| Before his Emmy, before his Grammys, before his decades-long run of TV appearances and movies, Steve Martin was a fledgling teen comedian at a small theatre in an amusement park. “Four paying customers was officially an audience,” he wrote in The New Yorker, in 2007, “so we often did shows to resonating silence.” He didn’t have that problem for long. On Tuesday, Hulu will release the third-season première of Martin’s “Only Murders in the Building,” his unlikely but popular sendup of true-crime podcasts, entertainment-industry egos, and tenant-board politics on the Upper West Side. But, for several years early in his career, Martin floundered personally and professionally, struggling to figure out what he wanted his act—and his life—to be. His Personal History for the magazine was unusually candid about his travails, sometimes for a punch line, but more often, it seems, simply in the service of honesty and reflection. The piece revisits jokes that bombed and relationships that failed, and even acknowledges Martin’s use of stolen material very early in his career. The essay doesn’t mention many household names, but it does identify a director to whom he lost an early love—and who later made a pass at a different woman, Martin’s wife. “Incidentally,” the comedian notes, the director “died a few years ago, but it was not I who killed him.” | 
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