Customer Reviews

Wild & Crazy Guy

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Steve Martin's second comedy LP begins somewhat inauspiciously and then segues to a more raucous performance before an audience as wild & crazy as the titular Festrunk brother.

W&CG begins at The Boardinghouse nightclub in San Francisco; the first three tracks sound like outtake material from the Let's Get Small performances. Here, though, Steve sports a rougher, less inhibited edge, such as when he boasts that he gets his drinks at half-price. He runs down a list of bogus books he's authored - the funniest is How To Get Along With Everyone, which he coauthored with someone he doesn't get along with - and then pontificates on language in his own inimitable fashion.

He tackles language again late in the second track amid pieces on philosophy, religion (Steve finds that The Lord has tallied the times he's used His name in vein, and it numbers 1,000,006), and college - feeling humiliated over the greatness of Leonardo Da Vinci, Steve takes up juggling, then outlines a dirty trick to play on impressionable three-year-olds and comments on his awkward negotiation with the French language during a recent vacation to Paris.

After denouncing the audience as paranoid, Steve does a nice banjo riff before mangling a portion of I'm In The Mood For Love.

The opening minute of track Four takes place at The Boardinghouse with a bogus financial disclosure by Steve; when he notes his desire to sell out a show at $800 per ticket, we then segue to the far more raucous atmosphere of Red Rocks in Denver, where Steve goes into his Festrunk brother routine. He resumes his Festrunk identity when he lectures Americans on their naive methods regarding dating.

Sandwiched between his Festrunk act is a series of pieces on cats - an expose on cat juggling, his need to shackle his own feline because he was embezzling from him, and a hilarious double-entendre regarding a girlfriend and her cat.

After a somewhat sloppy piece on his "real" name, Steve launches into the act's thunderous closer - the King Tut song that likely inspired Pam Tillis' hit Cleopatra: Queen Of Denial - every time I hear Pam Tillis' number I expect Steve Martin to chime in with the famous "Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia" line.

While at times tackier than Let's Get Small, Wild & Crazy Guy nonetheless lives up to Steve's ability with laughs. But hey, he's into the......intellecutal...........KIND of thing.

For any who want to see Steve Martin at his rocketing beginnings (when some of us thought he would ONLY be a standup comic) this is a great companion piece to "Let's Get Small." Though that cd sounds like a club date, this has some material not used on that first cd, along with live "stadium" stuff that Martin did following the first cd.
I actually saw him opening night at the Universal Amphetheater, with opening band THE BLUES BROS. - whose "Briefcase Full of Blues" was recorded later that week at these string of shows.
Funny stuff here, some of it dated, but if you were a fan at the time, or if you never heard Martin stand up you will like this. "King Tut" is great and should never be forgotten...it is worth the price of this cd alone!

This is one of the best, no the VERY BEST Steve Martin work from my point of view. I recently gotten ahold of A Wild and Crazy Guy CD and it brought back some very veeeerrrry funny memories from when it first came out in 1978. I was very young and to this day, I still hear King Tut rolling in my head. I can't go anywhere without hearing this on my headset and not laugh myself silly walking down the street to which people may think I'm crazy. This is a good CD to have if you favor people other than Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, or Richard Pryor among others.

This was a GREAT college album. After seeing its ranking on Amazon, it sounds like it's still doing well. That is amazing.
Martin's humor was a great way to get through tense college days. He is in a world all of his own, but it is an interesting world, that's for sure.

Steven Martin is a great comedian for just about anyone. I am 14 years old and enjoy his comedy very much. Many comedians today throw too much profanity into their acts. While this can be funny, after a while it gets old. Steve Martin may throw in some profanity but he doesn't get old. Steve Martin is a very original man. The only weak point of this CD is the songs, Martin would have been better doing two more comedy skits than doing the songs. All in all its a 4 star performance.

I have not had a chance to check out other Steve Martin releases yet, but this one has convinced me to go out and get them all. The stuff is still as fresh and funny as it was when it came out, and I feel tons better finally knowing where the famous "I just want a girl with a good head on her shoulders" tirade came from. After Bill Hicks' work, this has to be my 2nd favorite comedy release.

In May of 1978 we finally got to play the main room at Harrah's in Lake Tahoe. Bill Harrah, like Steve Wynn, ran a class act hotel. An ordinary room at Harrah's had two bathrooms in every room and a TV in every bathroom. Imagine what the suites were like, not to mention the view of the lake and the fresh air. They were all second to none. The first time we played the main room, Kenny (Rogers) was the opening act for Steve Martin, who was still doing stand-up in those days. As anyone who's ever seen Kenny's show knows, he gives out a handful of autographed tambourines during the first song of every show and asks the recipients of his gifts to play along. No one thought to explain this to Steve Martin. The people with the tambourines couldn't keep them quiet during his monologue, and this distracted him too much to continue. But he was able to come up with a solution. The "Wild and Crazy Guy" jumped off the stage, ran through the audience, threw open the doors to the showroom, and ran through the casino screaming, "They're playing tambourines. They're playing tambourines, drain the lake!" -- Garth Shaw

first off i love what he did on SNL and hes just as goofy and funny on the album.and if you dont like steve martin...thats ok. but if you do...this is most definately worth the money

I love some of Steve's movies and decided to give his stand-up a go. Well...it's occasionally funny. The material is a bit dated, too.

And maybe it's just this one album, but there are moments of alarm when Steve sounds like he is very much in love with himself; that "I-am-so-cool-don't-I-sound-cool?" vibe which is utterly pretentious and self-indulgent.

I dunno...give it a shot and listen for yourself. I'll check Steve's other comedy albums 'cause there are promising signs of some great stand-up material, which, I am sorry to say, is thinly scattered here.

Recently I listened to Steve Martin's touching autobiography Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life & was eager to get into his stand-up material (which I'd never even heard of before then). I thought a good place to start would be this CD as it went Double Platinum & is prominently featured in the book.

And though I dreaded that it would be atrocious (after Martin's self-deprecating words), I was actually surprised at how sharp the man was in his day. As an example, there is the excellent last track King Tut (showing that Stand-Up comics CAN write decent songs) & there was also his put-down of a heckler with "Hey, I remember my first beer too!"

Besides this the material comes over surprisingly undated, including his material about cats (Tracks 6-7) & his dialogues on Philosophy in track two ('A Philosophy degree teaches you just enough to screw you up for life'). You can also see how Steve Martin in his day made audiences so comfortable that he could lead them Jesus-like out into the street to get hamburgers etc (e.g. track 4, where he gets the audience to ironically repeat a 'non-conformist oath').

You know what's coming though...

Steve Martin is a great comedy writer (e.g. Planes, Trains & Automobiles, L.A. Story etc), but is not a natural on stage. Though his material is first-rate, he seems somehow stilted & strange. It's hard to put a finger on what it is, but I guess it can only be seen through looking at other comedians.
Ricky Gervais, Bill Hicks, Robin Williams etc are all much easier to laugh AT - you are laughing because everything they ARE is funny.
Something about Steve Martin is hard to laugh at. I'm not sure quite what, but its what stops this work being truly seminal.

Couple this with the effect of age on the craze that surrounded 'Martin at the time, and you can see why some comedy ages like cream...

That said, this CD is still well written & is fairly timeless as it's mostly everyday observations (e.g. going to France & not understanding the lingo). It's also good to see the man in his prime, before he moved away from stand-up to his main skill of writing.
If you want really good comedy from the 70's though, then I recommend George Carlin or Richard Pryor, who are much more at home on stage.
As for this? Give it a go, but read his excellent autobiography first.