People Keep Screwing Up This Detail About Steve Martin’s Life
Steve Martin is known for being an actor, a comedian, a writer, a fancy art lover, a professional Martin Short defamer and a guy who once wrote a novel about a woman who shaves her public hair with toilet water for some unfathomable reason. But is he a member of the international smarty-pants club known as Mensa?A recent New York Times crossword clue made reference to the “elite group whose members include Steve Martin and Geena Davis.” Since “Illuminati Reptilian Overlords” didn’t fit, the answer was seemingly “Mensa,” the famed organization full of high I.Q. individuals, including at least one four-year-old and a bunch of giant creeps. Don't Miss The only problem is: Martin isn’t a member of Mensa. We know this because Martin himself took to Instagram to correct the puzzle. “Hey NYT crossword,” Martin wrote, “FYI, I’m not a member of MENSA and never have been. Just a regler guy.” While The New York Times eventually corrected the error, they aren’t the only outlet that has mistakenly claimed that Martin is a member of Mensa. CNN once reported this as fact, too. Their source? Martin’s 1997 New Yorker piece entitled “How I Joined Mensa.” Anyone who simply read the title and byline might have assumed that this was Martin’s way of bragging about his massive intellect, but it was actually a work of humorous short fiction all about, as Martin once put it, a “love affair between members of Mensa.” It’s immediately obvious that this isn’t a work of nonfiction featuring Martin’s earnest assessment of I.Q. testing. The first few lines find the narrator attempting to look up “Mensa” in the phone book before complaining about the “strict alphabetizing rules that are so common nowadays.” By the end of the story, the protagonist reveals that his name is “Ord,” which, last time we checked, is not Steve Martin’s name. In the full version of the story, published in Martin’s book Pure Drivel, the character is even more ridiculous, attempting to dial 1-800-MENSA, which “weirdly brought dead silence on the other end of the phone.” He later describes his love interest Lola as having “hair the color of rust and a body the shape of a Doric column — the earlier ones, pre-invasion.” The two spend the rest of the story talking to each other in the performatively snooty language of “Mensa-ese.” Martin was very clearly poking fun at the culture of Mensa, not confessing that he personally wanted to join them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Martin isn’t still a genius — after all, would a non-genius have been able to make the act of soiling themselves on camera quite so captivating?
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