Comedians

Excuuuusse ME!

Quick now: Who wears $700 white suits, balloons on his head, an arrow through his skull, rabbit ears and a rubber nose and is forever afflicted by uncontrollably buck-and-winging "happy feet"? "Hey, we're havin' sommmme fuuun," he chortles. Pregnant pause. "Hey, this guy is really... crazy! By now, any halfway clued-in cultist should recognize silver-haired Steve Martin, 32, a Dadaesque philosopher turned goofball.

Almost as fast as he can deliver his trademark "Excuuuusse ME!" Martin has become one of the country's hottest comics, stumbling, smirking and stroking his banjo through a sold-out 50-city headliner tour. The act is a lunatic deluge of sight gags, supercool show-biz parodies, zany body language and well-paced one-liners. Martin seems spacey, and his props appear to be simplistic. But below that surface, the act is as tight as a bear hug, and even the simplest shtik has flip-side gags within gags.

"I try to make each line or attitude multilevel," Martin explains. "Each word is expressed with my entire body. I feel like I'm living the joke." And killing his audiences. Martin says he is looking for "cat handcuffs." His tabby--a tiger-stripe he calls Dr. Carleton P. Forbes--has amassed $3,000 worth of "cat toys" by filching checks from Steve's mailbox. But alas, Dr. Forbes has escaped ... to Catalina. On a catamaran. Audiences invariably groan as this inventive tale turns into mushy vaudeville. Wide-eyed pause. "You think comedy is ... pretty?" leers Martin. He catches them catnapping every time. As a youngster in Southern California, Steve used to bike over to nearby Disneyland and virtually moved in. He sold guidebooks, practiced card tricks, prowled the park's secret passages after hours, and idolized Wally Boag, a vaudevillian who did card tricks and balloon animals at Frontierland's Golden Horseshoe Revue.

After high school, the young comic did an existential somersault. He enrolled in Long Beach State and studied philosophy "like crazy." He recalls: "I got to a point where I could no longer speak." When after three years he began reading Ludwig Wittgenstein, who declared that if philosophical problems are solved, "little is achieved," Martin dropped back into show business. But he still likes to ponder philosophical problems. "I know all the important ethical questions," he tells audiences, "like is it O.K. to yell movie in a crowded firehouse?"

After a brief interlude writing jokes for the Smothers brothers' and other variety shows, Martin decided to hit the circuit himself. In 1973 he made the Tonight show, and more recently has been appearing on Saturday Night Live. Says Bill McEuen, Martin's longtime manager and boyhood friend: "We're trying to assess each move to make sure he doesn't become an instant cliche." The translation for that is a mix of limited television exposure and carefully spaced albums. (On his new album Let's Get Small, now climbing the charts, Martin recalls his cat's latest bath: "The fur stuck to my tongue, but other than that...")

Offstage Martin is a quiet eccentric who collects late 19th century American impressionist painting, dates randomly and relaxes over vegetarian meals in his antique-cluttered, solar-heated Aspen, Colo., house. On the road, he is happiest huddling alone in a hotel room with a football game on the TV. Before taxes and operating expenses, he expects to gross nearly a million dollars this year. "I'm fortunate to have gained an almost metaphysical communication with my audience," says he. "The thrill is in the blank spaces and pauses, changing your voice up and down. I love to take a long pause, stand there and look like I'm lost." Hey, is this guy really... crazy? Like a fox.

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