Steve Martin and a gag line in a story about office clothes
Steve Martin is the name attached to the stretched-out gag line "excu-u-u-u-u-se me" in Dana Parsons' Los Angeles Times column about workplace clothes. Parsons reaches for the expression while recalling a newspaper internship during the summer of 1970. A city editor sent him home for arriving without a tie, despite his dress shirt and trousers. The columnist then makes the timing explicit: he did not say the line during that incident, because Martin had not introduced it yet. That distinction gives the attribution question a clear answer while keeping the remembered event separate from the later comic language.
The memory provides a setting for the joke. Parsons recalls the editor telling him that a reporter ought to dress like a reporter rather than like a copy boy. The column describes copy boys wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes and casual shirts while doing important work around the office. Against that background, the imagined retort offers a compact change in tone. I read it as the columnist's playful response from a later vantage point. The passage is explicit about that perspective, so there is no reason to turn it into a quotation delivered at the bus stop during the internship.
The Steve Martin reference appears early in a column that goes on to discuss increasingly casual workplace dress. Parsons says that thirty years after the internship, many reporters wore the kinds of clothes once associated with copy boys. The recalled rebuke and the later dress habits therefore sit in a deliberate contrast. The gag line helps mark the space between those attitudes without supplying a complete history of workplace fashion. Its role is brief but clear: it gives the earlier episode a comic punctuation, then the column moves on to the changing ways people present themselves at work.
Another part of the column concerns Brooks Brothers leaving Fashion Island in Newport Beach. Parsons notes that the store had been there since 1980 and closed on Wednesday. He also says the company did not connect the closure to casual workplace clothes. That qualification deserves to remain attached to the detail. The column wonders about the relationship, but wondering is different from establishing a cause. For a reader following the argument, the useful approach is to keep the closure, the broader discussion of dress and the company's stated position distinct. The story can raise a question without settling that question.
Steve Martin's gag belongs to the opening anecdote, while the column's later interviews explore different meanings attached to office clothes. Ajay Shah, chief executive of Handshake.com, tells Parsons that he is wearing Dockers and an untucked purple T-shirt. Shah describes high-tech as a meritocracy and says clothing and hair color are less relevant to doing business than performance. This is his reported view, rather than a universal rule offered by the columnist. It provides a contrast with the city editor's earlier emphasis on appearing like a reporter, and it gives the discussion a concrete voice beyond the internship memory.
Richard Millar supplies another perspective. The senior partner at a Newport Beach law firm describes its dress habits as divided between a Brooks Brothers half and a casual-Friday half. He generally wears a suit and tie, while acknowledging that the dress code is becoming more casual. His explanation emphasizes looking serious when someone brings a serious problem. Shah also allows an exception to his usual clothing choices: he dresses up when asking for money. The contrast is interesting because it leaves room for circumstance. Even within the reported preferences, the conversation does not reduce professional appearance to a single unqualified position.
Returning to Steve Martin helps separate the small attribution question from that larger discussion. The column identifies him as the person who introduced the gag line, but it does not give a debut date, a particular performance or a television program for that introduction. The summer internship supplies a chronological boundary within Parsons' recollection, not a complete account of the phrase's development. I find that distinction useful. It allows a confident answer about the name while preserving the limits of the surrounding detail. The comic line belongs to the columnist's later retelling, and its first introduction remains outside the account's particulars.
The answer is Steve Martin, with Dana Parsons explicitly naming him in the passage. The context adds something enjoyable to recognition: a dress-code memory becomes the starting point for a conversation about the changing appearance of professional life. The column moves from a missing tie to casual reporters, a clothing-store closure and contrasting views from business and law. Within that movement, the stretched-out expression remains a short comic aside. I would keep the name and the timing qualification together when retelling it. Doing so preserves both the attribution and the care Parsons takes to distinguish his later joke from his earlier experience.