I really enjoyed this book and surprisingly have not read anything else by Steve Martin, other than his one-pagers in the New Yorker (more Martin planned for my Goodreads queue). As one who played his comedy albums over and over, Steve Martin's voice was ingrained in my adolescent ears and to read this book was to hear him again. His comedic voice is ever-present but nothing in the book is funny, which reinforces a perspective that humor is a light overlaying lens on our reality, one Steve wears naturally, albeit not without a craftsman's effort and edit. The reality he highlights is the big first chunk of his life as it distills into the mega-successful stand-up act. This is the act that I never saw, too young to go to comedy clubs or even be allowed to watch SNL circa his earliest appearances. Steve, for me, first lived on self-made cassette recordings of his first three comedy albums, one each year, 1977, 78 and 79, which helped make his semi-illicit silliness portable enough to sneak into the woods with my best-friend at the time for non-stop regurgitation. How does one enjoy the joke about 'her pussy' in your room if you have to lower the volume when the profane punchline is expected? And yes Martin had punchlines, but far fewer of them as the book and other reviewers do well explaining; his brand of 'anti-comedy' was new and refreshing. In regards to that first album, 'Let's Get Small,' he writes, "The material was so vivid to Bill and me that we naively included bits that were largely visual. The uninitiated heard clanks and spaces that brought forth laughs, and this minus turned into a plus, as the transitions seemed more surreal than they already were." Those awkward flanks made one feel, especially a pre-teen boy, as if you were listening to something completely raw, something big was happening and all you had was the sound portion to de-code the act. Well now we have the book.