Stephen Glenn Martin (born August 14, 1945) is an American comedian, actor, writer, producer, and musician. Known for his work in comedy films, television, and recording, he has received many accolades, including five Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award as well as nominations for eight Golden Globe Awards and two Tony Awards. Martin received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2005, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2007, the Honorary Academy Award in 2013, and an AFI Life Achievement Award in 2015. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Martin at sixth place in a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics.
Martin first came to public notice as a writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1969, and later as a frequent host on Saturday Night Live. He became one of the most popular American stand-up comedians during the 1970s, performing his brand of offbeat, absurdist comedy routines before sold-out theaters on national tours. He then starred in films such as The Jerk (1979), Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), The Man with Two Brains (1983), All of Me (1984), ¡Three Amigos! (1986), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Roxanne (1987), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), L.A. Story (1991), Bowfinger (1999) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). He played family patriarchs in Parenthood (1989), the Father of the Bride films (1991–1995), Bringing Down the House (2003), and the Cheaper by the Dozen films (2003–2005).
Since 2015, Martin has embarked on several national comedy tours with fellow comedian Martin Short. In 2018, they released their Netflix special An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life, which received four Primetime Emmy Award nominations. In 2021, he co-created and starred in his first television show, the Hulu comedy series Only Murders in the Building, alongside Short and Selena Gomez, for which he earned three Primetime Emmy Award nominations, two Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, a Golden Globe Award nomination, and a 2021 Peabody Award nomination. In 2022, Martin and Short co-hosted Saturday Night Live together with Gomez making an appearance.
Martin is also known for writing the books to the musical Bright Star (2016) and to the comedy Meteor Shower (2017), both of which premiered on Broadway; he co-wrote the music to the former. Martin has played banjo since an early age and has included music in his comedy routines from the beginning of his professional career. He has released several music albums and has performed with various bluegrass acts. He has won three Grammy Awards for his music and two for his comedy albums Let's Get Small (1977) and A Wild and Crazy Guy (1978).
Stephen Glenn Martin was born on August 14, 1945, in Waco, Texas, the son of Mary Lee (née Stewart; 1911–2002) and Glenn Vernon Martin (1914–1997), a real estate salesman and aspiring actor. He has an older sister, Melinda.
Martin is of English, Scottish, Welsh, Scots-Irish, German, and French descent. He and his sister grew up in a Baptist family in Inglewood, California, and later in Garden Grove in Orange County; he was a cheerleader at Garden Grove High School. One of Martin's earliest memories is seeing his father as an extra serving drinks onstage at the Callboard Theater on Melrose Place in West Hollywood. During World War II in Britain, his father appeared in a production of Our Town with Raymond Massey. Expressing his affection through gifts like cars and bikes, Steve's father was stern and not emotionally open to his son. He was proud but critical, with Steve later recalling that in his teens his feelings for his father were mostly of hatred.
Martin's first job was at newly opened Disneyland, selling guidebooks on weekends and full-time during summer break. The work lasted for three years (1955–1958). During his free time, he frequented the Main Street Magic shop, where tricks were demonstrated to patrons. While working at Disneyland, he was captured in the background of the home movie that was made into the short-subject film Disneyland Dream, incidentally becoming his first film appearance. By 1960, he had mastered several magic tricks and illusions and took a paying job at the Magic shop in Fantasyland in August. There he perfected his talents for magic, juggling, and creating balloon animals in the manner of mentor Wally Boag, frequently performing for tips.
After high school, Martin attended Santa Ana College, taking classes in drama and English poetry. In his free time, he teamed up with friend and high school classmate Kathy Westmoreland to participate in comedies and other productions at the Bird Cage Theatre. He joined a comedy troupe at Knott's Berry Farm. Later, he met budding actress Stormie Sherk, and they developed comedy routines and became romantically involved. Sherk's influence led Martin to apply to California State University, Long Beach, for enrollment with a major in philosophy. Sherk enrolled at UCLA, about an hour's drive north, and the distance eventually caused them to lead separate lives.
Inspired by his philosophy classes, Martin considered becoming a professor instead of an actor-comedian. Being at college changed his life. It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non-sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!' Then it gets real easy to write this stuff because all you have to do is twist everything hard—you twist the punch line, you twist the non-sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up. Martin recalls reading a treatise on comedy that led him to think: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. Martin periodically spoofed his philosophy studies in his 1970s stand-up act, comparing philosophy with studying geology. If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.
In 1967, Martin transferred to UCLA and switched his major to theater. While attending college, he appeared in an episode of The Dating Game, winning a date with Deana Martin. Martin began working local clubs at night, to mixed notices, and at twenty-one, he dropped out of college.
In 1967, his former girlfriend Nina Goldblatt, a dancer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, helped Martin land a writing job with the show by submitting his work to head writer Mason Williams. Williams initially paid Martin out of his own pocket. Along with the other writers for the show, Martin won an Emmy Award in 1969 at the age of twenty-three. He wrote for The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour and The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. Martin's first national television appearance was on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968. He says: [I] appeared on The Virginia Graham Show, circa 1970. I looked grotesque. I had a hairdo like a helmet, which I blow-dried to a puffy bouffant, for reasons I no longer understand. I wore a frock coat and a silk shirt, and my delivery was mannered, slow and self-aware. I had absolutely no authority. After reviewing the show, I was depressed for a week. During these years his roommates included Gary Mule Deer and Michael Johnson. Gary Mule Deer supplied the first joke Martin submitted to Tommy Smothers for use on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour show. Martin opened for groups such as The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (who returned the favor by appearing in his 1980 television special All Commercials), The Carpenters, and Toto. He appeared at The Boarding House, among other venues. He continued to write, earning an Emmy nomination for his work on Van Dyke and Company in 1976.