Confessions of an anti-comic

The first rule of jokes is that it's all in the way you tell 'em. The first rule of retelling jokes from old stand-up comedy routines is not to bother. You had to be there. Because it flouts these elementary principles, Born Standing Up, Steve Martin's autobiography, is not a very funny book. At the peak of his stand-up career, Martin was packing out 30,000-seat stadiums with his one-man show. He made the cover of Newsweek and Rolling Stone. In the mid-Seventies, when there was no power left in the hippy flower, when loved-up, folksy optimism had slunk off the stage into a square job or rehab, comedy was briefly the new rock'n'roll. And Steve Martin was a headline act. But to get the gags, you kind of had to be there. It was the way he told 'em.

But it doesn't matter that Born Standing Up is a straight book. Martin doesn't aspire to side-splitting prose , although he is witty enough to be a compelling narrator. He falls into that category of performers who are earnest technicians of laughter. He is a comedy craftsmen. A British equivalent could be Rowan Atkinson, who, like Martin, comes across in interviews as serious, private, a bit shy. Martin was no Mozartian prodigy, slaying family and friends with precocious one-liners at the age of five. He wasn't one of those playground performers who see off the bullies with rapier repartee. His teenage ambition was to be a magician, an act that relies on painstaking practice. Spontaneous humour is an advantage, but it is only a tactic, diverting the audience for long enough to perform a sleight-of-hand trick and earn a bigger ovation.

As he made the transition into standup, Martin kept the conjuror's commitment to tradecraft. He recorded his act, annotated it, whittled away at rough edges and focused on precision. He developed a theory of comedy based on subverting the audience's expectation of entertainment. He wanted its apogee to be the joke with no punchline - anti-comedy that would unnerve and alienate the audience, but also, through self-deprecation, engage them in conspiracy against himself. He perfected the art of having an act so bad it was good.

That doesn't sound much like fun and for Martin a lot of the time it wasn't. He suffered bouts of depression, pathological anxiety and loneliness, grafting on the road, doing two shows a night in any venue that would have him.

Why? The usual reason people take to the stage is because they crave approval. And a common reason why people seek approval in the applause of strangers is because they never had it at home. Steve Martin's father once had showbiz dreams of his own, but he abandoned them for a career in real estate. This lifelong captivity of the spirit by mundane suburban America left Martin Snr, according to his son's analysis, discreetly embittered. He was capable of generosity but not warmth. He controlled his family by withholding affection and occasionally erupting in fearsome rages. He once volunteered a hostile review of his son's act to a local estate agents' trade journal, to make the point that he valued po-faced respectability over celebrity (and family intimacy).

Martin fled an upbringing in the uptight, upwardly mobile Fifties. He went to college, read philosophy and rebelled in the Sixties. He grew his hair and smoked pot. He missed the Vietnam draft by a combination of luck and malingering. He gradually dropped any hint of protest politics from his act in the Seventies. He says that absurdity and escapism were better suited to the times, the reaction of a disillusioned idealist to the flint-hearted cynicism of Nixon's America. Another interpretation would be that, like most astute hippies, Martin saw the writing on the wall, recognised it was a corporate logo and sold out.

In 1981, Martin walked away from live comedy to make movies, at which point Born Standing Up ends. For all of Martin's outsider angst, this is ultimately a conventional tale. It is the American Dream with a baby boom twist. It is the story of how a boy from the 'burbs pulled himself up by his clown boot straps, applied a bit of Protestant work ethic and won the West. It culminates in a touching deathbed reconciliation with the estranged father and a sunset on the Hollywood horizon. There is as much homily as humour. There is plenty of insight into comedy, celebrity and live performance. But there is also a moral, encapsulated in a piece of advice given to Martin late in his career by an orphaned friend: 'If you have anything to work out with your parents, do it now. One day, it will be too late.' Not funny, but true.