Steve Martin called his 1978 double-platinum album A Wild and Crazy Guy. Martin of course was far from that. He looked and dressed like an accountant, and his trademark style for the past four decades has been precision-engineered comedy.

Few other Academy Awards hosts could have greeted their peers at the Kodak Theatre with the line: “Writers. Directors. Actors. If we’re stuck here tonight and run out of food, that’s the order in which we eat them.”