A Happy Feat

He found a kind of key in philosophy.

"Philosophy taught me two things. First, the reality of the absurd. Absurd was funny. You didn't need a punch line, a structure, you just needed an ironic juxtaposition. Second, there's a logical progression to things, but when you disrupt it, that's very funny. I got that from Lewis Carroll. There's a word for it. I don't know it, but I know there's a word for it."

Example, from an old monologue: "I'd never divorce you, because I love you, I cherish you, I honor you and I don't want to lose half my stuff."

Armed and undangerous with his new insight, he took to the road to find material. He also worked as a writer on TV shows, honing his material. But his laboratory was always the road, opening for folk groups and then rock bands, trying desperately to find a persona.

"I did everything I could to get up to 15 minutes of good material. Some nights I had nothing. But it's like Windows, you know the way screens just keep coming on to cover other screens. You pile it on. Or it's like evolution. One night you mutate. You're all alone, you and 40 people in a room somewhere, and you're just looking for something that works and it just happens."

What Martin settled on was something that could be called The Deluded Man. It's a kind of postmodernism, a figure so steeped in showbiz realities and traditions that he just doesn't realize what he's doing isn't funny. It's a parody of showbiz conventions by someone who doesn't realize it's a parody.

The arrow through the head, an ancient vaudeville trope, is a perfect case of this. If you put an arrow on your head, nobody would laugh at it. But if you put an arrow on your head and sell the audience on your being so naive and uncool and clueless that you think they'd think such a lame-o stunt is funny, then magically the oldest joke in the biz is reinvented and becomes hysterical.

Martin's lunch companion believes (but can't verify) that he saw the breakthrough moment: his first network appearance on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" on Feb. 15, 1972. It was a time when American comedy was particularly dead, the buttoned-up comics of the '50s long forgotten, the war in Vietnam sucking much of the comic oxygen out of the nation, Woody Allen in his serious phase and "Saturday Night Live" three years away. "Steve Martin"? What could someone with a Fuller Brush salesman's name add to this?

He blew the house up and the reporter can recall being dazzled by the guy's antic craziness, his deft use of showbiz idiom but skewed slightly toward the insane, his vivid energy.

"Steve, Steve, people say to me, you're a ramblin' kind of guy, what makes you ramble?"

Sheer genius. He got the comic power of a word like "ramble," never used in conversation except by the delusional, by someone so clueless that he thought being called ramblin' was really cool. But it was also in the body language. Martin had a powerful way of expressing irony through his body. It was his facial expression, faux-smug, a little too sure of the self, not aware, really, how off-key he was; and it was his physical exuberance, subtler than slapstick but still expressed in flesh. But most of all it was his sense of language.

He had a great gift for finding the apposite word and then infusing it with comic meaning so profound it would become funny even when shorn of context.

"Excuuuse me!" is one such, or "We are two wild and crazy guys ."

"I was very lucky," he recalls. "Before he died, Johnny sent me a disc with all my appearances on it. That first night, the camera happened to cut away from me to Sammy Davis Jr., falling out of the chair. That sold me. What I didn't realize was that Sammy always fell out of the chair; the camera cut just happened to catch it."

It was the first of five performances on "Tonight" that year; to date he's been on a total of 45 times, for the second most appearances (Bob Hope is first with 103; David Letterman third with 44). "Saturday Night Live" ginned up around that time, and his talents meshed perfectly with the show's -- his gift for sketch humor, his quickness with an ad-lib, his ability to rally the young cast, who didn't yet realize they themselves were on the way to becoming the new establishment.

One of Martin's gifts is consolidation: He masters a form, then moves on. The first feature film came in 1979, "The Jerk," directed by old pro Carl Reiner. Many of his early films were simple projections of his stage persona. But he was adventurous as well, as witness the flop that became a cult hit, "Pennies From Heaven" in 1981. "All of Me," in '84, where he shared a body with fellow Twain winner Lily Tomlin, put him over the top critically. From then on his pattern, a kind of pinball ricochet between more serious "acted" works (frequently he wrote and produced as well) and lesser, more popularly oriented broad comedies. In 1999, for example, he made "The Out-of-Towners," a broad, stupid comedy, and "Bowfinger," a much smaller and more focused film, which he wrote and co-produced. He'll follow up this month's "Shopgirl," which he wrote from his novella, with the upcoming "The Pink Panther."

"Martin seemed one of the few American artists of any sort who, working within a late-modern, ironic self-conscious sensibility, have found access to a vein of real feeling and genuine poetic invention, without ever becoming sentimental, precious, or self-congratulatory" the critic Adam Gopnik wrote of him in 1993. It's still true.

"I don't think I ever made a conscious career plan. Something always seems to come up. I never feel disciplined."

He describes his process as a constant search for "topics." He never knows where he'll find one, what it'll be, where it'll take him. But he's always looking for something to engage his imagination and take him on a little voyage.

"Shopgirl," which he stars in with Claire Danes, is typical: He wanted to try to imagine a young woman's mind, based on an encounter he'd had, but he didn't want to stoop to cheap psychology. He tried to write a paragraph that summed her up, feeling that if it worked, if it were accurate, it would take him to an interesting place.

"I think of it as about behavior. The book does not analyze this young woman. If you describe intently, you get the psychology." And then it's time to rush off. He has some German art collectors to meet, to see the paintings in his New York apartment as opposed to his Beverly Hills house. Glasses come on, baseball cap covers the permafrost, jacket is pulled tight, and fast and silently he departs, unnoticed by a room that has spent the past hour gawking at -- Peter Marshall.

Martin probably remembered Marshall that afternoon, as he joked he would; and maybe he wished he'd said a word or two to the retired old "Hollywood Squares" host.

But he had to hustle on.

"I just want a new topic in my life," he said.