There’s more doofus attitude than actual jokes throughout the show. For every set-up/punchline (“Do you mind if I smoke? No, mind if I fart?”), there are 10 bits of goofball physical shtick, from pretending to be electrocuted to fruit juggling to sculpting venereal diseases out of balloons. It’s as if Martin is taunting his paying customers — can you believe I’d be this stupid? Of course they can. And they can’t get enough.
Martin also looks like he’s having the time of his life. If there’s a hint of the bitterness that comes out in print interviews around that time, it’s at the concert’s end when he addresses fans who might be upset that he hasn’t performed more material from his comedy albums. You don’t like it, audience? Well, EXCUUUUSE ME! (Which, of course, served as both a middle finger and another surefire crowd-pleaser. WOOOOOOOOO!)
Shortly after recording this show, Martin was done with stand-up comedy. Like done-done. His attention was on movies, and the arrow-through-the-head days were over. What else was there left to do? “I can look back (on the summer of 1979) and say, ‘I did the impossible. I did what one in a million do. Or one in 10,000,000 do,’” he said shortly after leaving the game. “Even for a moment, to be on top. That’s all on top is, a moment, no matter who you are, even if you’re Elvis, you’re on top momentarily in terms of time.”
Martin just didn’t see a way the show could go on. The touring was exhausting, but even worse, Martin thought his act was just as tired. He’d made his satirical point about dumb stand-up comedy, and once you’ve told that joke, it doesn’t bear repeating. “I think it’s a dead end, you know,” he told Judd Apatow some 35 years later. Why is that, wondered Apatow, because it runs out of gas? “Yeah,” Martin replied. “I mean, I’m still around, but I couldn’t have kept doing that act.”
So he didn’t. In his new book, Number One Is Walking, Martin confesses that his enormous popularity was the very thing that allowed him to escape stand-up. “My job was to get off the stand-up train and throw my bags and myself onto the movie train,” he writes. “And I knew I had to do it while I still had some clout.”
For a comic who reveled in stupidity, Martin was smart enough to get out on top.