Re: Was Steve Martin ever funny?
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I think most celebrities end up being most known for work that is not their best. Usually they did some great work when they were younger, but young people don't know that stuff so they just seem like hacks.
His early comedy albums were great, but I'm now sure they would still be appreciated today. The Jerk was a classic. He has also made some hilarious appearences on David Letterman's shows.
Steve Martin has lost his edge, which is what made him so funny in the first place. It happens to most performers (but not all).
I still find myself singing "King Tut" every once and a while.
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Agreed and ditto on everything you said there, except I think The Jerk was more iffy. But part of the cool thing about Steve was that he would go so far out there and make stuff like that. Most people only play characters that flatter them. Steve was the opposite of uptight -- he'd do anything and almost always made himself look like some kind of jerk. But usually there was something embarassingly funny that we could relate to in it. His crazy foreigners freely talked as stupidly as we might fear we could on some hellish day, and made all the dating mistakes it terrified us even to think about. His Czechoxlovakian playboys had cool down all wrong and were bizarrely out of step on everything, yet were strangely confident about it all, and you couldn't help laughing as they constantly said and did the worst things you could ever imagine yourself doing. He made characters whose idiocy and missteps you could relate to because they were the part of you that you hoped to god didn't exist or at least would never, ever, ever be discovered, even by you. His stupidity was incredibly distant yet had a recognizability about it you had to love. It was funny as hell and a little hard to imagine doing yourself, because you wouldn't have the guts. Or be anywhere near as funny if you did. Anybody who ever struck a pose of any kind will see it mirrored in the Czeckoslovakian playboy strut and squirm a little. And laugh all the harder for it.
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