Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Martin to Receive Mark Twain Prize

Filed under
Misc

Steve Martin, the "wild and crazy guy" who has spread his comic skills throughout all areas of the performing arts, has been selected to receive this year's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

The Kennedy Center, which has given the award for humor for the past eight years, said Martin embodies the American zest for versatility and funny, as well as biting, portrayals.

"The Kennedy Center is pleased to give Steve the Mark Twain Prize for an extraordinary career," said center chairman Stephen A. Schwarzman, who announced the award today. "His creations, be they on stage, on film or in a book, have created a collective memory of humor and joy for all Americans."

Martin issued a statement saying: "I think Mark Twain is a great guy and I can't wait to meet him."

Martin, 59, born in Waco, Tex., but raised in Southern California, started his career writing for television and soon won his first award -- an Emmy for his skits he created for "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour."

Martin made his first impression on American audiences through the late-night TV circuit. He has hosted "Saturday Night Live" so frequently that many viewers thought he was a member of the cast. He was not but he brought down the house in the 1970s with his "wild and crazy guy" routines and fully-costumed King Tut. He repeated this success on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show."

He developed not only the physical interpretations -- with the lopsided shoulder walk -- but also a droll approach. When a close friend from childhood wrote a book about their early lives, Martin said, "Finally a book about me! I loved this book and fell deeply in love with the central character."

His film career started with a short called "The Absent-Minded Waiter," which was nominated for an Oscar. Then he teamed with Carl Reiner, a previous Twain winner, on "The Jerk," "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid," "The Man With Two Brains" and "All of Me." In the later he played opposite Lily Tomlin, another Twain recipient, and won best actor awards from the New York Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review.

His hit comedy work includes "Parenthood," "Father of the Bride," "Father of the Bride Part II," "Cheaper by the Dozen" and "Bringing Down the House." This summer Martin ventures into the risky territory of recreating a role associated with a comic legend. He will play Inspector Clouseau in "The Pink Panther," made famous by Peter Sellers.

Martin has won Grammy Awards for two comedy albums and another Grammy for Best Country Instrumentalist; he played banjo in the Earl Scruggs video "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" He also sat in with B. B. King in his video of "In the Midnight Hour."

"The Jerk," he may or may not be. Martin has shown a substantial serious side in his two best-selling novellas, his Off-Broadway plays and his assembly of a remarkable art collection that includes Picasso, Hooper, O'Keeffe and deKooning.

The Twain award will be presented Oct. 23 at the Kennedy Center. Previous winners, in addition to Reiner and Tomlin, were Richard Pryor, Jonathan Winters, Whoopi Goldberg, Bob Newhart and Lorne Michaels.

The essence of comedy is notoriously illusive, but Martin once took a stab at defining it: "What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke."

By Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Source.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.