Laugh Track: Steve Martin’s Stand Up Years

Steve Martin was the king of the world in 1981 when he became the first (and at that point, only) comedian to have a stand up album that went Platinum. He was treated like a rock star. But then he stopped. He just walked away from it all and decided not to do stand up anymore.

Martin started performing in the mid 60s, but he didn’t catch a break until his girlfriend at the time showed his work to Mason Williams in 1967. At the time, Williams was the head writer for The Smothers Brother’s Comedy Hour. Williams saw something in Martin and hired him to become a writer for the show. He stayed with the show until it was canceled two years later. During that time, he won an Emmy award for Outstanding Writing.

The show was a massive hit, but since Martin was mostly behind the scenes, he hadn’t become a household name yet. That started to change with his 1969 appearance on The Steve Allen Show, where he performed his stand up act on television for the first time. This was the first taste that America got of the absurd brand of comedy that Martin became known for.

After The Smothers Brother’s Comedy Hour was canceled, he moved on to writing for several other successful shows, including The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour and The Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour.

Around this time, he also started to perform at a small club called The Boarding House in San Francisco. His unique mix of stand up comedy and banjo music hit at just the right time. He was at the intersection of the California folk music scene of the 1960s and the comedy scene of the early 1970s, and his act started to grow in popularity. As he drew in more crowds, he was offered a chance to host a new hit series on NBC: Saturday Night Live. Over the next 30-plus years, Martin would host SNL 13 times, making him one of the people to host the show the most. (The only person to appear as a host more times is Alec Baldwin).

His fame continued to grow, and in 1977 he released his first stand up album. Let’s Get Small went on to become a national phenomenon, sparking the catch phrase “Well, excuse me!” The album went platinum, selling over one million copies and winning Best Comedy Album at the Grammys. Over the next two years, he released two more comedy albums, A Wild and Crazy Guy and Comedy is Not Pretty. While both were successful, Comedy is Not Pretty was the only one of Martin’s stand up albums to not be certified as Platinum. It did, however, manage to sell over 500,000 copies. A Wild and Crazy Guy won Martin his second Grammy in as many years.

The same year as Comedy is Not Pretty was released, Martin’s first starring role in The Jerk. It served as a showcase for Martin’s bizarre and out-there sense of humor and managed to strike a chord with audiences. The film, directed by comedy legend Carl Reiner, was successful enough to shift Martin’s focus away from stand up and toward writing and acting. To this day, The Jerk is often listed as one of the funniest movies of all time.

Yet Steve Martin hasn’t performed stand up since 1981. Let’s take a look back: