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...

Martin's style is a pie in the faces of Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Mort Sahl and all the iconoclastic comics who dominated the stand-up scene in the '60s and whose legacy has been passed down to most of today's best comedians. Now, the prevailing style is less political, but it retains an ethnic edge and an outsider's perspective. Woody Allen mines a mother lode of anxiety and insecurity, pleading the case for the little guy. Lily Tomlin urges that attention be paid to society&#x...

Jokers like David Steinberg and George Carlin are just that—jokers and no more, whereas [Steve Martin and Randy Newman] (even sounds like a comedy team, eh?) are great U.S. humorists in the ironic and equivocal tradition of Mark Twain, Robert Benchley and the Marx Bros. You never quite know when they're being serious. They are both depraved and blasphemous—queers, nigguhs, bilinguals, schmucks who listen to this stuff ("who actually pay for it," as Martin puts it)—n...

In a time burbling with misused and perverted intelligence, Steve Martin is a welcome apostle of pure idiocy. Not the corroded comforts of neuroticism (Woody Allen), not the subversive logic of madness and bad taste (Mel Brooks), but blessed idiocy is Martin's thing, and in director Carl Reiner he's found the perfect collaborator in creative cretinism. Well, not perfect, because as talented as Reiner is, the Martin movies he's directed and cowritten ("The Jerk" and "...

Steve Martin has become the comedic rage by the usual means: introducing a couple of readily imitable phrases into the vernacular (excuse me if I don't repeat them). More than that, his characterizations have made being an asshole fashionable again; all he lacks is a lampshade. For this, he deserves a humanitarian award. Now, when you do stupid things people think you're being paid for it. Unfortunately, the least deliberately absurd thing Martin has done was committing his act to vinyl. The p...

The nature of Steve Martin's humor defies pat definition. He wanders from downright silly sight gags such as repeated bumbling with the microphones to ironic quips about every subject imaginable (car seats to solar energy heat), to quirky musical excursions on the banjo somewhat reminiscent of the early Smothers Brothers. All is executed from a rather mock-humble stance, with Martin himself professing to be uncertain as to why he makes people laugh. It could be, he claims, the pieces of bologna he pu...

Rising comic star Steve Martin apparently has wide appeal, but ["Cruel Shoes," a] collection of 50 of his short routines, finds us reacting with irritation rather than chuckles. Short to the point of terseness (and sometimes pointlessness) the pieces are snide commentaries on what Martin sees as the pretentiousness of certain segments of society. The titles of "The Diarrhea Gardens of El Camino Real" and "Turds" convey the bathroom level of much of his humor…...