‘If you’re anointed tonight, you can be dumped on tomorrow’: Steve Martin on fame, failure and TV humiliation

, The Man With Two Brains, LA Story and Bowfinger so deliriously inspired. And he was comedy’s first double-platinum-record-selling, stadium-touring megastar; he began wearing a white suit on stage only so that he could be seen by fans in the cheap seats several postcodes away. He crafted riotous slapstick crescendos in All of Me and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and displayed a literary flair even at his silliest.

The first half of Steve! covers Martin’s childhood, his teenage job in the Disneyland magic shop, his innovative early standup, all the way up to when he made his leap from stadiums to screen with The Jerk in 1979 – then quit live comedy. In the second half, we get the rest of the story, including the failures, anxieties and disappointments that preceded his present professional and domestic bliss.

Mentioning it brings a smile to his face. “This was back when you’d be asked for autographs,” he says. “The card had a signature printed on it. I’d give them out, but people would just be puzzled. Then they’d ask me to sign it, so it didn’t really work.” Martin worries that accepting acclaim today means looking foolish tomorrow. Jerry Seinfeld refers to him in Steve! as “the most idolised comedian ever”. Martin says Seinfeld’s comment “makes me cringe. Idolatry is so fleeting. When I was a kid, there was this comedian, Joe Penner, whose catchphrase was: ‘Wanna buy a duck?’ If you said: ‘Wanna buy a duck?’ everybody would fall down laughing. And now it’s embarrassing. So I don’t invest too much in that stuff.

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