For comedians, the science of making people laugh is serious business. It’s a special alchemy – two parts absurdity to one part nonsense with a spark of the needed to jolt the joke to life. One of comedy’s greatest practitioners, Steve Martin, has unlocked the laboratory door on the science of comedy with a compelling and unusual autobiography, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.

Perhaps the reason comedians fret over the chemistry of humor is because it is so terribly inexplicable. Why does watching someone slip on a banana peel make half the room laugh but not the other? Martin writes with great passion and intensity about the years he spent trying to unearth that magic formula while trying to change it and evolve it at the same time. In fact, I should state right now that Born Standing Up is no flashy Hollywood kiss-and-tell tale. It’s about a career more than a man, about how someone took their dream and in a serious and yes, business-like manner, worked and honed and reasoned and just plain sat down and thought his way into success.

Martin gives his reader glimpses of what sparked that drive: a father who took the disappointment of his own failed acting career out on a son who had made it. Martin writes briefly but devastatingly about the coldness of his relationship with his father, a relationship he sums up like this: “I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.” What a simple, sad explanation.

For anyone fascinated by the machinations of comedy and humor, this book is an indispensable primer. To watch a young, shy California boy parlay his passion for magic tricks into a stint at Disneyland followed by years in amateur theater before finally finding the courage to go solo with a stand-up career is, well, as mushy as it sounds, inspirational.

And for anyone who ever wanted to know what happens to nice normal guys when they become ridiculously famous, this book throws back the curtain on that psychology, chronicling the depression that set in once Martin found himself at the top of the game. I know I used to shake my head at the whole “I’m so sad now that I’m famous” lament of the rich and famous. Not after reading this book. Martin brings the loneliness to life, the insecurity of wondering “am I really funny or are they just laughing because they think I’m supposed to be funny” and the disorientation that comes from standing up in front of 20,000 people every night and trying to find their communal comedy trigger.

From Buster Keaton to Robert Benchley, from Freddie Prinze to Spalding Grey, there are dozens of stories about funny men haunted by sadness, lending credence to the belief that great comedy comes from great sorrow. Born Standing Up shows how one man tamed that sorrow and turned it into something extraordinary, all by sitting down and solving the problem of how to make people laugh.