Born Standing Up

Steve Martin grows up in Southern California and takes his first jobs at Disneyland, selling guidebooks and then magic tricks. As a teenager he also performs at Knott's Berry Farm. Magic, banjo and stagecraft come first, years before he has an act of his own.

This 2007 memoir of his stand-up career follows the slow, unglamorous work of building that act. He plays small clubs to indifferent audiences and spends a stretch writing for television comedy. Then he decides to give up the conventional punch line for something stranger.

The career is only part of the story. Martin describes a tense relationship with his father, and anxiety attacks that trouble him for about two decades. Late in life he reconciles with both parents.

The telling is plain and light on gossip, so the book reads as an account of the craft and cost of comedy as much as of one famous career. It closes in 1981, when he walks away from stand-up at the height of his fame.