Here is a brief excerpt from a “classic ” article, written by Steve Martin and featured in The New Yorker (October 22, 2007).  To read the complete  article, check out others, and obtain information about subscription rates, please click here.

Credit: Photograph by Mitzi Trumbo

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Before his Emmy, before his Grammys, before his decades-long run of TV appearances and movies, Steve Martin was a fledgling teen comedian at a small theatre in an amusement park. “Four paying customers was officially an audience,” he wrote in The New Yorker, in 2007, “so we often did shows to resonating silence.”

He didn’t have that problem for long. On Tuesday, Hulu will release the third-season première of Martin’s “Only Murders in the Building,” his unlikely but popular sendup of true-crime podcasts, entertainment-industry egos, and tenant-board politics on the Upper West Side. But, for several years early in his career, Martin floundered personally and professionally, struggling to figure out what he wanted his act—and his life—to be. His Personal History for the magazine was unusually candid about his travails, sometimes for a punch line, but more often, it seems, simply in the service of honesty and reflection. The piece revisits jokes that bombed and relationships that failed, and even acknowledges Martin’s use of stolen material very early in his career. The essay doesn’t mention many household names, but it does identify a director to whom he lost an early love—and who later made a pass at a different woman, Martin’s wife. “Incidentally,” the comedian notes, the director “died a few years ago, but it was not I who killed him.”

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During the nineteen-sixties, the five-foot-high hand-painted placard in front of the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm read “World’s Greatest Entertaiment.” The missing “n” in “entertainment” was overlooked by staff, audience, and visitors for an entire decade. I worked there between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two as an actor in melodramas. Knott’s Berry Farm began in the twenties, when Walter and Cordelia Knott set up a roadside berry stand. A few years later, Cordelia opened her chicken-dinner restaurant, and Walter bought pieces of a ghost town and moved the Old West buildings to his burgeoning tourist destination. Squawking peacocks roamed the grounds, and there was a little wooden chapel that played organ music while you stared at a picture of Jesus and watched his eyes magically open.

My first performances for a paying audience were at the Bird Cage, a wooden theatre with a canvas roof. Inside were two hundred folding chairs on risers, arranged around a thrust Masonite stage that sat behind a patch of fake grass. A painted cutout of a birdcage, worthy of a Sotheby’s folk-art auction, hung over center stage, and painted representations of drapes framed the proscenium. The actors swept the stage, raised and lowered the curtains, cleaned the house of trash, and went out on the grounds pitching the show to visitors strolling around the park. I was being paid two dollars a show, twenty-five shows a week. Even in 1963, the rate was considered low.

The show consisted of a twenty-five-minute melodrama, in which the audience was encouraged to cheer the hero and boo the villain. I appeared in “The Bungling Burglar,” performing the role of Hamilton Brainwood, a detective who was attracted to the provocatively named soubrette, Dimples Reardon. Fortunately, I ended up with the virtuous heroine, Angela Trueheart. The play was followed by a ten-minute “olio” segment involving two five-minute routines in which the actors did their specialties, usually songs or short comedy acts, and here I was able to work steadily on my fledgling comedy-magic act, five minutes at a time, four times a day (five on Sunday), for three years.

The Bird Cage was a normal theatrical nuthouse. Missed cues caused noisy pileups in the wings, or a missing prop left us hanging while we ad-libbed excuses to leave the stage and retrieve it. A forgotten line would hang in the air, searching for someone, anyone, to say it. The theatre was run by Woody Wilson, a dead ringer for W. C. Fields, and a boozer, too, and the likable George Stuart, who, on Saturday nights, would entertain the crowd with a monologue that had them roaring: “You’re from Tucson? I spent a week there one night!” Four paying customers was officially an audience, so we often did shows to resonating silence. On one of these dead afternoons, Woody Wilson peed so loudly in the echoing bathroom that it broke us up and got embarrassed laughs from our conservative family audience.

The theatre was stocked with genuine characters. Ronnie Morgan, rail thin, would dress up as Lincoln and read the Gettysburg Address for local elementary schools. On a good day, he would show us young lads cheesecake photos of his wife in a leopard-skin bikini, and even at age eighteen we thought it was weird. There was Joe Carney, a blustery and funny actor, who opened the lavatory door from the top to avoid germs. Paul Shackleton was the son of a preacher and could not tolerate a swear word, but he once laughed till he cried when we sat down under a eucalyptus tree to drink our Cokes and a bird shit on my head. For days we could not look each other in the eye without breaking into uncontrollable hysterics. John Stuart, a talented tenor with a mischievous sense of humor, once secretly put talcum powder in my top hat. Onstage, whenever I popped the hat on or off, a mushroom cloud of smoke bloomed from my head, leaving me bewildered as to why the audience was laughing.

Stormie Sherk, later to become an enormously successful Christian author and proselytizer under her married name, Stormie Omartian, was beautiful, witty, bright, and filled with an engaging spirit that was not yet holy. We performed in the melodramas together; my role was either the comic or the leading man, depending on the day of the week. She wore calico dresses that complemented her strawberry-blond hair and vanilla skin. Soon we were in love and would roam around Knott’s in our period costumes and find a period place to sit, mostly by the period church next to the man-made lake, where we would stare endlessly into each other’s eyes. We developed a love duet for the Bird Cage in which she would sing “Gypsy Rover” while I accompanied her on the five-string banjo. When she sang the song, the lyric that affected me the most was—believe it or not—“La dee doo la dee doo dah day.” We would talk of a wedding in a lilac-covered dale, and I could fill any conversational gaps with ardent recitations of poetry by Keats and Shelley, which I picked up at Santa Ana Junior College. Finally, the inevitable happened. I was a late-blooming eighteen-year-old when I had my first sexual experience, involving the virginal Stormie, a condom (swiped from my parents’ drawer), and the front seat of my car, whose windows became befogged with desire.

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Here is a direct link to the comnplketer article.