An awesome present!Born Standing Up is Steve Martin sharing the foundations of his own kind of comedy: his preferences in performers, his attention to style, his building of a repertoire and eventually, a name; and Born Standing Up is enjoyable because it doesn’t attempt to be encyclopedic, it doesn’t attempt overt analysis of Martin’s psychology, it doesn’t tell you every single detail of every single skit or the personal life of every one of its characters. Born Standing Up is sweet, short, funny, classy (especially in Martin’s strict practice of crediting every single person that impacted and shaped his material) and occasionally brilliantly observant. I dove into this book and didn’t come up until it was over. Like the best shows, you end it feeling like you’ve seen something irreproducible and genuine. What that really means, of course, is that Martin leaves you dying for more.
