When Steve Martin’s ‘A Wild and Crazy Guy’ Became a Comedy Icon
- edgarstreetbooks
- Jan 9
- 3 min read
‘100 Funniest Comedy Albums’ Book Excerpt
Frank Mastropolo
Steve Martin’s second album, 1978’s A Wild and Crazy Guy, cemented his position as a comedian who had attained rock star status.
It reached №2 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart, only kept off the top spot by the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. It includes the hit novelty single “King Tut” and won the Grammy Award in 1979 for Best Comedy Album.
Side One of A Wild and Crazy Guy was recorded at the intimate Boarding House nightclub in San Francisco. Side Two was recorded at the Red Rocks Amphitheater outside Denver before 9,500 people.
Great to be here for the closing night show here at the — where is this? Is this San Francisco? OK, I’ve been here for two weeks and this is the closing night. We do two shows tonight, and I’m really looking forward to it.
And I think rather than do it just twice, I think I’m going to do it over and over. I’m going to do the same joke over and over in the same show. This would be like a new thing.
Martin reprises his role as Georg Festrunk, one of the Czech “wild and crazy guys” he introduced with Dan Aykroyd on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Martin introduced the character on the album’s title track and Georg returned briefly on “You Naive Americans.”
Many people come to me, and they say, “Hey, how can you be such a swinging sex god?” Well, I tell you. It’s not because I can make love up to one time a night. It’s not because I say the things a woman wants to hear like, “Are you through yet?”
It’s because I know how to read a woman. If she is like a cat, I have kitty litter. If she is like a dog, we do it on the paper. But I’m also a unique guy too. The kind of guy who likes to have his own special scent. Not to smell like every other guy.
I like to have my own individual odor. That’s why I wear tuna fish sandwich. I put a tuna fish sandwich under each arm. Maybe one or two behind the ears. I don’t smell like any other guy. And it’s economical too because the smell lasts for four or five days.
Fans did not realize that Martin was growing tired of his routines. “It was about 1981,” Martin told NPR.
“I still had a few obligations left, but I knew that I could not continue. But I guess I could have continued if I had nothing to go to, but I did have something to go to, which was movies.
“And you know, the act had become so known that in order to go back, I would have had to create an entirely new show, and I wasn’t up to it, especially when the opportunity for movies and writing movies came around.
“It’s like painting the same blank canvas over and over and over and over and over. Once the concept is known, you don’t need to see two.”
Martin won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2005 and was one of the Kennedy Center honorees in 2007. In 2015, A Wild and Crazy Guy was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress.
Frank Mastropolo is the author of 100 Funniest Comedy Albums, part of the Greatest Performances series. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.
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