Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life [Kindle Edition] Author: Steve Martin | Language: English | ISBN:
B000UZNSN6 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Download Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Download Download Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link The riveting, mega-bestselling, beloved and highly acclaimed memoir of a man, a vocation, and an era named one of the ten best nonfiction titles of 2007 by Time and Entertainment Weekly.
In the mid-seventies, Steve Martin exploded onto 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, selling guidebooks in the newly opened theme park. In the decade that followed, he worked in the Disney magic shop and the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm, performing his first magic/comedy act a dozen times a week. The story of these years, during which he practiced and honed his craft, is moving and revelatory. The dedication to excellence and innovation is formed at an astonishingly early age and never wavers or wanes.
Martin illuminates the sacrifice, discipline, and originality that made him an icon and informs his work to this day. To be this good, to perform so frequently, was isolating and lonely. It took Martin decades to reconnect with his parents and sister, and he tells that story with great tenderness. Martin also paints a portrait of his times—the era of free love and protests against the war in Vietnam, the heady irreverence of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the late sixties, and the transformative new voice of Saturday Night Live in the seventies.
Throughout the text, Martin has placed photographs, many never seen before. Born Standing Up is a superb testament to the sheer tenacity, focus, and daring of one of the greatest and most iconoclastic comedians of all time. Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Download Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
- File Size: 3061 KB
- Print Length: 228 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1416553657
- Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition (November 20, 2007)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000UZNSN6
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,240 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Comedy - #29
in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Comedy - #63
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Actors & Actresses
- #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Comedy - #29
in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Comedy - #63
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Actors & Actresses
My pre-ordered copy from Amazon arrived the day before Thanksgiving. I tried to explain to my son who was home from college for the break how much I looked forward to reading Steve Martin's autobiography. He thought it sounded about as interesting as reading the autobiography of Chevy Chase.
But to anyone old enough to remember Steve Martin's sensational, if seemingly brief, career as a stand-up comic, this is a fascinating book, not to be missed. There is much here that was new to me. I had no idea, for example, that he appeared so many times on the Tonight Show before becoming really famous, or that he had appeared as a bearded, long-haired comedian before adopting his famous clean-cut 3-piece white suit look, or that he suffered from debilitating panic attacks just as he began his career as a writer on the Smothers Brothers show.
For the first 80 pages or so I thought his life story was a bit humdrum, almost like a parody of Bob Dylan's "Chronicles". Martin grew up 2 miles from Disneyland, and the fact that he became an entertainer seemed almost inevitable. But the book really takes off as he recounts the early days of his career making the transition from magician with a few funny bits to a full-blown stand-up comic. Not that Steve Martin is the colossal genius that Bob Dylan is, but it's interesting that much as Dylan describes how he became a songwriter because he realized he could never succeed as a virtuoso guitarist, Martin writes how he became a comic because, well, who doesn't want to be in show business?
At the height of his career as a stand-up comic Steve Martin was the funniest man in America. One of the joys of this book is that he appreciates how funny he was and delights in retelling the same jokes that amused us then and amuse us now.
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