"Steve Martin may have started out as the Jerk, but he has ended up as the Legend," noted Susan M. Kirschbaum writing for In Style. The legend in this case was Martin's commendation by the American Museum of the Moving Image in 2000. For more than four...

Steve Martin's crazy, off-the-wall brand of humor had major effects on stand-up, television, film, and print. From the 1970s, when his white-suited appearances on the ensemble comedy show Saturday Night Live were widely enjoyed and copied, to the...

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Last year, when Steve Martin was preparing to move from his stage performance in "Waiting for Godot" to playing the anxious father of anxious kids in Ron Howard's movie "Parenthood," he sat in an East Side restaurant in New York, wondering how he would...

STEVE MARTIN: WILD AND SERIOUS GUY Steve Martin is sitting with three friends at an umbrella-shaded table in a Southern California restaurant. He sips from his cup of coffee and listens to the bubbling water of the patio fountain. Then, Martin feels...

The trend seems as plain as the nose on your child's face, or an arrow through your head. There's Madonna, Billy Crystal and Jamie Lee Curtis. And Jerry Seinfeld. And John Lithgow. And Katie Couric.All celebrities. All parents. All authors of children's books.Now Steve Martin...

American Prospect asks name-y experts about the most overrated and underrated cultural events of the year. Historian Antony Beevor: “Overrated: I was deeply disappointed by the film Atonement. Perhaps my expectations had been too high, having greatly admired the novel. The film certainly opened well,...

Much has been written about the "new wave" comedy of the late seventies. It's been defined as a backlash against the comedy of the sixties, which was preoccupied with social and political commentary. New wave comedy is not concerned with political issues. It's only concerned with silliness. In fact, Steve [Martin] has spoken proudly of deliberately weeding out anything in his act that has legitimate meaning. (p. 113) Steve has said that comedian Jack Benny was one of his idols wh...

[Steve Martin's] jokes are funny—not just funny but, you know, different, weird, "out there." Like his description of all the world's religions: "And the fourteen invisible people came down from the sky with the magic rings that only Biff could read." Sometimes they're shocking: "Not too many people smoking out there tonight, that's pretty good; it doesn't bother me when I'm in a sleazy nightclub like this, 'cause I&#...

A comic's naked desire to make us laugh can be an embarrassment, especially if we feel that he's hanging on that laugh—that he's experiencing our reaction as a life-or-death matter. Steve Martin is naked, but he isn't desperate. (He's too anomic to be desperate.) Some performers can't work up a physical charge if the audience doesn't respond to them, but Steve Martin doesn't come out on a TV stage cold, hoping to get a rhythm going with the peop...