After comedian Steve Martin got all he could or wanted from his “Well ex-cuuuse me!” bit, he would be seen on late-night shows on which the host or one of the other guests would say to him, “Well ex-cuuuse me!”

The thin smile on Martin’s face would appear as a wince. That bit was cooked; time to move on.

That brings us to one of TV’s most puzzling acts: Chris Berman, since 1979 an ESPN original, although his originality as a TV “personality” ended roughly 25 years ago. And his run with ESPN, as per an expired contract, appears over as of early next year.

“I’m watching the Home Run Derby,” reader Jack Baroody wrote Monday. “Am I the only one growing weary of Chris Berman’s ‘back, back, back’ home run call shtick?”

Certainly not the only one, Jack, but surely among the last. If it took until now, you’re a very patient man.

Perhaps no broadcaster’s presence on live televised sports events is met with more popular dread than Berman’s. He and ESPN have conditioned us to anticipate Berman’s inexplicably self-defeating devices before he soon delivers on that promise. Dogs drop, shudder and hide under beds during thunderstorms. Sports fans have Chris Berman.

Berman remains tethered to a self-deluded plan that he, not the event — not golf’s US Open, an NFL opener, an MLB playoff game or even a sideshow such as the Home Run Derby — nor the news and info content of a studio show, is what draws a TV crowd.

Berman began on ESPN as an energetic and somewhat appealing novelty act, a fellow who tried and occasionally succeeded in making his audience smile.

But now he is, and for decades he has been, a have-to-put-up-with-him indulgence. He’s the Thanksgiving dinner great-uncle who tells the same joke and performs the same got-your-nose trick with his thumb every year.

Monday’s Home Run Derby should have been perfectly suited to Berman. After all, it’s just a goof, a slam-dunk contest, the Pro Bowl.

But when ESPN wasn’t trying to attach historical, statistical significance (ESPN does with stats what babies do to bowls of spaghetti) and dead-serious analysts and analysis to it, Berman was there to hog the stage with his exhausted shtick that promotes only his inability to, now just as long ago, know better.

As his public appeal has plummeted, we wonder why he and ESPN have allowed it. Didn’t anyone tell him? Why doesn’t he know? Why didn’t he know at 40, let alone today, at 61? He graduated from Brown, not from clown college. He bristles at the claim that he relies on repetitive shtick, including his who-cares NFL Swami studio bit, but how else, short of a seltzer bottle with its nozzle aimed at us, to describe it?

Even his wordplay nicknames are self-indulgent. He has defended them as adhering to the tradition of bestowing nicknames on athletes, the way we know of Lou Gehrig as the Iron Horse and Ted Williams as the Splendid Splinter. But “George ‘Taco’ Bell” has nothing to do with Bell, only with Berman.

Still, the inability of ESPN’s shot-callers over the years to hear and act on the self-evident is flabbergasting. How good, how valued would Berman have been had he not chosen to run aground in his own mud and had ESPN thrown him a rope and demanded that he hold it tightly and with both hands?

Why did he play the same hand? Why did he paint himself into this corner, then, long after the paint dried, choose to stay in it?

Tell folks that Chris Berman is going to call a game and the news is met with a groan, as if they know what they’re in for. And they’re right.

This isn’t a bashing of Berman and ESPN — that’s too easy, carp in a barrel, and now, too late. It’s more an expression of exasperation, skywriting that reads “Why?”

It’s not that we can’t take him seriously; it’s more that we can’t take him at all. Even minimal logic tells us that 20, 25 years ago, he needed to grow — even, in his case, needed new material — in order to head in his original ESPN direction, which was up.

Duncan was the epitome of class

Tim Duncan’s retirement this week is much like Vin Scully’s, which is coming this October.

While so many broadcasters are eager to tell us Scully is among the very best, how is it that so few choose to be anything like him?

In Duncan, we had an easy man to root for. There were no inflammatory or vulgar tweets, no trash-talk or all-about-me gestures to be excused and explained as “his enthusiasm for the game,” no public contract demands, no compromise of our good senses. There was just a 19-year, five-championship, same-team career predicated on skill, strong and intelligent play, team-first vision, modest by-example leadership and genuine — forgive the antiquities — sportsmanship and class.

Yet, as the NBA, its players, coaches and media have lined up to praise Duncan for all of the above, why are so many players who conduct themselves antithetically to the way he does framed and sold to the public — especially the young — as worthy of emulation and hero worship?

Was Duncan under-promoted and under-commercialized because he played for San Antonio? Or was it because he was short on the bad-dude junk that sells, among other things, insanely priced Nikes as status symbols to the easily excited and exploited?

Was Duncan too good for his own good? Too good for basketball’s good? Too good for kids’ good? Given that stars such as Duncan are trending toward extinction, that those questions even can be asked and their answers considered is disturbing.

Fundamentals no fun for major leaguers

The Game Has Changed, Continued: Let the record show (fat chance) that the 2016 All-Star Game ended with an infield double play fully enabled by Rockies batter Nolan Arenado’s disinclination to run to first, where he was out by 6 feet.

On FOX, John Smoltz suggested Arenado may have “thought” there already were two out. Oh.

Sunday night, the Giants’ Madison Bumgarner had a perfect game with two out in the fifth, when right fielder Gregor Blanco dropped a fly ball.

ESPN’s booth offered multiple choices to explain the error: The setting sun was in his eyes, he momentarily lost sight of the ball, he had a long way to run to get to it, all of the above.

There wasn’t even the suggestion that had Blanco used his other hand to secure the ball in his mitt, as taught in Little League. … Ah, forget it.