East Coast, and he's entering a phase of his career where he's the veteran as opposed to the youngster trying to break into the industry.

But it's not hard for him to remember a time 20 years ago when he was meeting his heroes and a little too tongue-tied to say what he wanted to say.

"He was really nice to me and everything you'd want him to be," he says of meeting Wright early in his comedy career. "He was aware of me. He knew that I had done standup. We talked about doing short jokes. And I did have enough self-awareness to tell him, 'Hey, look, you're my influence. And I know I'm too similar to you. And I'm really working on being myself.'

"But he was very gracious about it. Because comics, I think we're all very proprietary. 'This is my thing, and hey, you're doing my thing, or that's her thing. What are you doing?' But he didn't act like that."