Oh my God, I'm boring them, this is the worst possible." He wasn't joking. After an hour, someone at the back got up to leave, whereupon Martin bent double and cried, "We have to finish now. "You're killing me up here." Then he sat back down to answer questions. His demeanour throughout was extravagantly pained, "I can't believe you people are making me do a rope trick," he said. Martin reprised some of his early routines, sang a satirical song and, to the delight of the bookish audience, successfully executed a rope trick. The book covers the period from his childhood to his early 30s, when, with audacious ambition, he left stand-up comedy to take a shot at movie stardom. I'd seen Martin's public persona in action at the New Yorker literary festival the day before, where he'd appeared before a full house to discuss his new memoir, Born Standing Up. But the wide-brimmed hat, our-man-in-Havana-style suit and sunglasses the size of wing mirrors are all wardrobe decisions that, along with his mildly self-conscious air, announce his arrival as subtly as a town crier. It's not entirely his fault: the toothbrush moustache he wears is a condition of his lead in the second Pink Panther movie, currently filming in Chicago. Steve Martin crosses the lobby of New York's Algonquin Hotel in what I at first take to be a disguise of some sort.
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