Steve Martin

Steve Martin: The Comedian Who Quit at the Top

In 1981 Steve Martin was the biggest stand-up comedian in America, filling stadiums in a three-piece white suit, with two platinum comedy albums and a novelty single about Tutankhamun that had sold a million copies. He walked away and did not perform stand-up again for thirty-five years. His explanation was characteristically cold-eyed: "My act was conceptual. Once the concept was stated, and everybody understood it, it was done."

Waco, Disneyland, and a Distant Father

Stephen Glenn Martin was born on August 14, 1945, in Waco, Texas, and raised Baptist in Inglewood and then Garden Grove in Orange County. His father, Glenn, sold real estate and wanted to act; his mother, Mary Lee Stewart, kept the home. Glenn was stern and withheld affection, substituting gifts for warmth, and Martin has said his teenage feelings toward him were "mostly of hatred." His first sight of performance was watching his father work as an extra at the Callboard Theater in West Hollywood.

From 1955 he sold guidebooks at the newly opened Disneyland, and by 1960 he was working the Magic Shop in Fantasyland under Wally Boag, learning card tricks, juggling and balloon animals and performing for tips. It is the single most useful biographical fact about him: the vaudeville toolkit came first, and the irony was layered over it later.

Philosophy, and the Death of the Punchline

After high school he took drama and English poetry at Santa Ana College, studied philosophy at California State University, Long Beach, and transferred to UCLA in 1967, where he switched to theatre. The philosophy stuck. "Something about non-sequiturs appealed to me," he said. "You start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic!'" From that came the defining formal decision of his career: comedy without the setup-and-punchline structure that had organised American stand-up since vaudeville, replaced by absurd assertions, physical business, banjo, balloon sculptures of abstract concepts and juggling routines performed with stuffed toys.

He dropped out at twenty-one. A former girlfriend, Nina Goldblatt, got him a writing job on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, where head writer Mason Williams initially paid him out of his own pocket. In 1969, at twenty-three, that job won him an Emmy.

The Stadium Years

Through the mid-1970s Martin became a fixture on The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, where his appearances added a million viewers and where he popularised air quotes; he has appeared on 27 episodes and hosted sixteen times. Let's Get Small went platinum in 1977 and put "Excuse me" into national circulation; A Wild and Crazy Guy reached No. 2 in 1978. Both took Grammys. The white suit was suggested by his girlfriend Eve Babitz, who helped shape the persona. The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin later caught the trick precisely, calling Martin "both a consummate entertainer and a glib, knowing parody of a consummate entertainer."

Hollywood

The Jerk, which he co-wrote and Carl Reiner directed, cost roughly $4 million in 1979 and took more than $100 million. Determined not to be typecast, Martin then spent months learning tap for Pennies from Heaven in 1981, which flopped; "I don't know what to blame," he said, "other than it's me and not a comedy." Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and The Man with Two Brains also failed, and his career wobbled before All of Me in 1984 restored it.

The strongest decade followed: Three Amigos and Little Shop of Horrors in 1986, Planes, Trains and Automobiles with John Candy and his own Cyrano adaptation Roxanne in 1987, which won him a Writers Guild award, then Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Parenthood, L.A. Story, Father of the Bride and Bowfinger. By 2003, on the back of Bringing Down the House and Cheaper by the Dozen, he was the fourth-biggest box-office star in America. Two Pink Panther films took $230 million between them. In 2021 he co-created and starred in Only Murders in the Building with Martin Short and Selena Gomez, and has said it will probably be his last role.

Man of Letters

Running parallel was a body of written work most comedians never attempt. Cruel Shoes appeared in 1979, essays for The New Yorker through the 1990s, the collection Pure Drivel in 1998, and the novellas Shopgirl in 2000 and The Pleasure of My Company in 2003, followed by the novel An Object of Beauty in 2010. His 1993 play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, first read aloud in his own living room with Tom Hanks as Picasso, ran from Steppenwolf to New York; when an Oregon school board banned it in 2009 he offered to fund an off-campus production, comparing the objections to "calling Hamlet a play about a castle." Meteor Shower reached Broadway in 2017. His 2007 memoir Born Standing Up was named by Time one of the ten best nonfiction books of the year. He has collected art since 1968, sat on the LACMA board for twenty years, sold an Edward Hopper for $26.8 million in 2006, and was fooled by a forged Campendonk from the Beltracchi ring.

The Banjo

He picked up the instrument at about seventeen, teaching himself by slowing bluegrass records from 33 to 16 rpm and detuning the banjo to match. Decades later he made it a second career: The Crow won the 2010 Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, Love Has Come for You with Edie Brickell took Best American Roots Song, and the Broadway musical Bright Star, co-written with Brickell, brought five Tony nominations and another Grammy. In 2010 he founded the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, a $50,000 award for players the wider public has never heard of.

Why Steve Is Called a Genius

The case rests on a specific act of demolition. American stand-up ran on a machine of premise and payoff; Martin, having read enough philosophy to distrust cause and effect, built an act with the machine removed, leaving audiences laughing at the absence of the joke rather than at the joke. Rabin's description of him as "a sly intellectual whose goofy shtick cunningly deconstructed stand-up comedy" is as close as anyone gets to naming the quality: he performed idiocy from a position of complete analytical control. The influence is measurable in Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Conan O'Brien, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bo Burnham and Jordan Peele, and Comedy Central placed him sixth among the hundred greatest stand-ups in 2004. The rarer trait is the serial reinvention: Emmy-winning writer at twenty-three, stadium comic, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, Grammy-winning banjo player, each done well enough to stand alone.

The counter-case is honest and large. A great deal of his filmography is undistinguished commercial work made for money, from the Pink Panther remakes to The Big Year, and The Guardian in 2009 listed him among the best actors never nominated for an Oscar, which is another way of saying the screen never gave him what the stage did. His serious attempts often failed commercially, and Pennies from Heaven nearly ended him. He is also an expert, not a scholar: the philosophy was a tool for an act, not a discipline he pursued. What is genuinely uncommon is the willingness to abandon mastery in order to start again, which is temperament as much as intellect.

Legacy

Martin has five Grammys, an Emmy, an honorary Academy Award from 2013, the Mark Twain Prize from 2005, Kennedy Center Honors from 2007 and the AFI Life Achievement Award from 2015. He hosted the Oscars three times. But the durable legacy is structural rather than ceremonial: he proved that stand-up could be conceptual art, and then that a comedian could credibly become a novelist, a Broadway composer's collaborator and a bluegrass patron without any of it looking like a hobby.