Will the Real Steve Martin Please Stand Up?

I began watching STEVE! (martin): a documentary in 2 pieces out of a dutiful nostalgia, admiring the comedian’s versatility and longevity and remembering his cultural omnipresence in the late 1970s. For a while there, Martin was as inescapable as Star Wars.

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But by the end of Morgan Neville’s new two-part, three-hour documentary (premiering March 29 on Apple TV+), I’d come to a weightier conclusion: Steve Martin is one of the greatest stand-ups of the greatest era of American comedy. Onstage, he was as skilled as Robert Klein, Albert Brooks, or George Carlin and could be as meta as Andy Kaufman. Yet he was more popular than anyone before or maybe since, including the incomparable Richard Pryor.

And yet, Martin is frequently left off comedy’s Mount Rushmore. With his white suit, banjo, and bunny ears, Martin is sometimes brushed off as comedy’s Pet Rock. Far from a novelty, Martin may simply have been too good for his own good, inhabiting a character so successfully that people assumed he was the Jerk or a Wild and Crazy Guy.

The first half of Neville’s documentary gives the lie to that. Martin’s stage persona—a knowing parody of stand-up as performed by a dumb guy convinced he’s a genius—was honed over a decade of grinding it out at small clubs, often in front of audiences who didn’t get it. (One reviewer called him “the worst thing to happen to American comedy.”) Readers of Martin’s 2007 memoir, Born Standing Up, already know many of these stories, but it is worth sticking around to hear them again. “I think if I had any guidance,” Martin says at one point, “nothing would’ve happened for me.”

Even after three hours (which follow half a century in the public eye), the “real” Steve Martin remains blurry. Whereas most post–Lenny Bruce stand-up comedians can lay claim to trying to express something about themselves, Martin seems to have little internal self to express: “I often hear, ‘Just be yourself.’ But who knows who their ‘self’ is? I don’t,” he says at one point. “You can be what you choose to be.”

One possible reason Martin seldom gets his due is his background. As a white gentile from Orange County, Martin doesn’t fit neatly into stand-up’s dominant tropes. Unlike Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, the other great absurdists of the 1970s, Martin doesn’t have sepia memories of the shtetl or the darkness of the Holocaust to give his work shadow and heft. Allen famously said, “If I had been born in Poland or Berlin, I’d be a lampshade.” Martin, on the other hand, would’ve been everyone’s favorite philosophy professor at UC Santa Cruz.

Yet Martin did have struggles that never made it into his jokes. Martin speaks of his distant, belittling father, who didn’t accept him until he was a superstar and who even then probably respected his son’s success more than he respected his son. That low hurdle in the Traumalyplics is as close as this doc gets to explaining Martin’s prodigious drive and focus. (Compare that with Pryor’s early life being raised in a brothel in Peoria, Illinois.) Martin’s life reminds us that it’s not the scale of the trauma that counts but the artist’s sensitivity to it. And Martin’s aesthetics—from his white suits to his art collection—mark him as an almost squirmingly sensitive man.

STEVE! Doesn’t really account for what, exactly, turned Martin into such a cultural force in the late 1970s, which found him on the covers of magazines, a frequent guest on the Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, writing and starring in hit movies, and performing his stand-up in sold-out stadiums. What Neville shows, though, is that throughout this time, Martin was always anxious and grew all the more so. Martin’s mega-success made it impossible for him to have a personal life, form normal relationships, or even go outside often.

It must’ve felt a lot safer for Martin inside his persona.

One thing Martin understood that many of his contemporaries didn’t was when to quit. As he explains, he gave himself until age 30 to make it, a deadline he hit, but only just. Six years later, in 1981, Martin walked away at the peak of his stand-up success. Later, after a string of beloved movies, including Parenthood, Father of the Bride, and L.A. Story, he says that he “lost interest in Hollywood right when Hollywood lost interest in [him].”

Happiness, like comedy, is all about timing. As Martin would say, “T-T-timing. Tiii-MING.”

The second part of the documentary, while a pleasant watch, has little inherent drama. Martin now enjoys a successful and contented last act living between Manhattan and Santa Barbara with his wife and child. And, of course, Martin Short, who you half expect sleeps in a bunk bed with his Only Murders in the Building costar.

But what part two reveals, in its way, is a story as extraordinary as that of Martin’s rise in the first piece. Comedy has truly worked for Steve Martin in a way that it has for very few comedians not named Jerry Seinfeld. It’s made him rich and famous, but it does that for lots of comedians. What Martin’s success has given him is the status of mellow elder statesman. After so many years trying to make people laugh on stage, vinyl, and film, Martin doesn’t really seem to care one way or another. At one point in the doc, Martin and Short are seen talking to a lady and her dog, and if she recognizes them, there’s no indication whatsoever. She probably just thinks they’re a cute old married couple.

At 78, Martin has finally become exactly what a 1968 poster billed him as: “a fantastically clever comedian, magician and all-around good guy.”•