Steve Martin Swam Across His Audience in an Empty Pool

The show was over, and the audience would not go home. So Steve Martin walked them out of the building, found a drained swimming pool, told everyone to climb in, and swam across the top of them. It is a story Martin has told himself, on public radio and in his memoir.

The Crowd That Would Not Leave

Martin told the story to NPR's Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 2008, while talking about his memoir Born Standing Up. He was playing a college practice theater, a classroom with a stage at one end. It had small wings but no exit from them, so the only way out was through the audience.

He finished his act and said it was over. "And they still sat there," he told Gross. He packed up his things and decided they were simply not going to leave.

Talking All the Way Out

So he walked out through the audience, talking. "I have no idea what I was saying," he said, "but talking."

The crowd followed him into the hallway while he worked through a small repertoire of lines. Then they all ended up outside. He told Gross it was the first time he had ever done it.

Everybody Into the Pool

Then he came across a swimming pool that had been drained. He told everybody to get into the pool, and they all did. Next he told them he was going to swim over the top of them, and they stiff-armed him over their heads.

The Night He Went Home Happy

Martin called it "a kind of a wild night, at least for then," and he places it in the early 1970s. "I went home that night and I thought, oh, something happened that was good," he told Gross.

Born Standing Up, published in 2007, covers the 18 years Martin spent as a stand-up comic before he walked away from the stage.