Martin Olson is a comedy writer, television producer, stage director and composer. He is also a playwright and poet known for comedic and unusual subject matter. Olson is best known as a "founding father" of the Boston comedy scene, as a collaborator with comedians, composers, artists and poets, and as a writer-producer of off-beat television series and stage plays.
Olson's encyclopedic satire Encyclopaedia of Hell is published by Feral House (Spring 2011); the film rights were bought by producer Andrew Lazar for Mad Chance at Warner Bros.
Olson has received an Emmy nomination and an Ace Award for television writing and two Emmy nominations for song writing.
In interviews for the Writers Guild of America, West's magazine Written By and thesop.org, Olson stated that as a child he saw the eccentric comedian Brother Theodore ranting and raving on The Merv Griffin Show, and from that moment on he knew he would be a comedy writer. Before his death in 2001, Brother Theodore became a fan of Olson's first book, Encyclopaedia of Hell (Feral House, 2011), and wrote one of the quotes on the book's dust cover.
Raised in Boston, Massachusetts (USA), Olson began writing for comedians before there were any comedy clubs in Boston. He sent pages of jokes to Rodney Dangerfield, which were returned with the same polite note scrawled at the bottom, "Sorry, Marty!" (According to his agent's press kit, years later when writing for Penn & Teller in Las Vegas, Olson produced comedy bits with Dangerfield and the two became friends.)
Olson first sold comedy material to the hosts of local "Gong Shows" which began his career as a comedy writer.
Olson started the first comedy club in Boston in 1977 with local producers Paul Barclay and Bil Downes. There, he became house piano player between acts, and also performed as a comedian for the first two years with an absurdist deadpan act. His act consisted of playing the guitar and hosting "a show within the show" that featuring other comedians as his eccentric guests. At the club every night for four years, Olson worked for and wrote with the comedians who became his friends - Lenny Clarke, Bobcat Goldthwait, Don Gavin, Jimmy Tingle, Barry Crimmins, Steven Wright, Denis Leary, Steve Sweeney, Joe Alaskey, Sean Morey and many others.
Olson and comedian Lenny Clarke became roommates in an apartment near Harvard Square where comedians from all over the country stayed while performing in their comedy club. Olson wrote for Clarke, who soon became the most popular comedian in Boston. Their apartment became known as The Barracks, a legendary hub of comedy and depravity that was the subject of a television special on Boston comedy in the 1980s, and also of the award-winning documentary on the Boston comedy scene When Standup Stood Out (2006) directed by filmmaker-comedian Fran Solomita.
Olson, the Ding Ho and Lenny Clarke's Late Showmoreless
When Barry Crimmins started the second comedy club in the Boston area, the Ding Ho, Olson became the piano player there. He began showing short films he wrote and directed. This led to Olson writing Lenny Clarke's Late Show, a late-night comedy TV series on TV-38 hosted and co-written by Lenny Clarke. This bizarre, two-hour weekly show attracted a small but dedicated cult following. After two years, however, Olson and Clarke were fired for airing two controversial segments ("News for Negroes" and "The Mentally Retarded Faith Healer" featuring Bobcat Goldthwait).
Olson took his tapes from the show and drove cross-country to San Francisco with comedian Don Gavin. There, by coincidence, the 1980 San Francisco Comedy Competition was starting up, which offered a first prize of $10,000. Olson helped Gavin audition and make it into the finals. There Olson met his future wife Kay Furtado, a writer who had been flown to San Francisco to coach another comedian in the competition. A year later they married in a ceremony in San Francisco by comedian Michael Pritchard, attended by all of the local comedians. Olson and his wife moved to Los Angeles where they raised two children, Casey Olson and Olivia Olson.
Olson's Los Angeles home became a halfway house for comedians coming to the city to perform and audition for shows. Meanwhile Olson wrote HBO comedy performance specials, became staff writer for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, wrote an award-winning series for Comedy Central in London and became head writer for many animated series voiced by his comedian friends. He was head writer for the first season of the Disney comedy series Phineas and Ferb.
Olson wrote, co-wrote or directed a number of off-beat stage plays in Los Angeles, including "The Head", "The Idiots", "I Never Knew My Father", "Torn" and "Cold Black Heart" at various theaters, including the Comedy Central Stage and the HBO Theater in Hollywood.
Impact on and Affiliations in Contemporary Comedymoreless
Specializing in writing comedy specials and staging one-man shows for comedians, Olson became producer-writer for Penn & Teller on their notorious FX variety series Penn & Teller's Sin City Spectacular.
When Olson was a staff writer for Rocko's Modern Life, director Stephen Hillenburg showed Olson a comic book called "The Intertidal Zone" that Hillenburg drew in university. Olson loved it and suggested that Hillenburg rewrite it as an undersea cartoon series for Nickelodeon, which became SpongeBob SquarePants.
Selling comedy screenplays to Dreamworks, United Artists, Touchstone Pictures, and Warner Bros., Olson was able to dedicate his time to writing and directing live stage performances in Hollywood at the HBO Theater, The Steve Allen Theater and Comedy Central Stage featuring well-known comedians and actors.
As an occasional actor, Olson has guest-starred in a live action sequence in SpongeBob SquarePants ("Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy V"), in "Don't Watch This Show" by director-comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, in the documentary When Standup Stood Out by filmmaker Fran Solomita, on The Tonight Show playing an Indian yogi with Bobcat Goldthwait, as Satan, Lord of Evil on "Adventure Time ", and in a featured role as a fundamentalist professor in the film The Anna Cabrini Chronicles by filmmaker Tawd B. Dorenfeld.
Martin Olson's brother, Thomas Olson, is a well-known comic film and stage actor, and his daughter, Olivia Olson, is a singer-songwriter, who starred and sang in the British comedy film Love Actually and plays Vanessa on the Disney comedy series Phineas and Ferb. He also played Marceline's Father on Adventure Time, in which his daughter plays the role of Marceline, the Vampire Queen.
Olson is a twice-Emmy-nominated songwriter, and Annie-nominated songwriter. He has appeared as a singer on several television shows including SpongeBob SquarePants and Phineas and Ferb. His strange satirical songs were regularly featured on many television series, including London Underground (Comedy Central), Rocko's Modern Life (Nickelodeon), "Get That Puss Off Your Face" (HBO), Camp Lazlo (CN), Penn and Teller's Sin City Spectacular (FX) and Twisted Tales of Felix (ABC). Olson wrote or co-wrote over 150 songs for Phineas and Ferb (Disney), and the theme song for "Don't Watch This Show" (Cinemax).
Olson first collaborated with song-writer Jeff Root on four albums in the mid-70's, including "Idiot's Delight" (1975) praised by Beatles producer George Martin as "the best home-recorded disc I have ever heard", and saying "it's a pity there is an ocean between us." Being provincially-minded neophytes, neither Olson nor Root gleaned that it would be a good idea to arrange a meeting with the renowned producer in England.
Music Awards:2010 Emmy Nomination for Songwriting,2009 Emmy Nomination for Primetime Songwriting,1997 Annie Award Nomination for Songwriting in an Animated Series.
