Steve Martin's new book, Born Standing Up, is quite a surprise. It's kind of an autobiography, though he says it comes close to being a biography because he feels so detached from the person he's writing about. He covers his childhood, his adolescent days working at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, and then his break-in to comedy writing and performing and stardom. It stops when he makes his first movie, The Jerk, and gives up stand-up forever. Amazingly introspective — which is not to say all his self-observations ring true — he depicts his subject (himself) as not particularly gifted in the way we think a successful comedian is born funny. To Martin, it was all a matter of figuring out how to do something that, he seems to feel, did not come naturally to him.
It is not, in some ways, a particularly flattering self-portrait. I came away from the book admiring Martin's candor and willingness to display his warts but I'm less certain of how I feel about him as a comedian. In portions of Born Standing Up, he seems to be conducting a final burial for his stand-up act, drawing a hard line between that guy and the person he is today…and even the old Steve Martin, the guy in the white suit with the arrow through his head, doesn't seem to have ever been the real Steve Martin. He writes of anxiety attacks and of feeling lost in his own career…and at time, I found myself wondering why he wrote the book.
Which is not to say it's not a fascinating read. You can order it from Amazon by clicking here and I'm going to recommend you do that. It's a quick read and a good chance to get inside the brain of a very successful performer. You'll understand that stardom, especially in the area of stand-up comedy, ain't always as wonderful as it may look.