Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

By Steve Martin

Steve Martin's riveting, mega-bestselling, beloved, and highly acclaimed memoir of a life, a vocation, and an era—named one of the ten best nonfiction titles of the year by Time and Entertainment Weekly.

In the mid-seventies, Steve Martin exploded onto the comedy scene. By 1978 he was the biggest concert draw in the history of stand-up. In 1981 he quit forever. This book is, in his own words, the story of “why I did stand-up and why I walked away.”

Emmy and Grammy Award–winner, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Martin has always been a writer. His memoir of his years in stand-up is candid, spectacularly amusing, and beautifully written.

At age ten Martin started his career at Disneyland, selling guidebooks in the newly opened theme park. In the decade that followed, he worked in the Disney magic shop and the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm, performing his first magic/comedy act a dozen times a week. The story of these years, during which he practiced and honed his craft, is moving and revelatory. The dedication to excellence and innovation is formed at an astonishingly early age and never wavers or wanes.

Martin illuminates the sacrifice, discipline, and originality that made him an icon and informs his work to this day. To be this good, to perform so frequently, was isolating and lonely. It took Martin decades to reconnect with his parents and sister, and he tells that story with great tenderness. Martin also paints a portrait of his times—the era of free love and protests against the war in Vietnam, the heady irreverence of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the late sixties, and the transformative new voice of Saturday Night Live in the seventies.

Throughout the text, Martin has placed photographs, many never seen before. Born Standing Up is a superb testament to the sheer tenacity, focus, and daring of one of the greatest and most iconoclastic comedians of all time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: Nov 20, 2007
• ISBN: 9781416569749

Steve Martin

Steve Martin is one of today's most talented performers. He has had huge success as a film actor, with such credits as Cheaper by the Dozen, Father of the Bride, Roxanne, Parenthood, L.A. Story, and many others. He has won Emmys for his television writing and two Grammys for his comedy albums. In addition to his bestselling novel The Pleasure of My Company and a collection of comic pieces, Pure Drivel, he has also written a play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. He currently stars in Only Murders in the Building and lives in Los Angeles.

Book preview

Beforehand

I DID STAND-UP COMEDY for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success. My most persistent memory of stand-up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next. Enjoyment while performing was rare—enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. After the shows, however, I experienced long hours of elation or misery depending on how the show went, because doing comedy alone onstage is the ego’s last stand.

My decade is the seventies, with several years extending on either side. Though my general recall of the period is precise, my memory of specific shows is faint. I stood onstage, blinded by lights, looking into blackness, which made every place the same. Darkness is essential: If light is thrown on the audience, they don’t laugh; I might as well have told them to sit still and be quiet. The audience necessarily remained a thing unseen except for a few front rows, where one sourpuss could send me into panic and desperation. The comedian’s slang for a successful show is I murdered them, which I’m sure came about because you finally realize that the audience is capable of murdering you.

Stand-up is seldom performed in ideal circumstances. Comedy’s enemy is distraction, and rarely do comedians get a pristine performing environment. I worried about the sound system, ambient noise, hecklers, drunks, lighting, sudden clangs, latecomers, and loud talkers, not to mention the nagging concern Is this funny? Yet the seedier the circumstances, the funnier one can be. I suppose these worries keep the mind sharp and the senses active. I can remember instantly retiming a punch line to fit around the crash of a dropped glass of wine, or raising my voice to cover a patron’s ill-timed sneeze, seemingly microseconds before the interruption happened.

I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. I was not naturally talented—I didn’t sing, dance, or act—though working around that minor detail made me inventive. I was not self-destructive, though I almost destroyed myself. In the end, I turned away from stand-up with a tired swivel of my head and never looked back, until now. A few years ago, I began researching and recalling the details of this crucial part of my professional life—which inevitably touches upon my personal life—and was reminded why I did stand-up and why I walked away.

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.

Coffee and Confusion

ON A HUMID MONDAY NIGHT in the summer of 1965, after finding an eight-dollar hotel room in the then economically friendly city of San Francisco, I lugged my banjo and black, hard-shell prop case ten sweaty blocks uphill to the Coffee and Confusion, where I had signed up to play for free. The club was tiny and makeshift, decorated with chairs, tables, a couple of bare lightbulbs, and nothing else. I had romanticized San Francisco as an exotic destination, away from friends and family and toward mystery and adventure, so I often drove my twenty-year-old self up from Los Angeles to audition my fledgling comedy act at a club or to play banjo on the street for tips. I would either sleep in my VW van, camp out in Golden Gate Park, pay for a cheap hotel, or snag a free room in a Haight-Ashbury Victorian crash pad by making an instant friend. At this point, my act was a catchall, cobbled together from the disparate universes of juggling, comedy, banjo playing, weird bits I’d written in college, and magic tricks. I was strictly Monday-night quality, the night when, traditionally, anyone could get up to perform. All we entertainers knew Mondays were really audition nights for the club.

The Coffee and Confusion, ca. 1965.

I walked past Broadway and Columbus, where Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ramshackle City Lights Books was jam-packed with thin small-press publications offering way-out poetry and reissues of long-ago-banned erotic novels. Around the corner on Broadway was Mike’s Pool Hall, where bikers and hippies first laid eyes on each other, unsure whether they should beat each other up or just smoke pot and forget about it. Steps away was the hungry i, a nightclub that had launched a thousand careers, including those of the Smothers Brothers, the Kingston Trio, and Lenny Bruce, but I had to trudge on by. Just up Columbus, I passed the Condor, the first of a sudden explosion of topless clubs, where Carol Doda, in a newfangled bathing suit that exposed her recently inflated basketball breasts, descended from the ceiling on a grand piano that was painted virginal white. This cultural mélange—and the growing presence of drugs—made the crowded streets of North Beach simmer with toxic vitality.

The Coffee and Confusion was nearby on Grant Avenue, a street dotted with used-clothing stores and incense shops. I nervously entered the club, and Ivan Ultz, the show runner, slotted me into the lineup. I lingered at the back, waiting for my turn, and surveyed the audience of about fifteen people. They were arrayed in patchwork jeans with tie-dyed tops, and the room was thick with an illegal aroma. In the audience was a street poet, dressed in rags and bearded like a yeti, who had a plastic machine gun that shot Ping-Pong balls, which he unloaded on performers he didn’t like. I was still untouched by the rapidly changing fashion scene; my short hair and conservative clothes weren’t going to help me with this crowd.

Ivan introduced me. My opening line, Hello. I’m Steve Martin, and I’ll be out here in a minute, was met with one lone chuckle. I struggled through the first few minutes, keeping a wary eye on Mr. Ping-Pong Ball, and filled in the dead air with some banjo tunes that went just okay. I could see Ivan standing nearby, concerned. I began to strum the banjo, singing a song that I told the audience my grandmother had taught me:

Be courteous, kind, and forgiving.

Be gentle and peaceful each day.

Be warm and human and grateful,

And have a good thing to say.

Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike,

Be witty and happy and wise.

Be honest and love all your neighbors,

Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant.

Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus.

Be dull and boring and omnipresent.

Criticize things you don’t know about.

Be oblong and have your knees removed.

Be sure to stop at stop signs,

And drive fifty-five miles an hour.

Pick up hitchhikers foaming at the mouth,

And when you get home get a master’s degree in

geology.

Be tasteless, rude, and offensive.

Live in a swamp and be three-dimensional.

Put a live chicken in your underwear.

Go into a closet and suck eggs.

Then I said, Now, everyone, and I repeated the entire thing, adding in:

Ladies only!: Never make love to Bigfoot.

Men only!: Hello, my name is Bigfoot.

Not many people sang along.

I thought I was dead, but I wasn’t. And now, I announced, the napkin trick. Unfolding a paper napkin, I grandly displayed it on both sides, held it up to my face, and stuck my wet tongue through it. I bowed deeply, as though what I had just done was unique in the history of show business. No Ping-Pong balls came my way, only a nice curious laugh that perked up the rest of my show and seemed to make the audience think that what they were seeing might be okay.

I got word from the club’s owner, Sylvia Fennell, that the Coffee and Confusion would like to try me for a week as an opening act. Sylvia was a tough but likable New Yorker who had moved west to enter the nightclub business and whose width, height, and depth were the same measurement. She didn’t know much about show business, having once told a ventriloquist to move the dummy closer to the microphone. She was, however, savvy about the bottom line, as evidenced by a sign in the kitchen that said: ANYONE GIVING MONEY TO JANIS JOPLIN BEFORE HER LAST SET IS FIRED! AND IF THEY ARE A CUSTOMER,THEY’RE 86’ED! Later, I found out that the main reason I was hired was because I was a member of the musicians’ union, which I joined only because I thought I had to be in at least one performers’ union, and the musicians’ was the cheapest. Sylvia had been told that if she didn’t hire a union worker, pronto, the place would be shut down.

The night of my first appearance, Gaylord the bartender—the separate syllables of his name correctly described his sexual orientation and his demeanor—came to me and said it was time to start. But, I said as I waved my hand to indicate the stone-empty club, there’s nobody here. He pointed to the large window that looked onto the sidewalk, and explained that my job was to be onstage so passersby could see a show going on and be lured in. I said that I wasn’t a singer, I was a comedian, and doing comedy for absolutely no one posed a problem. So? he implied. Dave Archer, the amiable doorman, seconded him, telling me that this was the way the evening always began, so I went onstage and started talking. Talking to no one. The first couple who walked through the door did a whiplash scan of the vacant room and immediately left. But more than a few came in, looked around, saw nobody, shrugged an Oh well, and sat down, especially after Dave offered them a free coffee.

The cheapness of the place gave me some opportunity for laughs. The lights were controlled with wall switches just behind the performer. Saying I wanted a mood change, I gave an imperious order to the light man, who, the audience soon realized, was me. I reached back and twiddled the rheostat while feigning indignation.

One night I started a serious banjo tune and, sensing the audience’s boredom, stopped and said, I like to keep the laughs rolling even while I’m playing…. I reached down to my prop table and put on my arrow-through-the-head, purchased on a whim at a Hollywood Boulevard magic store, and finished the song. Then I forgot to take it off. Every earnest thing I said was contradicted and deflated by this silly novelty. Sylvia Fennell’s advice about the arrow—which was to become my most famous prop—was Lose it.

I had a strong closer, an absurdist version of a balloon-animal act in which all the balloon animals were unrecognizable. I would end up with the balloons on my head, nose glasses on my face, and bunny ears. The point was to look as stupid as possible, then pause thoughtfully and say, And now I’d like to get serious for a moment. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘Oh, this is just another banjo-magic act.’

I was contracted to be onstage for twenty-five minutes. I had a solid ten minutes, and the rest of my material was unreliable. If I got some laughs, I could almost make it, but if the audience was dead, my twenty-five-minute show would shrink to about twelve. Afraid of falling short, I ad-libbed, wandered around the audience, talked to patrons, joked with waitresses, and took note of anything unusual that was happening in the crowd and addressed it for laughs, in the hope of keeping my written material in reserve so I could fill my time quota. The format stuck. Years later, it was this pastiche element that made my performances seem unstructured and modern.

That week at the Coffee and Confusion, something started to make sense. My act, having begun three years earlier as a conventional attempt to enter regular show business, was becoming a parody of comedy. I was an entertainer who was playing an entertainer, a not so good one, and this embryonic notion drove me to work on other material in that vein.

After my last show on Sunday, I walked a few doors up to the Coffee Gallery, another Grant Avenue folk club, and sat alone in an empty showroom. On the jukebox was the haunting voice of Frank Sinatra singing …When I was seventeen, it was a very good year. Each successive stanza advanced the narrator by a decade, causing me to reflect on something I

Reviews for Born Standing Up

[estellechauvelin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Steve Martin's memoir of his stand-up career has the perfect balance of eloquence and simplicity of his novellas, short essays, and plays. He has a knack for making himself comprehensible, even somebody with whom one can identify, in spite of the fact that his readers must be nearly 100% lacking in life experiences that truly mirror his. (For that matter, has anybody really had a comparable career to Steve Martin's?) The revelations of where little nuggets of absurdity such as "happy feet" came from delight, and even reading brief snippets of his material will have you laughing out loud at them all over again.

[kacccre6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So funny and interesting. Such a complex man indeed. K

[Gregory Edwards · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have always been a fan of Steve Martin. He wore his heart on his sleeve when he wrote this. It was sad to read about the relationship he had with his family, especially his dad. I enjoy success stories and I enjoyed the struggles he had but kept plugging away to reach the top.

[Tobin Ewing · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An easy read. Well chronicled. You get a real sense of Steve the human being, not just comedian. All his bits are here. Brings back fond memories.

[John Hansen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An enjoyable read; short, sweet, and in the end, moving.

[Josh · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Surprisingly heartfelt book. I came along after Steve’s comedy but enjoyed his movies growing up. This is a very sincere epitome of his early life and career that was as enjoyable as it was funny.

[jessiqa_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a memoir of Steve Martin's career, chronicling his early life and beginnings in stand-up, right up until he made it big and moved to film. Hint: it took a lonnnng time. For example, he mentions how it's perceived that once a comic appears on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, then they've made it big. In his case it took over a dozen appearances on the program (mostly with guest hosts) before he got that ever-sought-for approval from Johnny himself.I had heard that Steve Martin was actually a pretty shy fellow, but I don't think I realized just how or how uncomfortable he really is with fame and attention. It sounds a bit ironic, considering his profession is so attention-grabbing, but it's true. He talks of jokes that worked and jokes that didn't (which still generally made me laugh). He includes his first jobs at DisneyLand, where he learn the art of perfuming magic, which he would later incorporate into is act.I listened to the audiobook, which Steve narrates, which always makes the story more immediate. Had there been any other reader, I would not have chosen the audiobook format. I listened as I walked and frequently giggled, which had to have confused anyone within earshot of me.I think anyone thinking going into stand-up should read this, not only for inspiration but to learn just how hard it is to really make it in that business. For those of us who do not wish to stand on a stage and tell jokes, it's still an excellent read, full of laughs and a few words of wisdom.

[bibleblaster · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Greatly enjoyed hearing about Steve Martin's early years and how his comedy was formed, as well as how he came to the decision that it was time to bring his stand-up routine to an end. I enjoyed his writing and his narrative voice...which inspires me to check out some of his fiction.

[d-fbuser-198234610 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Being part of the generation raised on Steve Martin's comedy, the book provides a lot of the back story I never knew about how his comedy came to exist. It is a very quick read. I read it over the lunch hour, and it got me away from spreadsheets, and helped me contain my "workaholic" nature, since I felt compelled to finish reading.

[katiekrug · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love Steve Martin, but I didn't know much about his early career as a stand-up comedian. He's very honest in this memoir about his family and the challenges he faced. I was fascinated by the description of the grind he went through to make a success of his career.

The audio is read by Martin himself.

[Kayleen Walsh Burke · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is full of interesting insights into how Steve Martin's brain works, his history and how his stand up developed. Only read if you are a fan of his.

[zot79-720973 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sometimes I think of Steve Martin like an older cousin I never met. We both lived in Garden Grove, California (I even performed on the stage of the theater at Garden Grove High School, which he attended) and we both worked at Disneyland (albeit 20 years apart). It's been fun watching him make good and this book does a good job chronicling that process, up through the beginning of his film career.

What works is that he doesn't sensationalize anything, but he doesn't shrink away from emotional issues, either. He really does seem to want to tell it like it was, successes and failures. What also comes through is the amount of persistent hard work it took to be an overnight success. He seems to personify the saying the luck is being ready to take advantage of an opportunity when it comes.

For any fan of Steve Martin, this is a must read.

[RobRubinate · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is amazing, one minute you're laughing uncontrollably the next you're sobbing. I have read this book twice and will most likely read it again. Steve Martin is brilliant

[Everett Powers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An enjoyable read, mainly because I like Steve.

[ranjr-562000 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Steve Martin's clear, direct, unadorned prose style makes for easy reading and his visual inferences are the cherry on top. This memoir of his pre and stand-up years was interesting from his start in front of Disneyland to desperately bouncing around night clubs in the pre-comedy-club era. His alienation from his parents due to an alienating home life and his re-connection with them and his sister later in life added a potent emotional core to the whole trip.

The book doesn't seem to dwell on any single incident or the narrative get bogged down in any single era or point in his life either. It moves along at a very brisk pace from aspiring guidebook sales-kid to movie-actor/retired stand-up nostalgically sifting through stowed fragments of the past. It was entertaining and vivid.

I would recommend this book to anyone even mildly interested in Steve Martin and his work (or stand-up comedians), it's an easy and enjoyable read.

[formerenglishteacher · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is now 14 years old, and in that time Martin has added to an already incredible career. “Born Standing Up” gives fans a good chance to see Martin at his most honest, humble self. It’s been rumored for years that he is a shy person, and his book proves that. I happened to have listened to the Audible version of the book, one I checked out of the local library. Listening to Martin narrate his own memoir is an additional treat. My only regret about the book is that he didn’t spend more time talking about his film career, which has been as brilliant as his stand up and skit comedy career. The one miss of all the movies he made, I think, was “It’s Complicated,” the 2009 Alec Baldwin Meryl Streep comedy where Martin was completely miscast as Adam Schaffer, Streep’s character, Jane Adler’s architect, something I think most Steve Martin fans probably agree with. “Born Standing Up” was masterfully written, no surprise from one of the best writers in the entertainment world. It was entertaining and informative to read and listen to.

[laneliterati · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Steve Martin's writing is thoughtful and witty. Young people could learn a lot about work ethic, talent and growth from this lovely memoir.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To start, I think Steve Martin is brilliant, so naturally I found his memoir of the stand up years fascinating, funny and warm. His simple but elegant writing also pleased me. I await the next installment.

[pam8enser · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had a hard time getting into this, but turned out to be entertaining. I'm glad I listened to this and I'm sorry I got my dad the actual book instead of audio for christmas. This is def a book to listen to as Steve Martin actually reads the book. It makes all the difference when you hear him do some of his comedy bits.

[karalawyer · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Wow. Big disappointment. I was hoping for some insight into this this man who was so hilarious in the 70s, yet disappeared to later reemerge as a family-friendly "light" comic actor. But this is an impossibility due to the fact that Martin seems to have little insight into himself.

His book reads like a Filofax diary of who and where and what. What's missing is any genuine humanity or emotion. Is he married today? Has kids? Who knows because it's not addressed.

He also appears to have less emotional connection to the women in his life than he did to his stage props. (I actually detected some emotion when he talked of his magic rings and arrow-through-the head prop - but I could be mistaken.)

I walk away from reading this book thinking Martin has got to be a very shallow man, and feeling duped that I found him so interesting back in his SNL days.

[foof2you · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Man of many disciplines tells us about his start into comedy. Starting with magic and working at the magic shop in Disneyland and moving on from there he tells his story. From a distant and critical father to the heights of stardom his climb was not one of an overnight success but a slow methodical climb.

[idiopathic-374092 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Struggles before and after fame

Although the book is short it is full of details. At one point I was getting tired of his listing one small venue after another. I couldn’t see the point. But when at the end he describes the transition to super stardom, to easy work and lonely life, I got it. And I got why he missed the early difficult years where he could be himself even as very few liked that self. It really is hard to be entertainer.

[sarcher-3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Covers childhood to the end of his stand-up career, with a small post-script (not labeled as such) to wrap up aspects of his family life that didn't end neatly with the end of stand-up. Real effort got put into this autobiography, setting it apart from too many autobiographies written for (take your pick): (a) the money; (b) to 'be funny'; (c) to ego-sooth. This book comes across as a real attempt at self-reflection.

[grouchygrammarian · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This was boring. How is that even possible?

[skybalon · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting in the sense that it helps one understand the work necessary to be a stand-up comedian. Not so interesting in the lack of stories about the people along the way. People are mentioned but seldom is their interaction really explored.

[cubsfan3410 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a very well written and entertaining memoir. I enjoyed it very much.

[linda.a. · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this fascinating autobiography Steve Martin reflects on his childhood, his family relationships, his early jobs in California theme parks and, following his early days as a magician, his developing career in stand-up comedy. Although he was still drawing large audiences, this was a career he walked away from in 1981 because he felt he had done as much with it as he could, didn’t want to become stale and wanted to pursue his film career.
Using rather spare, elegant prose he reflects on how, and why, he developed and honed his acts over the many years he remained on the comedy circuit. He reflected on how he coped with the contrast between performing in small, intimate clubs, in front of tiny audiences when he first started out, to performing to audiences numbering in the tens of thousands in huge, cavernous venues.
It soon became clear that his approach to comedy was in many ways very analytical and professional and that his apparently rather zany, spontaneous persona was a careful construct. One of the fascinations of his reflections was being able to trace how disillusioned and constrained he began to feel over the years, and why he eventually decided to step away from this particular outlet for his talents.
It felt sad, although not altogether surprising that, whatever his successes, he suffered badly from anxiety attacks, hypochondria and phobias over the years. He wrote of his estrangement from his family, his very strained relationship with his father and the gradual building of bridges which took place over the years. However, I felt that his analysis of these fractured relationships was, for the most part, lacking any real emotional input. He comes across as a rather shy and very private man, one who is prepared to go only so far in sharing who he is. There were times when I was reading that I felt he was yearning for more intimacy in his relationships and yet the professional demands he put on himself ensured that he couldn’t achieve this.
The book features lots of photographs, from early family ones to those taken when he was performing. Apart from being a very enjoyable addition to my reading, many of them added an extra layer of insight because they seemed to capture the man behind the mask of comedy. I also enjoyed the way in which he so evocatively captured the rapidly changing world of the 1960s and 70s – so many memories came flooding back of the “peace and love” and “flower-power” culture of the time!
I’m not usually inclined to read celebrity autobiographies but read this one because it was given to me by a friend who was aware that I enjoy Steve Martin’s work. I’m very pleased that I did, even though I am left with a sense of sadness about this highly complex, talented performer who gives so much pleasure to so many people.

[booksfordinner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent, straight forward bio. Very honest (as much as we can tell it seems) and very kind to almost everyone he mentions in the book. Even himself sometimes. Would have loved to hear more about his movies, but I guess that's another book!

[2wondery_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyable, but not outstanding. It was still a pleasure to be in Martin's company for a bit.

[widsith_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I remember watching The Sunday Show in 1996 when Dennis Pennis buttonholed Steve Martin at a red carpet do somewhere – ‘Steve! Steve! Just one question—’ and then as Martin leaned in expectantly: ‘How come you're not funny anymore?’

He looked genuinely distraught as he turned away (in fact it later emerged that he had cancelled all his press engagements as a result), but the trajectory he was on is one that's become familiar – from live stand-up to film comedies, and from film comedies to more bittersweet roles, and finally to worthy passion projects. We can admire Steve Martin the banjo virtuoso like we can admire Hugh Laurie the pianist, but the primary feeling is one of tolerance rather than enthusiasm. In our heart of hearts we want Steve to put on a white suit and wear an arrow through his head, just like we want Hugh to be eternally getting punched in the face by Rowan Atkinson.

Like it or not, they're past all that, and the perspective is an important one for this book. Comedians frequently refer to Born Standing Up as the finest memoir of its kind, but the most striking thing about it is that – unlike a lot of stand-up memoirs I've read – it is not the analysis of a working comic about how their act has been honed, but rather the reflections of someone looking back in a tone of melancholy forbearance on a distant period of their youth. Sometimes, typing out his performance notes from the 70s, he seems unsure of the jokes, and eventually admits to the reader that he no longer gets the material.

At his prime, though, in the late 1970s, Steve Martin changed everything, inventing a new kind of stand-up comedy based on absurdist nonsequiturs, exuberant physical gags, and a constant, simmering hilarity which had been stripped of punchlines so that the audience was never allowed to release the tension. Watching him gradually arrive at this style, by fortuitous increments and occasional ‘intuitive leaps’, is fascinating, although it's told rather dispassionately, without any of the thrill that must have accompanied it at the time.

More vivid are his descriptions of the banal exigencies of touring, the exciting anonymity of life on the road and the exposure it gave him to different oddball characters – and girls, of whom he seems to have had one in every port. He is rather charming on this subject.

One night I opened the show for Linda Ronstadt; she sang barefoot on a raised stage and wore a silver lamé dress that stopped a millimeter below her panties, causing the floor of the Troubadour to be slick with drool. Linda and I saw each other for a while, but I was so intimidated by her talent and street smarts that, after the ninth date, she finally said, “Steve, do you often date girls and not try to sleep with them?” We parted chaste.

You can see that Martin is graceful enough to recognise the primary reason people read autobiographies, namely to find out who you were sleeping with back in the day. This winning anecdote, from his days of obscurity, contrasts interestingly with another story from some chapters later, when, now as the most famous comedian on the planet, he tries to take someone out on date.

After the salad course, she started talking about her boyfriend.
“You have a boyfriend?” I asked, puzzled.
“Yes, I do.”
“Does he know you're out with me?” I asked.
“Yes, he does.”
“And what does he think of that?”
“He thinks it's great!”
I was now famous, and the normal rules of social interaction no longer applied.

The distance Martin, as writer, has from his material may be a little disconcerting at times, but it does allow him to organise and streamline his material without getting distracted. He stopped doing stand-up overnight and – he says – never looked back once until he sat down to write this book. He should look back more often, because this is a joy to read – I just bought it a few hours ago in a bookshop outside Detroit, and I've bombed through the whole thing in a single afternoon. He may not be funny anymore, at least not in the same way, but his creativity and wit haven't gone anywhere.