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.
