‘Steve! (Martin)’ Revisits the Heyday of a Wild and Crazy Comedian

There are entire generations that have no idea that Steve Martin was a stand-up comedian. They may recognize him as one-third of the trio that’s turned Only Murders in the Building into a streaming hit, or the long-suffering patriarch of the Father of the Bride movies, or maybe as that guy with the funny mustache who was in that one thing with Beyoncé (i.e. 2006 Pink Panther reboot). Some might have watched Parenthood or Planes, Trains and Automobiles with their parents when they were younger. He’s the celebrity who, whenever he drops by Saturday Night Live for a quick cameo, gets an inordinate amount of applause. “A wild and crazy guy” may as well be a maxim from the Festrunk brothers’ home country of Czechoslovakia.

And yet, for the back half of the 1970s, Martin virtually was stand-up comedy — a guy in a white suit, with prematurely gray hair, who somehow managed to turn a club set involving banjo solos, balloon animals and 10 tons of irony into a cultural phenomena. His albums went platinum. His competition in terms of concert sales weren’t other comics, but Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin. He sold out stadiums. His catch phrases became part of the American lexicon. By the time he walked away from live performances at the end of 1980 tour, Martin’s singular blend of highbrow intellectualism and in-joke idiocy was the equivalent of a supernova.

It’s tough to describe to someone who wasn’t there to see it happen, in the same way that it must have been hard summing up, say, how popular Charlie Chaplin was in his heyday to those who came of age in the ’70s. This is why Morgan Neville’s Steve! (Martin) is doing a huge public service. A two-part documentary that dropped on Apple TV+ over the weekend, this look back at Martin’s career devotes its first chapter — titled “Then” — to how Martin carefully managed to build what would become a juggernaut of an act. It gives you needed context and the cartography of influences, naturally, but more importantly, there are clips that attest to both the ingenious nature of what that guy with the bunny ears was doing onstage and the sheer mania he inspired. Several talking heads speak of the way in which Martin “was the most idolized comedian ever” (Jerry Seinfeld) and how “he reinvented stand-up” (Lorne Michaels). After watching the initial installment of Neville’s portrait, you can see why those lofty statements read as something close to the gospel truth.

Before he was “Steve!”, a comedian fueled by exclamation points and air quotes, he was just Steve, the kid from Orange County, California, who loved Disneyland and magic tricks. Getting a job at the former in which he sold tourists the latter, the teenage Martin learned the art of patter and the joy of smarmy schtick. An entertainer named Wally Boag, who performed at the park’s Golden Horseshoe Revue, would dazzle crowds with goofy balloon animals and his quick wit; Martin claims he saw Boag’s show dozens upon dozens of times and took note. He began doing his own magic act for his parents’ friends and around town as Martin the Magic Marvel. Stage time at Knott’s Berry Farm’s Birdcage Theater further taught him how to work crowds. Influences ranging from Jack Benny to Jerry Lewis to Lenny Bruce began to work their way into his bits.

Martin is in his prime magpie phase, and Neville weaves in all sorts of snippets that help you see what the burgeoning comic will later incorporate and flip on its head. Philosophy courses at college has him questioning “the nature of comedy,” and he’s already playing coffee houses with a typically 1960s mix of music, “hip” jokes and readings of E.E. Cummings poems. An early version of what would later be known as “anti-humor” works its way in to his repertoire, based on the notion of maintaining tension rather than releasing it through punch lines or wink-nudges. He gets a job writing for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (which gives him panic attacks) and keeps logging time in at L.A. clubs (which makes him feel frustrated). The hair gets long and the ramblin’-man beard gets scraggly. Mom says he’s a dead ringer for Charles Manson, Dad says he resembles “a simian at the San Francisco zoo,” and someone says he looks like he’s “trying to be the Eagles.” Martin still hasn’t found what he’s looking for. He gives himself until the age of 30 to make it.

The breakthrough comes when he realizes he has to drop the bohemian style, put on a square’s suit and tie, and erase the lines between smart and silly altogether. It’s frankly amazing to see the doc’s archival finds from that era, when Martin was hitting the stage wearing a novelty arrow through the head and Groucho glasses, juggling oranges and playing the part of a jaded big shot. The idea that his act could be a parody of the glad-handing, overly sincere entertainer rather than the thing itself fits both his strengths as an absurdist comic and the tongue-in-cheek times themselves. For mid-’70s audiences, it was like seeing your parents’ favorite variety acts — balloon animals! banjo-playing! corny jokes carbon-dated back to vaudeville! — reinterpreted for their quite-possibly-stoned enjoyment. Both potheads and Carson loved him. Famous anecdotes about Martin’s post-show pied-piper antics (like when he took 350 audience members out for fast-food burgers) don’t seem any less awe-inspiring for being recounted for the 200th time. He’s just turned 30, and you can see he’s surfing a wave about to crest. Then a new TV show goes on the air. “Live from New York…”.

Once Lorne Michaels, who wasn’t quite sure what Steve’s act was but was smart enough to know it’d fit with his show, enlisted Martin to host his first SNL, all bets were off. The rock-star phase of his career had officially begun, at which point Steve! turns into a white-knuckler. Martin himself isn’t even sure what to make of it, deflecting questions about his ascent with equal parts self-deprecating digs and deer-in-headlights astonishment. When you listen to A Wild and Crazy Guy, the 1978 album that borrowed its title from an SNL sketch, cemented his status as the Next Massive Thing and featured his hit single “King Tut,” you can hear the transition from cult comic to the second coming of Elvis. (The King gets quoted here as well, telling Martin during a brief Vegas stint that, “Son, you got one oblique sense of humor.”) The first side was recorded at San Francisco’s Boarding House, a venue that was an early champion of Martin’s postmodern persona, before an audience of 300 people. The second documents a show at the Red Rocks Ampitheatre in Colorado in front of a little over 10,000 shrieking fanatics. It would only get bigger.

Much of this is covered in Martin’s memoir Born Standing Up, yet the chance to see his recollections buffered by the real thing is a treasure trove for aficionados and an eye-opener for those who just know the gray-haired actor as an éminence grise. Steve! also recognizes that this is something that can’t last, even if Martin’s signature lines start showing up in commercials and a club hosts a “find the next Steve Martin” night featuring 150 wannabe comedians painfully imitating his bits. Rather, the over-the-moon success of his touring act simply becomes too overwhelming for the somewhat shy, emotionally reticent guy at the wild and crazy center of it. When his first movie The Jerk becomes a hit, Martin sees salvation and an exit strategy. No more stepping in front of a microphone and being hit with a blast of white noise. After his 1980 tour ends, that’s all, folks. End of Part One.

Martin’s story is far from over, though Steve!‘s essentially is — Part Two, titled Now, has some very big (cruel) shoes to fill, and doesn’t have the benefit of the laser-like focus of its first half. It’s telling that, having become the single biggest thing in comedy, Martin’s first project of a new decade is …not a comedy at all. On paper, a remake of Dennis Potter’s exquisite TV drama Pennies From Heaven starring Martin as a bruised romantic with a penchant for lip-syncing Depression-era tunes seems intriguing. Onscreen, it’s a two-hour needle scratch. The Potter version benefits from the context of the British writer’s previous work and an established sense of fourth-wall breaking. No amount of charisma, tap-dance lessons or period detail kept audiences from a whiplash sense of “WTF?,” however. History has been kind to it, but the 1980s weren’t. If the idea was to bring the temperature down to something less white-hot, its mission was accomplished.

From there, Now speeds through the next four decades and skims rather than delves. Martin keeps starring in movies, some of which are stone-cold classics (L.A. Story, Roxanne, All of Me) and many of which are middlebrow at best. Meeting Martin Short to make The Three Amigos in 1986, he finds a creative counterpart and dear friend who, decades later, will eventually bring him back to the stage in the form of a duo. Art is his “Rosebud.” A love of solitude and sense of emotional distance — apparently The Lonely Guy is way more autobiographical than anyone could guess — eventually thaws out. A second marriage, to New Yorker fact-checker Anne Stringfield, leads to a blissful partnership. Late-in-life fatherhood gives him joy and purpose. The unexpected success of Only Murders in the Building once again makes him a star in his seventies. The wild and crazy guy has become the mild and settled veteran.

Martin’s graceful aging and ability to appreciate life more may be less of a yowza story than the meteoric rise that preceded it, but Now still has enough raw material to detail a hell of a second and third act. What we get instead, however, feels remarkably superficial. Yes, the chance to be a fly on the wall of Martin and Short’s writing sessions is a gift, but you don’t get the sense of why or how that friendship has yielded such fertile creativity in his autumn years. Martin notes that he became tired of movies around the same time they became tired of him; the doc seems done with them before they even get to that quote. His legacy as a writer is boiled down to just Wasp, a one-act play that doubled as an exorcism of his family trauma. Few friends feel they really know him. He’d rather not talk about a lot of things. His daughter is rendered as a literal stick-figure illustration, out of privacy. The occasional admissions around father issues and some filmmaking whimsy — a cut to Jaws during a bad date peripherally involving Steven Spielberg, a winking animated Picasso — doesn’t keep you from feeling like Neville never fully gets past his subject’s brick wall of defense.

The result is that Now gives those late acts more lip service than love, and feels content to just go straight to the victory lap. Martin himself feels happy to look back at an era he’s been done with for a long time (though reluctant to listen to said era; he gets less than a minute into an old set recording before he turns the tape off). Get into more personal areas, and you can feel the protective measures slide into place. If the uneven balance does tilt in Then‘s favor, so be it. Time capsules are invaluable, too. So are reminders of previously scaled heights.