In 1977, Steve Martin released "Cruel Shoes," a wonderful little nonsensical nugget of a book. The comedian was at a turning point in his career -- his stand-up act drawing crowds and his guest appearances on Saturday Night Live were about to propel him into hit movies like "The Jerk" and "All of Me." The book was an afterthought.

In 1998, Martin has released "Pure Drivel," another wonderful piece of nonsense. But now, things are a little different.

Martin is no longer just the lovable buffoon from "The Jerk." He is the man who wrote and directed "Roxanne" and has seen the opening of his first play, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile." He played the classy villain in David Mamet's "The Spanish Prison," and even took to the boards in New York City a few years back opposite Robin Willaims in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." Certainly, you would expect Martin's latest book to be the work of a matured artist.

Thank God some things never change.

"Pure Drivel" is just as irresistible and scatological as "Cruel Shoes." Not many writers could pull off stories like "Mars Probe Finds Kittens" or "The Sledgehammer: How it Works" without sounding like they're reaching too far into the abstract to be funny.

From "Sledgehammer": Yet "Should I buy now or wait for the new models?" is a refrain often heard from the panicky first-timer, who forgets the number of sledgehammer innovations in the past three thousand years can be counted on one finger.

From, "Michael Jackson's Old Face": Luckily, I am able to have lunch once a week, at Jones' Grill on Melrose, with Walter Matthau's face and imagine how things might have been. Walter orders paradoxically, and his eyes shine as he looks over to include me in the joke. He then brings a smile to his face, which creeps irresistibly onto the waiter's face, and then the waiter shuffles his feet and returns to Walter a sly look of respect. I order coldly, free of nuance. I have a salad.

These stories are funny for the same reason older stories like "Dr. Fitzkee's Lucky Astrology Diet" and "Dogs in my Nose"were funny. They hit whatever portion of your brain is responsible for making you laugh directly, without filtering the material through logic or reason. They are, as Martin describes them, "after-dinner mints to the big meal of literature."

That's not to say that Martin hasn't gotten better as a writer. For the past few years, he has been amassing these stories from his contributions to The New Yorker, working with the magazine's editors. He also set out to take a break from film work to concentrate on his writing, but stayed visible nonetheless with "Picasso" and "The Spanish Prisoner."

The fruits of Martin's labor are visible. The humor even approaches topical in "I Love Loosely," a mock Lucy sketch where Ricky gets out of trouble for having an affair at the club by saying it was just oral sex. There are no specific references to the headlines, but the piece is a hysterical lampoon of Zippergate nonetheless. It's hard to describe this as subtle, but it is smart and fresh.

Perhaps as a result of his concentration on writing, there is an instructional essay called "Writing is Easy!" Martin tells readers to move to California where it's sunny and cheery, to avoid the dark and depressing work produced by authors in more somber places like South America or Czechoslovakia. He also offers advice on word choice. "'Dagnabbit' will never get you anywhere with the Booker Prize people. Lose it."

A couple of Marin's stories don't attack like the others. "A Hissy Fit" and "Lolita at Fifty" are funny for the complete picture they paint, rather than for their surplus of particularly funny one- liners. There is even some drama in the character Martin draws of Lolita.

Still, to take the book seriously is to miss the point. It's like when Woody Harrelson's character scolded Martin's Wacky Weatherman Harris Telemacher in "L.A. Story" for being to intellectual. "More wacky, less egghead," he said. "It's only intellectual to you because you were educated with a banana and an inner-tube."

"Pure Drivel" is definitely more wacky, less egghead, but the days of the arrow-through-the-head trick and the big white suit are gone. Thankfully, you can change the clothes, but you can't change the man.