Jackie Martling stars in 'Joke Man,' new streaming documentary

Comedian Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling, former head writer for radio legend Howard Stern until their falling out in 2001, lives in Bayville, in a house he’s dubbed Jokeland. “There's not a person in Bayville that doesn't know where I live,” he says jauntily by phone while on a family vacation on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

His life is an open book, literally: He wrote the 2017 autobiography “The Joke Man: Bow to Stern.” In the new documentary “Joke Man” — debuting Tuesday on digital platforms including Apple iTunes, Google Play, Vudu and Xbox — he bares even more, also literally: Some of the final shots are of Martling stepping out from a nighttime skinny-dip in the Long Island Sound near his home, with only his hands keeping his modesty relatively intact.

“I'm 75, and who cares, you know?” the Mineola-born and East Norwich-raised Martling says with a chuckle. “All of our lives were a picture window for 15 years on the Stern show,” he notes of himself and compatriots including Artie Lange, “Stuttering John” Melendez and Billy West — some of the very few from Stern’s circle who braved an appearance in filmmaker Ian Karr’s feature. “And I've been running around shooting off my mouth since I was a kid. The whole world knows a lot about me, and I think it's an interesting tale to tell. It tells people, ‘Keep at what you're doing and persevere and don't give up’ — that you can get a lot luckier if you walk outta the basement and go try and do something.”

Karr — formerly the co-host of Martling’s post-Stern, 2007-14 SiriusXM radio show “Jackie’s Joke Hunt” — also is among those interviewed here, along with disparate others ranging from Willie Nelson, Sean Young, Penn Jillette and Mark Cuban to Martling’s girlfriend, ex-wife, niece, nephew and sister. The documentary presents a man obsessed with making people laugh, who eschews anecdotal, observational, topical or even prop-based humor to simply tell jokes. Martling brags of a preternatural ability to remember every joke he’s ever heard, and, even granting the gift of hyperbole, he does possess what seems an endless well.

“All I've always tried to do is make people laugh,” he says by phone. “That's the thing I like to do, and I accomplish it. Do I wish I would've been a superstar? I guess. But I wouldn't have wanted to change paddles in the middle of the river and all of a sudden stop telling jokes. And I don't want to talk about, 'Oh, I had a rough upbringing’ or ‘My mother was too nice’ or ‘My father was mean.’ I want to tell a punchline and have somebody double over.”

And when he says he’ll do that “whether it's one person or a hundred people or 3,000 people,” he means it: Parts of the documentary take place around a breakfast table as he tells stories to a handful of presumed friends or neighbors — and who are actually an audience, recruited just for this film.

“I told my friend Ron Barba,” an actor-comedian, “to bring some people that, like, are Stern fans, but not the kind that would know everything about me,” Martling says. “So if I tell ’em a few stories, they haven't heard this stuff before. Those people wouldn't have been sitting at my table unless we put ’em there to film ’em — they didn’t just happen by!”