At this point in time, CD box sets have been a going concern (especially around the holidays) for nearly 40 years. Thousands of them have been released, and with the unexpected shift toward listening on vinyl (who'd have thought?) and digital (particularly streaming, which has a near-total grasp on music consumption today), you've got to have a really strong angle to encourage fans to part with some extra money and add new titles to their shelves. What more can be done? you (and sometimes we at The Second Disc) wonder.

Stand-up comedy albums are an underrated entry point into catalogue activity: their existence today is rendered vaguely obsolete by mountains of streaming specials and podcasts with which to connect to your favorite comedians. When the stand-up LP circuit was at its biggest boom - honed to perfection by Bob Newhart, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and George Carlin - it just so happened that many professional funny folks were recording for Warner-affiliated labels...meaning their catalogues were ripe for superior archival presentation, often by Rhino Records.

One who was never compiled at the height of the box set boom, though, was one of the genre's biggest successes: Steve Martin, a man who deconstructed humorous presentation to its most surreal basics and, even more unlikely, earned a level of success reserved for actors or rock stars, neither of which he was at the time. Martin's moment for catalogue and context has finally come due with Steve in a Box (Warner/Rhino R1/2 726900), a quite good chronicle of his shockingly brief stand-up discography. It does everything you want a box set like this to do: it offers some of the funniest recorded stand-up of its time in a handsome package with some decent supplemental material. It also does one thing you don't want a box set like this to do: unintentionally highlight the excellence of half the material, and the mediocrity of the other half.

Steve Martin parlayed less than a decade of stand-up into an incredible career as an actor, author, award-winner, bluegrass enthusiast and living legend. It's easier than ever to get a sense of what makes him an icon. Turn on Hulu, and you can enjoy four seasons (and counting!) of Only Murders in the Building, the hilarious sitcom he co-created and stars in alongside longtime friend Martin Short and singer/actress Selena Gomez. On AppleTV+, there's STEVE! (martin) a documentary in two pieces, this year's close read on his life and work from filmmaker Morgan Neville. But a documentary may not be as bold and insightful as a primary source, and Steve in a Box! has four: 1977's Let's Get Small, 1978's A Wild and Crazy Guy, 1979's Comedy is Not Pretty! and 1981's The Steve Martin Brothers. Two of these albums were back-to-back platinum smashes and sterling examples of Martin's gift. The other two are decent bonuses for completists.

Martin, a TV writer turned deft stand-up by the time Warner Bros. first put his material on vinyl (Steve in a Box! is available on CD or LP), had polished his on-stage persona to perfection by the time Let's Get Small draws from a run of dates at San Francisco's Boarding House. He was the latest in a line of comedians who did his routines exceptionally well, with that side-splitting power being enough to generate a fine career without the forays into other media. You hear a lot about "fearlessness" in comedy, and for Martin - a onetime philosophy major in college - that extended to the way he was unafraid to turn a distorted funhouse mirror on the audience, himself and the entire concept of stand-up comedy. At any given moment, he blended low and high culture, broad silliness with deft wordplay. He'd let punchline-free crowd work hang in the air for patrons to catch ("How many people are here tonight?"). He'd juggle (sometimes literally) the lowest-hanging fruit - balloon animals, prop arrows-through-the-head - while cloaked in an armor of smartest-guy-in-the-room esteem.

That confidence and daring spirit cuts through the clearly Frankensteined essence of Small, weaving different bits from various nights with little concern for how well they flow together. The 15-minute "title track" is loaded with gems: a clueless, titular riff on taking drugs; a faux-snobby checklist of extravagant purchases ("a $300 pair of socks...a fur sink...gasoline-powered turtleneck...and of course I bought some dumb stuff, too"); gut-busting (if un-PC) riffs on not offending the progressive San Francisco crowd. There's toilet humor, stop-start banjo interludes, and even a preview of his eventual film work. ("Was it easy for you on the way up? No," he declares. "I was born a poor black child.") It's maybe a little corny or dated now - all comedy is, eventually - but behind its gentility, Let's Get Small has a considerable edge to it. "Is he allowed to do this?" you might think, an absurd query when George Carlin already devised his seven words and Richard Pryor's Bicentennial Nigger had won a Grammy for Best Comedy Recording. Some changed the world by pushing its boundaries of taste and societal acceptance. Steve Martin did it by getting so aggravated over a lack of exact spotlight directions that he invented a catchphrase. He plucked out a country song about the wisdom of a grandmother so ridiculous that it managed to dent the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100. There was still plenty of room for all sorts of pencils to draw outside the lines. (Adding to the surreal brilliance, too: the lack of visuals turning pratfalls and gesticulations into abstract sound collages.)

Astoundingly, Let's Get Small didn't even capture Martin at his most imperial. That honor went to follow-up A Wild and Crazy Guy, a quantum leap in comedy recording that starts off as a muscular sequel - the brilliant "Philosophy/Religion/College/Language," where Martin's erudite persona struggles for the right words to sound smart, is a highlight - and then turns into something else entirely. Mid-album, after a faux "financial disclosure," calculating the rate for a $2 million show and stating, "This is what I'm shooting for: one show, goodbye," the audio hard cuts from the Boarding House to a riled-up crowd at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado - a venue that had hosted rock shows by The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and others. From there, Martin - who by then would sport a white three-piece suit to draw focus from large crowds - swings for the back rows, throwing out silly riffs on cats, revealing his "real name" (a series of babbles), and of course, breaking out his persona as Georg Festrunk, the clueless Czech bachelor he'd created for four appearances as host of Saturday Night Live (alongside Dan Aykroyd as his brother Yortuk). The album closes with a non-sequitur studio recording: "King Tut," which features Martin and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band extolling the wonders of the famed boy pharaoh-turned-traveling museum exhibition. It peaked at No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, and A Wild and Crazy Guy outpaced its predecessor on the charts, which had managed a strong-for-a-comedy-album No. 10. (Wild and Crazy managed No. 2, kept from the top by Billy Joel's 52nd Street.) The latter album plays like Thriller for comedy geeks, a five-alarm blockbuster that is essential listening to appreciate the genre's underpinnings. (That maybe makes Let's Get Small Martin's Off the Wall - arguably stronger, as unencumbered by the weight of reputation.)

Even a renegade like Martin couldn't resist the siren call of multimedia. The same year he released third album Comedy is Not Pretty!, he also oversaw the wide release of a short-story collection, Cruel Shoes, and made his first starring appearance in a film, Carl Reiner's The Jerk. Despite Comedy is Not Pretty narrowing its scope back to The Boarding House, even its best bits are retreads, from a reading of Cruel Shoes' titular tale to another "real name" revelation (this time, he introduces himself under the admittedly funny moniker "Gern Blanston"). The standout moment may in fact have little to do with proper jokes: the two-minute "Drop Thumb Medley" Martin regales audiences with on his signature banjo. That pickin' is borne out to the majority of Martin's last album, 1981's The Steve Martin Brothers, which features a tossed-off side of less than 20 minutes of shopworn comedy bits - including a halfhearted treatise on America in "What I Believe" and a Festrunk bit that sounds wearied, three years after it last appeared on SNL - paired with an assortment of banjo-led melody-making, recorded on borrowed Nitty Gritty Dirt Band studio time in the early '70s. (Brothers - which credits three joke writers beyond Martin, including The Jerk co-writer Michael Elias and legendary SNL writer Jack Handey - barely dented the Billboard 200 and failed to go either platinum or gold, as the preceding three did. Martin's burgeoning film career hit a skid the same year when his dramatic turn in an adaptation of the BBC drama Pennies from Heaven crashed at the box office.)

The paucity of material on Comedy is Not Pretty and The Steve Martin Brothers is offset a bit by the eight-page booklet of notes packaged within the Let's Get Small jacket. (Both formats replicate the original packaging nicely, with inserts for all four and gatefold sleeves replicated nicely. The CDs feature sturdy cardboard stock and readable spines, and each disc - printed with the classic late '70s "Burbank" style label design - is encased in a rounded-bottom, anti-static, rice paper-inspired sleeve.) Comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff does a tremendous job breaking down Martin's comedy philosophy, how it played on these albums, and even dives deep into the backlash Martin faced within the world of recorded comedy. (Rich Little had unkind things to say, and retail giant Kmart made headlines by pulling A Wild and Crazy Guy out of stores due to complaints about its content - which is assuredly less blue than Carlin or Pryor's material.) It might not make the albums better, but it certainly makes less savory aspects of the albums clearer: Comedy is Not Pretty, for instance, was hastily released by Warner from outtakes from the prior albums, which explains the all-over-the-place pacing.

An enterprising collector could pick up any of these albums for pretty cheap, but if you believe Steve Martin's comedy career deserves a presentation worthy of its cultural impact, Steve in a Box is the gift for you. And if you don't agree, well, ex-c...oh, you know how that one goes.

Steve in a Box is available on CD from Amazon U.S., Amazon U.K. and Amazon Canada and on vinyl from Rhino.com. As an Amazon affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases.