Word: stande
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...when people finally did get it, around 1976, they couldn't get enough of it. He had platinum comedy albums and a million-selling single (King Tut). He played to arenas of 20,000 people. As David Letterman once noted, "I think that's a record for a stand-up comedian in peacetime." Saturday Night Live's audience jumped by a million viewers when he was on. His phrases "Well, excuuuuse me!" and "wild and crazy guys" became schoolyard mantras. Steve Martin was the comic as rock star. And then he wasn't. He stopped cold in 1981 to concentrate...
Till now. In Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life (Scribner; 209 pages), this most private of performers commits the ultimate indiscretion: an account of his first 35 years, from his youth in Southern California through the lows and highs of his stand-up career. "The interesting times are as you're working your way up," Martin said recently over lunch, his mustache dyed black for his role in the next Pink Panther movie. "After you have success, it becomes a routine catwalk. In most of show business, the successes aren't as significant as the failures...
...played banjo (another of his studious obsessions) with guitarist Mason Williams, who'd had an instrumental pop hit, Classical Gas. Williams helped him get a writing job on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, for which Martin won an Emmy at 23. But what he really wanted to do was stand-up--to have people laugh not at the jokes he wrote for others but at and with...
...Andy Kaufman turned on a plastic record player and lip-synched to the Mighty Mouse theme song, the laughter was uneasy or unheard. Audiences were forced to wonder: Is this supposed to be funny? And that was funny, in a new way. By renouncing the notion of the stand-up as sage and replaying the silly gags that amused them as kids, these rebels gave birth to post-funny comedy...
...candor about everything, from bodily functions to sexual fantasies--a turnoff for squeamish honchos who could have promoted her career--made stand-up comic Marilyn Martinez a heroine among her fans. The racy, unapologetically "fat" Martinez had tiny roles on TV (My Wife and Kids) and in film (Pauly Shore Is Dead) but mostly liked to discomfit her male-dominated industry in gigs with all-Latina troupes such as the Hot and Spicy Mamitas and the Latin Divas of Comedy, with whom she anchored a cable special this year. She was 52 and had colon cancer...