How Disneyland’s Resident Comedian Inspired Steve Martin
In spite of the Walt Disney Company’s obvious embarrassment, Disneyland celebrated its 69th anniversary earlier this week. And while the park has obviously had a big impact on generations of happy children/exhausted adults, it’s also worth noting that it helped to shape the career of one of the most famous comic performers alive today: Steve Martin.
Famously, Martin spent weekends and summers working at Disneyland as a kid, beginning at the age of 10, because, as the comedian later speculated, “I don’t think there were any child labor laws then.”
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In addition to catching the act that later inspired Three Amigos!, Martin was also influenced by the park’s resident comedian, Wally Boag, who performed a Western-themed routine as part of the “Golden Horseshoe Revue” in Frontierland’s faux saloon.
Boag’s time at Disneyland spanned decades, from when it opened in 1955 all the way to 1982. The attraction closed just four years afterwards, but was recognized by Guinness World Records as the show with the “greatest number of performances of any theatrical production.”
Boag’s act made a huge impression on ‘lil Steve Martin. As Martin wrote in his memoir Born Standing Up, Boag was “the first comedian I ever saw in person, plied a hilarious trade of gags and offbeat skills such as gun twirling and balloon animals, and brought the house down when he turned his wig around backward. He wowed every audience every time.”
Martin also recalled how he “absorbed Wally Boag’s timing, saying his next line in my head” and “took the audience’s response as though it were mine,” confessing that his ultimate fantasy was that “one day Wally would be sick with the flu, and a desperate stage manager would come out and ask the audience if there was an adolescent boy who could possibly fill in.”
Looking back at Boag’s act, it’s not difficult to see that Martin’s eventual stand-up persona was like a postmodern riff on the Crown Prince of Disneyland’s act — from the wild gesticulations, to the use of balloon animals. Boag demonstrated this skill when he hosted The Muppet Show in 1981, after Martin introduced him to Jim Henson.
Martin has claimed that he saw Boag perform “hundreds of times,” which is a lot, but still just a small fraction of his reported 40,000 performances. In addition to the humor itself, Boag’s energy and dedication to a routine that he performed so exhaustingly frequently was also an inspiration to Martin. “I didn’t realize that, what it took to do the same show over and over and over and still make it look like you’re doing it for the first time,” Martin once revealed in an interview. “It just made me love comedy.”
When Boag died in 2011, Martin Tweeted that the comedian was his “hero.”
All in all, it’s nice to hear that working at Disneyland was a pleasant experience for someone, and not a soul-crushing nightmare that required scrubbing feces from the floor of the Pirates of the Caribbean line.
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