Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

Steve Martin has proven himself to be a novelist and playwright of surprising sensitivity for someone who also stars in crap like The Pink Panther 2. So it's unsurprising that his memoir of his childhood and early years in show business is one of the better showbiz autobiographies of recent years. Many of the usual tropes are present and accounted for: the years of lousy dues-paying gigs, the difficult relationship with an emotionally distant father whom he (spoiler alert!) eventually reconciles with. But Martin tells his story with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, and passages recalling his teenage years working at Disneyland and his relationship with college girlfriend Mitzi and her father (the legendarily cantankerous blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo) are particularly warmhearted and generous. In the book's latter half, Martin discusses the evolution of the stand-up persona that made him a superstar in the late 1970s -- the banjo, the white suit, the arrow through the head -- and his increasing disenchantment with stand-up comedy with a dispassionate eye that sometimes makes him sound as if he's discussing someone else entirely. Given that the book ends with Martin's abandonment of stand-up circa 1980, he sort of is.