‘If you’re anointed tonight, you can be dumped on tomorrow’: Steve Martin on fame, failure and TV humiliation

I didn’t expect Steve Martin to be funny. Sure, it was his skewwhiff sensibility that made The Jerk, The Man With Two Brains, LA Story and Bowfinger so deliriously inspired. And he was comedy’s first double-platinum-record-selling, stadium-touring megastar; he began wearing a white suit on stage only so that he could be seen by fans in the cheap seats several postcodes away. He crafted riotous slapstick crescendos in All of Me and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and displayed a literary flair even at his silliest. No one who has seen Roxanne, the modern-day interpretation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac that found Martin investing his comedy with emotional weight for the first time, will dispute the Edward-Lear-like genius of the line “earn more sessions by sleeving”.

But when he isn’t starring in the crime-comedy series Only Murders in the Building, which he co-created, he is a serious sort. He writes plays, makes bluegrass records, collects art – knows everything about art, in fact. (He once sold an Edward Hopper for almost $27m.) Now, he is the subject of Steve! (Martin), a two‑part, three-hour-plus survey of his life and career from the Oscar-winning documentary supremo Morgan Neville. The chance today of lols looks low.

But blow me down if the first thing out of his mouth isn’t a gag.

All I have done is ask him and Neville, who are speaking to me from separate locations via a video call, whether they can hear me clearly. “I’m not sure,” says Martin. “It sounds like you have some kind of British accent on mine.” And we’re off.

The 78-year-old actor is in his New York City apartment, a heaving bookcase and mint-coloured sofa behind him, peering at his screen through brown-framed glasses. His hair is ceramic-white and looks as soft as cotton wool; his friend and comedy partner Martin Short once likened him to “a page in a colouring book that hasn’t been coloured in yet”.

Why did he agree to make the documentary? “You can’t analyse your own life and work,” Martin says. “I know what it looks like on the inside: a big mess, a big jumble. But how about from the outside?” What did he learn? “Well, I’ve only seen it once. I’ll know what to think when other people look at it. The one thing I did after I watched it was to call Morgan and say: ‘Shouldn’t you have mentioned the awards?’”

Neville is a lifelong fan. “I didn’t totally get what Steve was doing when I was a kid, but there’s an absurdity you respond to,” he says from his home in Pasadena, California. “Once you grow up, you see the sophistication as well.” What did he need from Martin for the documentary to work? “He had to be open. And it became clear from our initial meeting that he was genuinely curious about his own life.”

The first half of Steve! (Martin) covers Martin’s childhood, his teenage job in the Disneyland magic shop, his innovative early standup, all the way up to when he made his leap from stadiums to screen with The Jerk in 1979 – then quit live comedy. In the second half, we get the rest of the story, including the failures, anxieties and disappointments that preceded his present professional and domestic bliss. (He has been married since 2007 to Anne Stringfield, who used to factcheck his pieces at the New Yorker magazine and with whom he has an 11-year-old daughter.)

The film’s title, with its razzle-dazzle exclamation mark, reflects Martin’s shtick as a one-man showbiz parody: “I was an entertainer who was playing an entertainer, a not so good one,” he wrote in his early-years memoir, Born Standing Up. “It’s the phoney self-aggrandising position I’ve held my whole life,” Martin says now. “It’s also something from when I played Las Vegas in the 1970s. Everyone would do that one-name thing: ‘Cher!’ So I thought it was funny to go: ‘Steve!’”

As the documentary illustrates, Martin’s live act was an avant garde experiment in sustaining jokes without discharging their tension. He realised that if he didn’t give audiences the customary signposts of comedy (feed line, payoff), they would have to pick their own place to laugh and the humour might never climax. His confected self-belief, his facade of arrogance even as he stood on stage with a plastic arrow through his head, made him invulnerable. The audience, he wrote, “had to believe that I didn’t care if they laughed at all, and that this act was going on with or without them”.

The ironic embrace of showbiz extended to his treatment of fans. At the height of his 70s fame, he carried with him a set of cards on which was printed: “This certifies that you have had a personal encounter with me and that you found me warm, polite, intelligent and funny. Steve Martin.”

Mentioning it brings a smile to his face. “This was back when you’d be asked for autographs,” he says. “The card had a signature printed on it. I’d give them out, but people would just be puzzled. Then they’d ask me to sign it, so it didn’t really work.”

Today it’s all selfies. “I prefer that, because the autograph thing was always: ‘Oh, let me find a pen,’ and then you’re signing a shoe receipt.” Is he more comfortable now with fan interactions? “Not really. There is no interaction, because it’s all about me.” Pause. “Not that I would ask about them,” he says, with a perfect flicker of disgust.

It must have been odd for him, in the 70s, to be deconstructing showbiz conventions only to be embraced by the establishment. Steve! (Martin) features a clip of Sammy Davis Jr hugging him on The Tonight Show. “I felt so proud,” he says. “And then I found out that Sammy hugged everyone.”

Did it feel as if he had been anointed? “I didn’t think of it as anointing, because if you’re anointed tonight, you can be dumped on tomorrow.” Only as he is mid-answer do I appreciate the supreme pleasure of hearing him say “anointed” in that primly precise diction, just as he did in The Man With Two Brains while reciting Pointy Birds by the fictional writer John Lillison, AKA England’s greatest one-armed poet: “O pointy birds / O pointy-pointy / Anoint my head / Anointy-nointy.”

Martin worries that accepting acclaim today means looking foolish tomorrow. Jerry Seinfeld refers to him in Steve! (Martin) as “the most idolised comedian ever”. Martin says Seinfeld’s comment “makes me cringe. Idolatry is so fleeting. When I was a kid, there was this comedian, Joe Penner, whose catchphrase was: ‘Wanna buy a duck?’ If you said: ‘Wanna buy a duck?’ everybody would fall down laughing. And now it’s embarrassing. So I don’t invest too much in that stuff.”

Part of his humility must come from the way he was treated by his father, Glenn, a real estate salesman with thwarted showbiz ambitions. In Born Standing Up, Martin recounts instances of physical abuse, as well as Glenn’s peevish behaviour once his son’s career took off. When Martin first appeared as a host on Saturday Night Live – a position he would occupy a further 15 times – his father wrote a negative review of the performance in the newsletter of the Newport Beach Association of Realtors. Immediately after the premiere of The Jerk, Glenn said his son was “no Charlie Chaplin”.

Of course, he was wrong. In his pomp, Martin really was one of modern comedy’s closest equivalents to Chaplin. “Absolutely!” agrees Neville. “This will make Steve blush, but he was a cultural phenomenon.”

In dwelling on some of Martin’s perceived failures, Steve! (Martin) provides a surprisingly nuanced portrait. A generous chunk of time is devoted to the magnificent but maligned 1981 film version of Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven, which represented a brave attempt by Martin to extend his range right at the point where he could have sleepwalked into a sequel to The Jerk. I love his performance as a 1930s sheet-music salesman suspected of murder, but he remains unconvinced.

“Honestly, I think they cast it wrong,” he says with a shrug. “I felt I acted well enough as a character who was hurting inside, but I can’t judge it accurately. I just can’t.” It’s a blind spot that extends to all his non-comedic work, even his fine turn as a sinister conman in David Mamet’s 1997 thriller The Spanish Prisoner. “I don’t know how to assess those dramatic performances. If someone says: ‘You were great in The Spanish Prisoner,’ then I go: ‘Thank you! Was I? I’m glad.’”

You were great in The Spanish Prisoner, I tell him. “Thank you! Was I? I’m glad.”

Neville sees Martin as “the ultimate puzzle-solver. It’s in everything he does, from magic to standup to playing the banjo. He never sits back and says: ‘That was great.’ It’s always: ‘How do I make it better?’”

Having committed in Steve! (Martin) to showing low points as well as highlights, it was incumbent on Neville to feature the infamous clip of the British comic Paul Kaye, in the guise of the irksome celebrity-insulting hobgoblin Dennis Pennis, ambushing Martin on the red carpet in 1996. “It was nasty,” says Neville. “And I wanted to show how the world judges you when all you’re trying to do is be creative.”

Related: ‘Marty just kept following me!’ Steve Martin and Martin Short on their 35-year friendship

It’s still painful to watch an evidently weary Martin deciding to oblige after he clocks the BBC logo on Kaye’s microphone. “What’s the question?” he asks good-naturedly, only for Kaye to deliver the killer blow: “How come you’re not funny any more?” Martin then turns back to the throng, fatigued and deflated, and continues his dead-man-walking trudge past photographers.

“It hurt because I was at a very vulnerable moment in my career,” he says. It took place at the premiere of Sgt Bilko, which might be Martin’s worst movie. He had turned down the lead role in The Birdcage to make it, only for that gay comedy to become a $185m worldwide smash while Sgt Bilko limped toward a $38m lifetime gross.

Wikipedia claims that Martin cancelled all his remaining press interviews after the Dennis Pennis insult. “No!” he scoffs. “That’s just Wikipedia.” You just find a way to deal with it, he suggests. “Bad reviews hurt; they really hurt. But if I’m at a screening and I see the critic, I just go: ‘Hey! How you doing?’ Like you don’t know anything.”

Martin hasn’t crossed paths with Kaye since then. Before I go, however, I mention that the line has come back to haunt Kaye: he has said it is now the one thing strangers say to him in the street. Hearing this, Martin tips back his head and lets out an almighty laugh, warm and rich, yet curiously lacking in schadenfreude. “I hold no grudges,” he says. “Things have gone well.”

• Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces is on Apple TV+ from 29 March