I’m hesitant of the concept of the lifetime pass. Everyone, no matter how great, can reach the point where they’ve made too many turkeys to be forgiven. However, I do believe there are people where you’ll still hold the soft spot in your heart, even if you won’t always give their new work a chance. You’ll just keep wishing they could make the thing like the things they made already that you love.

I want Steve Martin to be funny again. His next movie is a drama by Ang Lee with what looks like a hell of a cast, and that’s great; he’s underrated as an actor in my opinion. He’s also done a lot of music; it seems I’m always broke when he’s performing around here, but I’d love to see him in concert one of these days. But he hasn’t done a comedy that appeals to me since the ’90s, and I’m one of the seven people on Earth who likes Mixed Nuts. I think there’s a place for the urbane, arrogant character he sometimes plays in his sketches, if he chose to write a movie about that. The guy he seems to play a lot these days just isn’t funny to me.

Still, when he was funny, he was extremely funny. It’s hard to pick the best scene of The Muppet Movie, but his “Insolent Waiter” is probably the funniest of the celebrity cameos. (He was great on the show, too.) Several of the comedy classics of the ’80s have his imprint. His stand-up was pretty consistently funny.

Let’s not forget the writing, either. Roxanne was a great take on the classic story of Cyrano de Bergerac, shifted into a ski resort with volunteer firefighters. It dabbles with the original script of the Edmond Rostand play, even lifting word-for-word in places, yet isn’t afraid to change what needs to be changed. Actually, there are a lot more women in it than in the original, as I recall. Which is nice. And the Roxanne character has a lot more personality.

There’s also something to be said for a man who was willing to cash in some of his chips in Hollywood to make a romantic comedy costarring his own wife. Which also, it’s worth mentioning, mocks the idea that all male leads should naturally be with love interests decades their junior; while Victoria Tennant, Martin’s then-wife, is five years younger than he is, that’s not a huge gap at all. And she was forty-one at the time, yet still very much seen by the movie as desirable and frankly more interesting than the character played by then-twenty-six-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker.

As you can see, there’s a lot of interesting to Steve Martin. His autobiography, Born Standing Up, is a delight. He’s recently done a few albums with Edie Brickell, wife of his old friend Paul Simon. I still haven’t actually sat down and watched Shopgirl, but I’ve meant to ever since I found out that he wrote it. He’s multitalented, one of the few people to win a Grammy for both comedy and music. And, indeed, he’s a wizard on the banjo, not an instrument people necessarily think of as a virtuoso instrument.

He’s young-ish for this column, I admit, though not the youngest I’ve covered. And in fact, he’s yet another person with a Disney connection—young Steve worked at Disneyland for the first three years it was open, selling guide books, and then for a while starting in August 1960 worked at the Main Street Magic Shop. He also spent some time less than ten miles away at rival park Knott’s Berry Farm. The rumor Back Home has long been that he was a guide on the Jungle Boat Cruise at Disneyland, but he was honing his craft in a different way at the time.