A wild and crazy guise?

THERE is a YouTube video, shot at a Lincoln Center tribute to Diane Keaton earlier this year, in which Steve Martin comes onstage with his banjo and plays a sweet, twangy melody called “Father’s Pride.” The music is winsome and his execution heartfelt. After a few seconds, a rumble of laughter rolls up from the crowd. Then it dies. The audience can’t seem to resolve the humorous visual cue of the banjo-wielding Martin with the sincerity of his song.

Martin’s memoir, “Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life,” will similarly confuse those who come to it looking for laughs. It is a mostly unfunny yet oddly stirring book about the comedian’s early life, beginning with his boyhood before moving through his 20s and on up to 1982, when he hung up his balloon hat and quit doing stand-up for good. Since then, Martin has done much to make us laugh, but he has also pursued other, loftier passions: essay writing, art collecting and a certain amount of armchair philosophizing. In all these years he claims never to have looked back at his beginnings, until now.

Martin was the son of a frustrated actor father and a star-struck mother. When he was 5, his family moved from Waco, Texas, to Hollywood, where his father held a few jobs on the fringe of show business before becoming a real estate broker to pay the bills. “I suspect as his show business dream slipped further into the sunset,” his son writes, “he chose to blame his family who needed food, shelter, and attention.”

Martin describes being “sick with fear” of his disapproving father. At 9, he suffered a beating that left him covered in welts. “I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts,” he comments. “I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.”

When Martin was 10, the family moved to Garden Grove, close to the newly opened Disneyland, a place that “seemed so glorious that I believed it should be in some faraway, impossible-to-visit Shangri-la, not two miles from the house where I was about to grow up.” Soon, he had a job at the park handing out guidebooks to visitors. After his shift ended, he would roam the Magic Kingdom finding showbiz father figures to teach him essential trade tricks. He learned lariat-twirling from a cowboy in Frontierland, juggling from a Fantasyland court jester and slapstick and balloon animals from legendary vaudevillian Wally Boag. Eventually, he got a job at Merlin’s Magic Shop, practicing prestidigitation and learning from old-handers Leo Behnke and Jim Barlow.

“The daily excitement of my life at Disneyland and high school was in stark contrast to my life at home,” he writes, in what can only be called an understatement. Family life was a grim affair. Martin withdrew into his hobbies and taught himself to play the banjo, practicing in his parked car with the windows rolled up so as not to enrage his father. His passions guided and protected him. The conditions were perfect for minting an intensely shy and private show-off -- which is exactly what he became.

After Disneyland, Martin did a three-year stint at Knott’s Berry Farm’s Bird Cage Theatre, where he met Stormie Sherk, a peaches-and-cream beauty with whom he fell in love. His description of them dressed in period garb, wandering the park together and singing tender duets onstage can’t help but bring to mind his scenes with Bernadette Peters in “The Jerk.” It was Stormie who turned Martin into a philosopher by giving him her copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge.” He enrolled as a philosophy major at Long Beach State College (now CSULB), and his classes in logic, literature and philosophy influenced his evolving act. By the time Martin had reached adulthood, the map of his career was drawn.

Martin’s success had little to do with lucky breaks but was a matter of discipline and audodidacticism. Gigging in local music clubs such as the Ice House, the Troubadour and the Prison of Socrates -- comedy clubs did not yet exist in Southern California -- he honed his bits, keeping scrupulous notes on how each one played. His act became a pastiche of sight gags, magic and drollery that at times bordered on performance art. “My show,” he notes, “was becoming something else, something free and unpredictable, and the doing of it thrilled me.”

Martin was, and remains, an entertainment anomaly. Finding inspiration in the poetry of e.e. cummings and the topsy-turvy logic of Lewis Carroll, he created a humor hybrid that centered on contradiction and the juxtaposition of disparate ideas. In the 1960s, his square look stood out -- “like a visitor from the straight world who had gone seriously awry.” He wasn’t pushing the boundaries of decency, politics or race but, rather, experimenting with the laws of comedy itself.

“What if there were no punch lines?” he was wondering by the 1970s. “What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What would the audience do with all that tension?” This led him to create, in the words of Richard Zoglin, “a more sophisticated kind of metacomedy, a comedy act in ironic quotation marks.”

Martin built an overstuffed entertainer alter-ego and then jabbed holes in it with jokes like, “I’m so mad at my mother, she’s a hundred and two years old, and she called me the other day. She wanted to borrow ten dollars for some food! I said, ‘Hey, I work for a living!’ ”

He was doing postmodern comedy before anyone knew what it was. His legacy includes a lineage of self-reflecting comedians -- culminating in the blowhard, Escher-like character of Stephen Colbert, who is perhaps the ultimate expression of what Martin started almost 40 years ago.

The double whammy of his 1976 debut on “Saturday Night Live” and his 1977 album “Let’s Get Small” made Martin a certified phenomenon, filling stadiums with thousands of arrow-wearing fans. But by 1981, he says, his act had become “like an overly plumed bird whose next evolutionary step was extinction.” All his training in close-up work, audience interaction and sublime physical comedy didn’t translate to the larger venues despite the trademark white suit he wore for visibility. Stressed and exhausted, he fulfilled his outstanding commitments, and took his final bow in 1982.

In much the same way as “The Razor’s Edge,” or the magic how-to books Martin pored over as a kid, “Born Standing Up” is full of hidden information that is magically revealed to a perceptive reader. Here, he offers us a context from which to reexamine his post-stand-up choices, from “The Lonely Guy” to the essays he has written for the New Yorker. His narration is artless and sweet, as though a much wiser, though no less wide-eyed, Navin Johnson were telling the story.

“Born Standing Up” also suggests a way to think about that Lincoln Center banjo performance and what it meant. Having watched him make a career out of mixed cues, out of blending lofty ideas with physical comedy, Martin’s audience can get confused. He once predicted that if he withheld a punch line long enough, “the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation.”

And so, having been conditioned by the first 20 years of his career, we have a Pavlovian response to the mere sight of him: We laugh. Even if it is out of desperation, it’s no less sweet.