I never thought Steve Martin was particularly funny as a comedian. Take a look at his Wild and Crazy Guy sketch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_zPmwvQFaM#t=00m39s). Martin is very wooden in his line readings and overactive in his gestures.
As standup, Martin came on creating a great deal of anticipation that he built on. He was so manic and energetic that he created the image that he was going to be very funny, but he never was. The jokes were just stupid, when there were any jokes there at all. He depended entirely on catchphrases for his best laughs.
I didn’t much care for him until someone did a profile and said that Martin really wasn’t a standup comedian – he was an actor playing the part of a standup comedian. And I realized they were right – his act was an act.
Once he went into films, however, he eventually showed himself to be a quite capable actor. Things like Three Amigos, L.A. Story (especially), Roxanne, Bowfinger, and Shopgirl are fine performances and probably what he will be remembered for.
His jokes may have been stupid, but it was right in the era when stupid jokes were the most popular. Coming out of Monty Python, surreal weird stupid humour was big in the 70s and early 80s, and was definitely my kind of thing.
Now it’s all crude and immature humour, squirm-inducing embarrassment humour, or dark and ironic humour. I miss the silly stuff.
Like Charlie Chaplin. TCM is showing some of CC tonight and his schtick simply bores me - I’d marginally rather see Buster Keaton. I know he’s supposed to be one of the greatest ever, and in his day he was unbelievably popular and led a life chock full of scandal, to boot. But his comedy bores me. I want to yell, ‘get on with it!’… I always liked Steve Martin from the get-go, not least because he’s intelligent. Look at his early comedy, he was acting the fool and people actually thought that WAS his act. I’ve really liked his dramatic roles, I’m among the small handful that liked ‘Pennies From Heaven’. And he’s moved on from early comedy, he’s an author, playwright, and art collector. … I do agree, though, that wild and crazy guy with the ‘arrow’ through his head would not go over big today.
Context is everything. In the early 70s, “relevancy” was a big codeword among comedians. Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin were trying to elevate the audience’s awareness as much as make them laugh, and for a while that was terrific. Steve Martin (up until this point best known as a writer and bit player on The Smothers Brothers) made a conscious decision to buck that trend and just be silly. And until his film partnership with Carl Reiner ran out of gas circa 1983, that too was terrific for a while. He wouldn’t have been as funny without Pryor and Tomlin providing contrast. And since they stopped providing it, Steve Martin went on and did other things.
Steve Martin wrote a book a couple of years ago on his stand-up years (“Born Standing Up”, a very easy and entertaining read). In the book he talks about the standard stand-up of his time – basically, it was a series of set-up, punchline, set-up, punchline. The comedian would build tension in the audience through the set-up and the punchline would allow the audience to laugh, releasing the tension.
Martin wondered – what if there was no punchline? What if the audience wasn’t cued where to laugh – would they still laugh to release the tension? Where would they laugh? And he developed his act around this, keeping the audience looking for a punchline that never came, forcing them to laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.
Nowadays that stuff is everywhere, so it’s not as unique and fresh. So, no, he wouldn’t be as funny today. Then again, the landscape of stand-up might look a lot different had he not existed, so maybe he would.
To echo what others have already said, comedy ages FAST, probably faster than any other form of expression.
Steve Martin appeared on the scene when there were some wide-open opportunities for comedy: in reaction to Vietnam and Watergate, people were tired of “meaningful” comedy, so there was a certain release in seeing a guy in a white suit with an arrow through his head. But since the rest of us didn’t see that, we ain’t geniuses.
That said, Steve Martin had some good insights into how we react to a seemingly ‘meaningful’ person - like a white guy with a booming announcer’s voice - who turns out to be a complete moron. IMO, this holds up really well forty years later, which is pretty damn impressive for comedy.
For more on this, google his routines, “You can be a millionaire, and never pay taxes”, or his ‘Five-Timers Club’ appearance on SNL, where he admonishes Tom Hanks, “Please… call me Mr. Steve Martin”.
Oh, and in answer to a question above, Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners performances, IMO, are STILL as good as comedy can get, almost 60 years later.
His standup from the '70s is still funny as far as I’m concerned. It’s showbiz parody and it’s stupid funny rather than being social commentary - that is, it’s Martin using his intelligence to make goofy jokes - but it’s not less funny for that. Today I think a couple of generations of comedians have built on what he did. You could make fun of some of the conventions of entertainment the way he did, but entertainment isn’t as conventional as it was at the time.
And yet Andy Kaufman was doing the same thing at the time (he appeared on SNL before Martin did) – and was much better at it. With Kaufman, not only did the punch line often never come, but the audience was always left wondering whether he was joking or not.
While Martin’s experimenting was clever on one level, the result was that his comedy was never all that funny – and he was not willing to take it to its logical conclusion like Kaufman did.
Martin is a fine actor (usually in semi-comic roles, however; the only fully comic role that was worth anything was in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and he was much better off once he left Carl Reiner). He was also good in All of Me and, yes, Pennies from Heaven.
That’s the difference between Kaufman being a performance artist and Martin a standup comic. I don’t think they were doing the same thing in the first place.
