About this title: In the mid-seventies, Steve Martin exploded on to the comedy scene. By 1978, he was the biggest concert draw in the history of stand-up. In 1981 he quit forever. This book is, in his own words, the story of "why I did stand-up and why I walked away." Emmy and Grammy Award winner, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Martin has always been a writer. His memoir of his years in stand-up is candid, spectacularly amusing, and beautifully written. At age ten, Martin started his career at Disneyland, ...
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Description: Good. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Purchasing this book supports the King County Library System Foundation. Thriftbooks and KCLSF have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. 1416553649 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Description: Good. 0739495585 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Description: Good. 1416553649 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Description: Good. 1410403122 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Description: Good. 1416553649 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Description: Very Good. 1416553649 Copy has been read but remains in nice & clean condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or high-lighting. Spine is tight; a clean read. Shelf wear and tear to the dust jacket. read more
Edition: First edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781416553649ISBN:1416553649
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 209 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781416553649ISBN:1416553649
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Hardcover Edition-Average Wear-Few Markings. Glued binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 209 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. 2007-Hardcover----Used-Good-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
"Coming of age in the 1980's Steve Martin sits in my youthful consciousness as a stand out/up celebrity. I laughed at his movies and all my high school and community college friends loved him. I remember everyone imitating him in conversations and at parties in attempt to be funny or contemporary. So when trying to find a comedian to read about for an April fools day challenge I chose his memoir Born Standing Up. I expected the book to be funny - it wasn't. So if your looking for humor this is not your book. If your looking for insight into the tenacity and thought processes of an evolving celebrity this is for you. His success was not a fluke. Steve Martin is, like most very successful people, an amazingly focused and complex person. He started working on his entertaining persona as a young boy and persistently continued to do so until he realized that his life as a stand up comedian was making him miserable. It ate away at his sanity and his ability to have meaningful relationships with others and himself. So he quit. (Good for you Steve!) It is apparent that he is a thoughtful and private person who looked at comedy intensely, intellectually, and soulfully to create the persona and act that made him famous. It was not just fate that led him to be so popular. The book also is a bit of "trip down memory lane". He brings up his chance meetings, and business connections with many of the icons of the era, which is interesting but much was lost on me. I would imagine that a reader who was born in the 1940s or 50s may be able to connect with."
"I devoured this book like semisweet chocolate, only some kind of chocolate that isn't too rich and doesn't leave me sick no matter how much of it I eat. I feel like I could read about Steve Martin's analysis of his own standup comedy for thousands of pages. Instead I'm stuck with about 200, and these I cherished.
Born Standing Up is not an intimate confessional by Martin, and those eager to learn more about the man behind the rather aloof, cold public facade will be disappointed here. The book finds Steve Martin looking back on his own standup career as if it all happened to someone else. He seems completely detached from it 25 years later, and rather mystified himself at the astounding success he achieved. And really, I can't say I blame him. If I'd reached a level of performance in which I was putting my show on in front of 20,000 people, I don't think I'd really believe it either. Martin explains what happened. Explains what he did to get where he got, and explains the development of his comedy from doing magic tricks at Disney Land to the astoundingly bizarre "avante garde" style he adopted as a 30-something. Observing the sheer weirdness of his act in retrospect it's hard to imagine how it got so popular, and I think it has entirely to do with the fact that Martin was so obsessed with comedy he performed literally thousands of shows during his lifetime. He attacked the craft with almost unprecedented zeal and the result was a level of comic timing so advanced he could get away with anything on stage, and make people laugh--including wearing balloon hats, slapping himself in the face, and tuning an imaginary banjo. He honed such a unique style that he is the one comic I can think of who is utterly inimitable. Nobody could ever try to emulate Steve Martin without looking like a total copycat. Somehow, in his absurd randomness, he created something utterly profound and memorable.
Anyway, it's fascinating to read Martin's deconstruction of his own comedy career, especially if you're interested in standup comedy itself as an art form, which I very much am. In Born Standing Up Martin provides the best, most succinct description of his own act I could possibly think of, and because he is my favorite standup comic in history, the quote, to me, really describes an ideal version of comedy in general:
"What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh."
Genius. You have to do something a hell of a lot, for a very long time, to come up with such an acute sense of how you actually do it. It's debatable if Martin was the greatest comic in history, but I'm almost positive he was the most precise, astute, and self-aware."
"I was born in 1978, a particularly good year for comedian Steve Martin. That was the year he won a Grammy for Best Comedy Album with Let's Get Small, the year he released "King Tut" on 45, the year he appeared in the movie Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, made so many appearances on SNL that he seemed more like a regular fixture than a guest host, and was basically as successful as any comedian can hope to be. But since I wasn't exactly cognizant in 1978, all this was lost on me. By the time I was old enough to appreciate popular culture Martin had long since traded in his stand-up career for one in film, so my early memories of him are more of the Little Shop of Horrors variety rather than the comedic banjo/magic act sort. And so, I entered into this autobiographic recount of his stand-up career with slight apprehension. I love Steve Martin but had never seen his stand-up routine, so I wondered if a story about this particular era of his life would be slightly lost on me.
As I came to learn, Martin's early career made for a pretty interesting read, even for those who were not yet self-aware in 1978. Before making it big, he more than paid his dues working in a Disneyland magic shop, performed some of his earliest material in a Knott's Berry Farm theater, made endless and often unsuccessful appearances on daytime variety shows, and strove to create a original brand of comedy that relied more on quirky non sequiturs than on punch lines. He was also a student of philosophy, loved art and poetry, suffered from severe panic attacks, had a complicated and poignant relationship with his father, and very nearly gave up on show business before finally making it big. On top of learning these interesting facts about Martin, his autobiography also revealed that he's a great writer who comes across as a genuine, wholly likable, and all-around good guy.
Personally, I clearly prefer fiction over non-fiction, and biographies/autobiographies are generally not my thing at all. It's not that I don't find true stories interesting - I do! - it's just that I'd rather enjoy my stories of celebrity life in episodes of E! True Hollywood Story form rather than in book form. But I needed a book for the plane and had heard good things about Born Standing Up, so when I noticed that it happened to be available at my local library I rolled the dice and picked it up.
And the verdict? Born Standing Up is a very enjoyable read that can easily be digested in a few hours, making it the perfect airplane read. If you are a Martin fan, it's definitely worth your time."
"for me, this book read just as if it were a one-sided, long conversation with the only thing forcing story progression being when steve would remember his original point and refocus on the story. he veered off on related tangents and then would jump back into the plot very quickly.
that sounds much more critical than it should. the man has done a lot in his lifetime and i'm sure it's hard to put all of that into a book cohesively. even thought it was a bit scattered, i would still recommend it.
i especially enjoyed the stories of all of his early jobs. i think learning about how he transitioned throughout his career was interesting. it was good to read about how he struggled rather than only reading about the succes (as some autobiographies do).
steve martin's celebrity persona seems to be comically snobbish mostly because his style of comedy doesn't differentiate from his on-stage personality and how he reacts to the press. even in interviews you often can't tell whether he is telling a story or setting up a joke.
i felt this in some parts of the book (eg: "the" eagles conversation). and some names were in the book almost as a way to brag about all of the 70s celebrities he has met or worked with. but i suppose that an autobiography should be a little braggy.
he definitely was selective about which relationships he included in the book. he skimmed over his divorce in a page, didn't talk at all about his current wife (except for her name in the credits) but glowed about his early infatuation for fellow actresses for page upon page. he discussed SNL rather quickly and mentioned john belushi and dan aykroyd but didn't talk about john candy, his grammy awards, or how he pushed lorne michaels to hire the illusive jack handey."
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