Jackie Martling Interview Also Known From Howard Stern Show

By Alysia Stern | July 20, 2015

“The Jackie Martling Show”  is now LIVE 8pm every Monday at Broadway Comedy Club, 318 West 53rd St. in Manhattan’s theatre district. The shows will be taped and integrated into a web series. Everyone in attendance, as well as the people whom are there, will be encouraged to come on stage and tell a joke(s), which will garner them laughs or prizes or both … as well as a very memorable experience.

Incase you didn’t know, Jackie is also a songwriter as well as a comedian. Among his best-known songs are “Flies”, “The Pot Song”, “The Beer Song”, and “Fool’s Gold.” He has been a stand-up comic since 1979. Jackie started on the radio with Howard Stern in 1983. He is a writer, and an actor. He has appeared in motion pictures and on prime time television shows.  Check out his reel:

 

I asked for a moment to sit with the legendary comedian Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling to ask him a few questions.

Do you have any Hobbies outside of comedy?

I’ve been a guitar player and a songwriter for a vey long time, with little evidence. I love to garden, and I love meeting and sharing show business stories with anyone & everyone. If that sounds a bit narrowcast … well, it is.

Were you a jokester in elementary school?

In my Eighth Grade class photo, I’m sitting in the front flipping the bird. Enough said.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently working on my autobiography, which has been an unending project … six decades of tales, with only twenty-six letters to tell them. I Tweet a joke every day at 4:20pm, so if you’d like to see them, follow me on Twitter,@JackieMartling

To get on The JokeLand E-Mail List, simply drop me an e-mail: jokeland@aol.com

  Yankees or Mets?

Yankees. There were no Mets in the 50’s. My father was politically connected, as is every person on Long Island, so we went to lots of Yankee games and lots of World Series games.  Of course now I love both, and get to a few games a year. Nothing quite like it.

  Now tell me about the Friars softball …what position do you play or do you just tell jokes on the sidelines?

I play right-center and last game I walked twice and scored a run. Yes, we tell jokes. We eat at the Friars Club after the games and it’s indescribably delicious. To be honest, I’m not the ballplayer I was, and back then I really wasn’t, either.

Boxers or briefs?
I never looked.

I love the way your entertainment fits every age group. What made you want to make GrossMaster Jr. and the JokeMaster Jr. to entertain children?

    In 2001, an electronics company enlisted me to make joke gadgets … we wound up with fifteen, of all shapes and sizes, and they’re all a hoot.  The company went under in 2008 … anyone interested in raising the Phoenix?    … along the way we realized we should make a joke toy(s) for kids. I recorded the jokes for the JokeMaster Jr. and then sped them up a bit, to give them the “Munchkin effect,” and kids flipped for them.Then we made the GrossMaster, all poop and fart and disgusting jokes and noises that kids flip for, again with the “Munchkin effect,” and sure as can be, they flipped for that, too.

The gadgets are no longer available, except one-Bay, but all of the JokeMaster Jr. kids’ jokes and the GrossMaster jokes, both for anyone 3-to-all ages as far as I’m concerned, are available from Oglio Records on iTunes & Amazon.

What advice would you give an up and coming actor or comedian?

Quit.  Jackie Tells Jimmy Fallon To Bag It

After I started to get well-known, in the early Eighties, after about the zillionth person came up to me and said, “I want to be a comedian, what should I do?,” I came up with a stock response. I’d say, “Give up. You haven’t got a chance. Forget it.”  Which is not intended to be at all mean … but because if me saying “don’t do it” is enough to stop you, or even give you pause, you shouldn’t go for it … because you’re going to hit so, so many hurdles on your way to becoming a comedian than me telling you to give up. It was meant to be kind of a first test … do you really want to do it?

Around 2007, in her daily column in The New York Post, Cindy Adams quoted Matt Damon saying, “People are always telling me they want to be an actor. I tell them it’s too hard, don’t bother. Hey, if that stops them in their tracks, they’re not cut out for it.”

Again in the Fall of 2013, in a Q&A atThe Gold Coast Film Festival, Sean Young was asked the same question and responded the same way, with the same explanation. Great minds. After Jimmy Fallon became a cast member of Saturday Night Live in 1999, he was soon cast in the film “Almost Famous” and when it was about to be released he called in to The Howard Stern Show to promote it. He had never been on Howard’s show, so both he and Howard were excited to talk. Jimmy said, “I met you guys years ago, Howard. I’m from Albany, and when you guys came up to the capital when you were thinking of running for Governor, I went to the bar of the hotel where you guys were staying, hoping to meet you. Of course Jackie was in the bar. I went up him and told him I was going to try to become a comedian, and he told me to quit.”

That’s all Howard needed to hear. Forget about me getting in one syllable of my reasoning for saying it. I never heard the end of how I tried to stifle a great talent and what a loser I was for doing it. Jimmy and I have laughed about it for years. He even swears that one fine day we’ll relate the story on his tv show.

Find Jackie Here;

http://www.jokeland.com/