How’s this for value? When Martin Short appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman one night this autumn, he gave of himself for more than 16 minutes—which, when you subtract the commercials and the monologue, accounted for the better part of the show. On the couch, he showered Letterman with unctuous faux flattery about the host’s youthfulness (“I was watching backstage. I thought, Is that one of the Winklevoss twins? They’re usually inseparable!”) and humility (“I love that you don’t thrust your Scientology at people!”). He did a couple of impressions, of Nathan Lane and of the show’s bandleader, Paul Shaffer. He came prepared with a good anecdote, about spotting his comic-actor friend Richard Kind from behind at a Washington party, wrapping his arms around Kind’s midsection, and buffoonishly declaring, “Oooh! Papa’s gained a little weight, hasn’t he?”—only to discover that the person he’d pressed himself against wasn’t Kind but David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief campaign strategist.
And then, to cap it off, Short offered, literally, a song-and-dance routine. First, he announced that he had reconciled with his brothers, Manny and Morty, with whom he had fallen out after a successful touring career in the 60s and 70s. And then, with fanfare, he introduced the re-united Short Brothers: himself plus two black singer-actors. The three of them went on to harmonize on a pre-election ditty about undecided voters (It’s either Rom-ney or O-bama / One built Bain; one killed O-sama), its verses punctuated by outbursts of spasmodic tap dancing by Short that recalled the most famous of his sketch-comedy characters, the touched but cheery man-child Ed Grimley.
Marty Short, all five feet seven of him, gives good talk show. As Shaffer explained after the Late Show taping, “A guy like David Letterman is so happy when Marty’s on, because he knows he can relax. He knows that Marty will take care of it—that he’s going to give you a couple of segments of socko.”
Short does this with regularity—not only for Letterman but also for Fallon, Conan, Kimmel, and Ellen. There used to be more like him: a whole talk-show ecosystem of Dinos, Sammys, Grouchos, Milties, and Toties who bounded onto soundstages in Midtown and Burbank and just delivered, entertaining for entertainment’s sake, unhampered by sulky-actor social ineptitude or a studio-mandated obligation to plug something. (Though Short threw in some plugging on Letterman, too, dutifully devoting a sliver of time to his voice work for Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie.)
Nowadays, however, there’s really no one else out there like Marty. And while his shtick undoubtedly comes with an overlay of winking commentary on the tired conventions of show business—witness his evocation of the old-time vocal group the Mills Brothers in the Short Brothers bit, or his customary shouted greeting to Letterman’s studio audience every time he visits, “Thanks for remembering!”—Short is genuine in his desire to entertain: an authentic trouper beneath the pretend inauthenticity.
Above all, Short is very funny. He can be funny in the neo-vaudevillian way of his talk-show appearances and Broadway performances (in such productions as his 2006 revue, Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me, and the 1998 revival of Neil Simon’s Little Me, for which he won a Tony), and he can be funny in the profoundly odd, sui generis Martin Short way he was on SCTV, Saturday Night Live, and Primetime Glick, where he went deep into deranged character—whether as Grimley, or the albino lounge singer Jackie Rogers Jr., or the clammy corporate-shill attorney Nathan Thurm, or the goitered, vapid celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick—with full commitment and nary a knowing wink to the crowd.
Short’s funniness has earned him an exalted place in show business. Tom Hanks’s first-ever glimpse of the comic in person came “at somebody’s big wingding birthday party more than 20 years ago,” he recalled, discussing the origin of one of his closest friendships, “where I was standing in an anteroom, on the way in, and I caught sight of Marty standing on top of a chair, telling a story, shouting over laughter. I was like, Who’s the loud guy?” The answer, Hanks would soon realize, is The guy whose material kills even in the toughest of rooms: the ones offscreen, where nobody but pros are watching.
Short’s Hollywood exaltedness is noteworthy because he has not succeeded by the normal measures of Hollywood success. He has never carried a hit movie or created a long-running sitcom. Yet those who have done precisely these things regard him with delight and something resembling awe. “Hands down the funniest guy I’ve ever met,” said Larry David when I asked him to offer his assessment of Short. David then hedged a little—“Well, I know a lot of funny people, so say ‘one of the funniest people’ ”—before self-correcting: “No! No! I don’t take it back! He is the funniest guy I know.”
David added, “And I’ve never heard a bad word said about him. That’s a hard thing for a comedian to pull off.” Steve Martin, another of Short’s high-achieving friends, made the same observation. “What’s interesting,” he said, “is that Marty is not driven to be funny. It’s not competitive or needy or desperate.” Martin noted that Nora Ephron—who, in the meticulous instructions she left before her death last summer, dictated that Short speak first at her memorial service, ahead of Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, and Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson—referred to Short as “the best person.” “Not the best person at something,” Martin said. “Just ‘the best person.’ Period.”
Everybody loves Marty. It’s both a tribute to Short’s character and a sad commentary on the collective reputation of comics that he is considered an anomaly: the legitimately funny person who is actually well adjusted and nice. “It really sets him apart. I’m trying to remember, but I don’t think he ever went through that megalomaniac period,” said his friend and fellow Order of Canada honoree, Lorne Michaels, who, in his long tenure as the overlord of Saturday Night Live, has endured all manner of messy ego-bursts. Indeed, Short is not only nice but good, a man who has things so figured out that he offers uplift—whose benign but mischievous presence, once experienced, is thereafter craved. “I’m a Marty addict,” said Hanks. “When I see on my calendar ‘Dinner with Marty Thursday,’ I’m like, ‘Oh, hurry up, Thursday. Please hurry!’ ”
The Marty Effect
I immediately felt it, the Marty effect, from the moment I set foot in Short’s home in Pacific Palisades, California. He pre-empted any awkward small talk by presenting a chilled bottle of Louis Jadot something-or-other and asking conspiratorially, “Do you think we should open this?”
He was wearing a dark suit and white dress shirt; not for Short the stubble and dishevelment of off-duty Colin Farrell. The hair was neatly cut but tousled, underscoring his preternatural and, to all appearances, unenhanced youthfulness at the age of 62. (When I brought up this subject with him, he playfully invited me to inspect behind his ears for surgical scars.) A few places in the house suggested themselves as interview spots—a kitchen counter, a dining-room table, his home office—but Short decided that we should settle into a pair of armchairs, pivoted toward each other, that sat invitingly in a crook of the house’s slightly curved staircase. There was a small table between the chairs for our wineglasses. Short had effectively set us up for our own little talk show.
And things proceeded in a manner not unlike a talk show. Whereas some comics are willfully uncomic when they’re not working, and others, like Robin Williams at his most 80s-manic, simply can’t switch themselves off, Short is a natural wit and a gently congenital performer. He’s on, but he wants you to be on with him—a fun, heady experience and a big reason, I suspect, that he is such popular company. Having mentioned to Short that I first registered awareness of him when he played the office boy on a short-lived ABC sitcom from 1980 called I’m a Big Girl Now—intended as a vehicle for Diana Canova, an attractive young star of Soap—I found myself, uninhibitedly and unexpectedly, joining him in singing the show’s half-remembered, Canova-sung theme song. And this, mind, was well before the wine had kicked in.
We moved along to the origin story of Ed Grimley, whose roots lie in Short’s days in the late 70s with the Toronto version of the Second City improvisational troupe. Grimley grew out of an existing Second City sketch called “Sexist,” in which a male employer interviewed two candidates for a job, one an accomplished, over-achieving young woman played by the future SCTV star Catherine O’Hara, the other a flagrantly stupid man—“the joke being,” Short said, “that the guy who’s hiring says, ‘You’re both so good, I can’t make up my mind!’ ”
Short’s version of the stupid man grew increasingly broad and outré with each performance, until he morphed into Ed, with his checked shirt (an artifact from Short’s actual teenage wardrobe), hiked-up trousers, hunched posture, and forelock greased straight up into a point. But as much of a hit as Ed was onstage, Short, by the time he joined the cast of SCTV, in 1982, had not played him in public for four years and was initially reluctant to do so again because, he said, “Ed had become a part of my life with my wife, Nancy.”
He wasn’t kidding about this, but as we discussed the matter further, we fell into a kind of late-night repartee:
“A part of your life with Nancy?”
“Yeah! So I’d come out of the shower nude … like this.” [Makes grimacing Grimley face.]
“With the hair sticking up?”
“Not even the hair—just nude.”
“Just doing the face and posture?”
“Just the face. And she’d say, ‘Ed, get outta here!’ Or sometimes we’d get into a fight, and she’d say, ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to Ed! Ed, what is wrong with him?’ [Grimley voice] ‘Oh, he’s jealous of you, Miss Nancy. It’s very sad, I must say.’ This was a private thing. So when I joined SCTV, I thought it was now way too personal to do Ed.”
“Marty—are you saying that Ed Grimley had therapeutic value in your marriage?”
“Yes.”
My goodness. Folks, we’ll be back after this commercial.
“Laughing on the Inside”
Short’s Grimley-therapy-abetted marriage to Nancy Dolman lasted 30 years, and they had already lived together for six years before their 1980 wedding. Dolman died of ovarian cancer in the summer of 2010—a sad fact that last May drew greater attention than it might have otherwise when Kathie Lee Gifford, interviewing Short on Today, asked about Dolman in the present tense, unaware of her death a year and a half earlier. Short deflected the gaffe gracefully, and Gifford was duly crestfallen and apologetic when she realized her mistake. But what she actually said—that the Shorts had “one of the greatest marriages of anybody in show business”—is a sentiment readily seconded by Short and his friends.
The Short household, when it was whole, was a sort of real-life, latter-day version of the TV household in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet: a tidy, pleasantly arrayed Southern California domestic space that people were drawn to because a happy, stable nuclear family lived there. The Shorts’ Christmas parties, Hanks said, “kind of resembled a Mormon Family Home Evening—a lot of participation, a lot of ‘Everybody, come on up!’ ”
Even now, Chez Short is comfortingly familial, with a driveway full of bicycles for pedaling down to the ocean and walls and tables covered with framed photographs of Marty, Nancy, and their three children, now all in their 20s. The Shorts bought the place in 1987. It’s without question an affluent person’s house in a ritzy neighborhood, but its scale is modest by industry standards—the Kardashians would find it poky—and it looks and feels like a home where kids were raised, which it is. When I visited, Short’s eldest, Katherine, was back, temporarily staying over because her apartment had been flooded. She appeared in the kitchen before bedtime wearing polka-dot pajamas, as if it just as easily could have been 1992, when she was nine.
Short flatly described his wife’s death as “awful” and admitted that in the two years since her passing he has spent an inordinate amount of time on the road, taking sundry TV jobs and touring a one-man show—variously entitled Sunny von Bülow Unplugged, A Party with Marty, and If I’d Saved, I Wouldn’t Be Here—because “when you’re putting on your suit in Boston, Nancy wouldn’t have been there. So life is normal. It’s here that it’s not as normal.”
But he has come to grips with being a widower without pretending to love it. “We became one human being,” he said, so his current life is “like a plane that continues to fly with one engine.” That he can still goof around on TV is testament not to the powers of denial but to Short’s fundamentally upbeat nature. The Broadway composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, with whom Short has worked frequently, have described him as “one of the few people in comedy who is laughing on the inside”—a trait all the more extraordinary given the circumstances of his early life. In 1962, when Short was 12, the eldest of his brothers, David, was killed in a car accident. By the time he was 21, both of his parents were dead, his mother, Olive, succumbing to breast cancer, and his father, Charles, to complications from a stroke.
“Particularly as a young person, you can either go into [stoner’s voice] ‘Do you understand now why I’m on drugs?’ or you can somehow become empowered and almost fearless,” Short said. He likened himself to Stephen Colbert, who, as a boy, lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash. “I remember running into Stephen at a party a couple of nights after he did the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with George W. Bush,” Short said, “and I asked him, ‘Were you scared?’ And he said, ‘No. That day when I was a kid, I was scared.’ There is a little bit of, when you’re met with fire early, you now have a Teflon quality to you.”
Besides, Short said, the serial encounters with mortality didn’t preclude his having a happy childhood overall. He grew up the youngest of five children in Hamilton, Ontario, where his violinist mother was the concertmistress for the local philharmonic and his father was an executive at Stelco, a large steel company. Charles Short was self-made, an immigrant from Northern Ireland and one of the 11 children of James Short, the proprietor of Short’s Bar, in Crossmaglen, County Armagh. One of Charles’s brothers, Tom, immigrated to New York, and another, Frank, to Birmingham, England; Frank’s daughter Clare Short, Martin’s first cousin, is a former Labour Party M.P. noted for resigning from Tony Blair’s Cabinet in 2003 over Britain’s participation in the invasion of Iraq. The rest of Charles Short’s siblings remained in Northern Ireland, and Martin’s Aunt Rosaleen, the widow of Charles’s brother Paddy, still runs the bar. (Search YouTube with the keywords “Paddy Short” and “Crossmaglen” and you’ll find TV-news interviews featuring an eloquent old barkeep who, were it not for his solemn talk of the Troubles, would appear to be Martin Short in age makeup doing a sketch about Irish republicanism.)
Short attended McMaster University, in Hamilton, earning a degree in social work. While at college, he made friends with two fellow theater enthusiasts named Eugene Levy and Dave Thomas. “We called him the Imp,” said Levy when I asked him about Short’s student persona. “He had this boyish energy and enthusiasm onstage that carried over from his everyday life.” A few weeks before his graduation, in 1972, Short successfully auditioned for the Toronto production of Godspell, the counterculture-tinged musical that, a year earlier, had taken New York’s Off Broadway by storm. “At that time,” said Paul Shaffer, a native Ontarian who found his first professional work as the production’s piano player and conductor, “the theatrical community was obsessed with two things: full frontal nudity and the Lord Jesus Christ. Godspell was the latter: the stories from the Gospels as told by clowns—a very early-70s idea, but, hey, it worked.”
Levy, too, passed the audition. The Toronto production has since acquired legendary status in Godspell circles, comedy-nerd circles, and Canadian-history circles for the amazing concentration of homegrown talent it launched: not only the future SCTV-ers Short, Levy, and Andrea Martin but also the future S.N.L.-ers Shaffer and Gilda Radner (from Detroit but living in Toronto at the time) and the actor Victor Garber. The group had been assembled by Stephen Schwartz, one of *Godspell’*s creators, as a touring company, but the production proved so popular that it stayed put in Toronto, running for 488 performances. Thomas, another future SCTV stalwart, joined the cast partway through its run.
The show allowed a lot of room for interpretation and improvisation. Shaffer recalled that Short was fond of doing a bit in which he’d walk out in front of the crowd during intermission and imitate Frank Sinatra, using the Chairman’s phrasing to make dreary words sound romantic: “Linoleum … your face is like linoleum!” Among those smitten was Catherine O’Hara, then still in high school but, through her older brother, part of the same circle of young performers. “I had eyes for Marty,” she said. “I kissed his picture in the program.” But it was Radner whom Short started dating—they were a couple for two years.
Though all of these performers have since become well known, they were, by and large, provincial young Canadians at the time, with no idea of how truly good they were. Shaffer was the first of the Godspell group to move on to success in the wider world, when he was tapped in 1974 to move to New York to join the pit band of another Schwartz musical, The Magic Show, constructed around the shaggy Canadian illusionist Doug Henning. When Shaffer went back to Toronto to visit, Radner eagerly asked him, “Paul, what are New York actors like?”
“And Paul said, ‘Well, maybe it’s just ’cause you’re my friends, but I think you guys are just as talented,’ ” Short said. “And Gilda goes, ‘Listen to that. Aw, isn’t that so sweet, that he would say that?’ Because we really found it daunting, the idea: New York actors.”
When Short and Radner broke up, he fell almost immediately into a relationship with another of the Godspell gang: Dolman, an understudy whom he found forbiddingly beautiful. “She had long, long, long, long, long, long Joni Mitchell hair, and she’d come in in an antique black cape,” Short said. They made a date to play tennis—July 8, 1974—and remained partners ever after. “The miracle of Nan and I is that it never stopped,” Short said. “There was never a time of ‘I’m packing my bag.’ The party and the laughs and the immediacy never stopped.”
Song and Dance
I asked Short if it is correct to assess him as a boomer-era comic who, even as those around him were aiming to be naughty and subversive, was not rebelling against anything. “I think that’s true,” he said. When he did his Jerry Lewis—and on SCTV in the early 80s he did Lewis brilliantly, advertising an Ingmar Bergman collaboration called Scenes from an Idiot’s Marriage and an album called Lewis Sings Dylan (“The answer is blowing in the … waaaaghhh!”)—he did it not to denigrate Lewis as ridiculous or passé but, he said, to pay loving comic tribute, “like a Hirschfeld sketch.”
But Short’s fealty to old-timey showbiz conventions cost him early in his career, or at least delayed the stardom and exposure his peers experienced. When, in the wake of Godspell, Levy, Radner, Martin, and Thomas (and the now graduated O’Hara) jumped at the chance to join the Toronto branch of the Second City, which was just coming into its own under a charismatic new leader, Andrew Alexander, Short balked, choosing to pursue a more traditional path. “I wanted to sing and dance,” he said. “I had that thing more than they did.”
Short seldom lacked work, but he existed in a parallel universe to that of his friends and contemporaries, who now included not only the Godspell alums but such other Canadian comic performers as John Candy, Joe Flaherty, and Dan Aykroyd. They were laying the groundwork for a new kind of comedy; he was starring in Toronto productions of The Apple Tree and Harry’s Back in Town, a revue of the music of “Jeepers Creepers” tunesmith Harry Warren.
Briefly, Short bridged both worlds as a member of the cast of The David Steinberg Show, an ahead-of-its-time Canadian program that, 15 years before Garry Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show, concerned the behind-the-scenes doings of a dysfunctional talk show. Steinberg, though only a few years older than the Second City upstarts, was a Canadian-comedy god to them, having made it in the U.S. as a stand-up and a regular on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show while still in his 20s. “I played an egotistical version of myself, and John Candy was a Doc Severinsen sort of guy,” said Steinberg, now one of the foremost directors of episodic TV comedy in Los Angeles. “Marty was Johnny Del Bravo, my obnoxious lounge-singer cousin, who I never wanted people to know was my cousin.” Steinberg is proud of the program, both for its prescience and for its role in midwifing SCTV—Flaherty, Thomas, and Martin also appeared on it—and Short is proud of the fact that he unveiled his smarmy lounge-singer character on television before Bill Murray did his own. But The David Steinberg Show was not to last beyond its sole TV season of 1976–77. “They took us off and put on something called Stars on Ice,” Steinberg said. “Because in Canada, anything ‘on ice’ is better.”
In 1977, Short had what qualifies as his one true dark night of the soul. He and Dolman were visiting Los Angeles while she, a singer as well as an actress, looked for a record deal. Shaffer, now the linchpin of the Saturday Night Live band, happened to be in town, staying at the Sunset Marquis. He invited Short and Dolman to join him and Bill Murray for dinner.
“I was now 26 and really felt that I was behind everybody,” Short said. “Paul’s in Saturday Night Live now; Gilda’s in Saturday Night Live now. And Bill’s in Saturday Night Live now because Chevy left, and he’s a hit. I’m just watching their rockets go up And I’m out of work, and, sure, there’s … The Music of Frank Loesser. I’m sure that’s waiting somewhere in some cabaret for me. I was feeling like that guy who just has to fake happiness and excitement for everybody.”
Walking along Santa Monica Boulevard, en route to meeting up with Murray and Shaffer, Short spotted a bench and told Dolman, “I have to sit down. I cannot spend an evening with Bill and Paul. I’m having a nervous breakdown.” So there they sat, Dolman patiently waiting him out. At one point, she stage-whispered, “How long are we going to sit here?”
It took about 15 minutes for Short to gather himself. The following morning, he called Andrew Alexander in Toronto and accepted his open invitation to join the Second City troupe. In the years to come, Dolman would jokingly refer to the spot where they had sat that night as Breakdown Corner.
“Live from New York”
Short threw himself into Second City like a diligent quarterback doing weekly film study, taping his improvs and transcribing them so he could analyze how they did and didn’t work. O’Hara, four years Short’s junior but already an old pro at Second City, bemusedly asked him what on earth he was doing. “Making up for lost time,” he replied.
But there was still a ripple effect to Short’s late start as a boomer-humor sketch demon. It wouldn’t be until 1982, when Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas left SCTV, flush with their success as the über-Canadian knuckleheads Bob and Doug McKenzie, that Short was invited to join the program, which was an outgrowth of the Toronto Second City’s stage shows. Short had spent the turn of the decade acting in a couple of failed, blandly amiable American sitcoms, his idiosyncrasies pent up. So when he finally appeared on SCTV, the arsenal of deeply weird characters that he unleashed was—particularly to those of us who remembered him from Diana Canova’s I’m a Big Girl Now—a revelation.
“Sometimes I’m playing catch-up on Marty’s old material, and I’ll think, That is very bizarre, very extreme and strange,” said Steve Martin. “Like Jackie Rogers Jr.—it’s so incredibly out there that I don’t know what to make of it, but it’s funny.” A cockeyed albino singer with a Dutch-boy bob who dresses in tights and gold lamé blouses and performs Vegas-style medleys—why not?
All the SCTV performers were expert shape-shifters, but Short seemed unusually taken with deformity and otherness, with lots of wonky eyes, oddly recessed hairlines, and androgyny. Short doesn’t have a particularly thought-out reasoning for this. He originally developed a lounge-singer character named Jackie Rogers Sr. for a sketch in which the elder Rogers was killed, prompting an abrupt cut to the younger Rogers promo-ing a Jackie Rogers Sr. tribute special. “And I had seen a picture in the paper of Mickey Rooney Jr., who looked, to me, albino,” Short said—as if this explained everything.
Perhaps it’s simply a matter of how Short’s innate eccentricity combined with his puckish Irish looks and his gift for physical comedy—how, in the words of O’Hara, Short “equally embraces his masculine, feminine, and alien sides”—that his characters turned out the way they did. “In read-throughs, you could rarely get what Marty was going for,” O’Hara said. “In Eugene Levy’s pieces you could really feel the writing and see where things were headed With Marty, we learned to trust that it would come out in performance.”
“You have to remember that that sort of oddness—that’s allowed in Canada,” said Lorne Michaels. “Dan Aykroyd was equally weird in his own way. Marty was allowed to develop without anyone interfering with his development.”
Short made such a name for himself at SCTV that, in 1984, he was invited to join Saturday Night Live for what its then executive producer, Dick Ebersol, called the show’s “George Steinbrenner season.” S.N.L. had been struggling, with NBC even considering its cancellation, so Ebersol propped up the show by forsaking its tradition of hiring emerging talent and instead gave lucrative one-year contracts to Short, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer. The resulting season was atypical for S.N.L., relying more on pre-filmed material and playing more like a grown-up variety show than a canteen rowdydow, but it produced some very good comedy. Crystal was the big news that year, but Short, at 34 the youngest of the veteran group, was the closest thing there was to a breakout star, introducing Grimley and Rogers to a wider American audience along with such newer characters as Nathan Thurm, a synthesis of every white-collar sleaze that Mike Wallace ever interviewed (“I know that! Why wouldn’t I know that?”) and Irving Cohen, an alter kocker survivor of the heyday of Tin Pan Alley (“Gimme a C, a bouncy C!”).
When Michaels returned the following season to retake the reins of the show he had created, he asked Short to stay on, but Short declined. He enjoyed the lift S.N.L. provided, but not the pressure. “I always wished in retrospect that I could have been looser with it all, but I wasn’t,” he said. “I had so much joy doing SCTV. In SCTV, you would have a six-week writing period, and you could have no ideas for two weeks and then make up for it the next three weeks. But at Saturday Night Live it was like final exams every week Billy and I in particular just burdened ourselves with it, always staying late.” (“I’d take him in my cast now, how hard he works,” said Michaels.)
Short did, however, accept Michaels’s offer to be in a movie that the producer had written with Steve Martin and Randy Newman called ¡Three Amigos! The picture, co-starring Martin and Chevy Chase, was a silent-film-era comedy with a rascally Hope-and-Crosby insouciance to it, and Short was especially winning as a guileless former child star, Ned Nederlander, now working as a mariachi-outfitted cinema heartthrob. But, like many an S.N.L. alum before him and since, Short discovered that quality leading-man movie roles for comic actors are few and far between. A flurry of leads followed—in, for example, the uneven Joe Dante comedy-fantasy Innerspace—but, sensibly, Short realized his métier was in character roles and TV work.
“A Moron with Power”
The Saturday Night Live-¡Three Amigos! period was like a hinge between two eras of Short’s working life. Before it, he had been the dewy ingénue, perennially a rising New Face of Comedy. After it, he was the savvy, knowing industry veteran with a particular flair for smart meta-humor about the business. His cameo in the 1989 movie The Big Picture—an outlier in Christopher Guest’s directorial canon, a straightforward, non-pseudo-doc narrative of a hot young filmmaker, played by Kevin Bacon, whose script gets mauled by the studio process—crystallized this transition. With spot-on silken phoniness and a peculiar third-sex affect, Short played a talent agent pitching woo to Bacon’s character: “This is the thing: If you decide to sign with me, you’re gonna get more than an agent. You’re gonna get [holding up four fingers] three people. You’re gonna get an agent, a mother, a father, a shoulder to cry on, someone who knows this business inside and out. And if anyone ever tries to cross you? I’ll grab them by the balls, and squeeze till they’re dead.”
It was a wonderful bit, but it felt different from earlier Short work, less like a flash of brilliance from the whiz kid and more like a comic turn from an established member of the firmament—which is what Short was becoming. That same year, Tom Hanks recalled, Saturday Night Live had its 15th-anniversary special, and at the after-party at the Rainbow Room it was Short, of all the gathered funny people, who brought the house down, getting up and doing his Tony Bennett impression. On the cusp of turning 40, Short had metamorphosed from Martin to Marty to Mah-ty, the comic’s comic, the pro’s pro.
This vein of humor, insiderist but still gettable by outsiders, reached its apotheosis in Jiminy Glick, a character that Short had created in 1999 for The Martin Short Show, his attempt to join the ranks of the syndicated daytime-talk powerhouses. That plan didn’t work out, but Glick—an obese, alternatingly belligerent and solicitous Hollywood interviewer, his name an amalgam of Walt Disney and Budd Schulberg references—got his own series on Comedy Central, which ran from 2001 to 2003. “I was tired of my own face, tired of appearing as me,” Short said. “What intrigued me was the idea that at no time would I look like Marty Short.”
The premise sounded potentially lethal—comic in fat suit wackying it up with his Hollywood friends—but the padding and the prosthetics somehow brought out something new, dark, and exhilaratingly unhinged. “Jiminy Glick is his greatest creation,” said Levy. “A lot of what Jiminy does is improvise, and he’s the comic-character extension of Marty at his fastest and funniest.” With his voice careening between a lispy falsetto and a guttural croak, Jiminy offended his guests with his poor preparation (to Steven Spielberg: “You’ve made so many films—when are you gonna do the big one?”) and insensitivity (to Mel Brooks: “What’s your big beef with the Nazis?”). He also was a reckless scandalmonger. When Conan O’Brien complained of Jiminy’s persistent failure to make eye contact with him, Glick blithely responded, “I’m looking right into your peepers—as Wally Cox used to say to Marlon at night.”
I suggested to Short that Glick was a departure, a plunge into a more dangerous kind of comedy, a hypothesis he disagreed with. “No, no—to me, Jiminy is just a moron with power,” he said. But he granted that Dave Foley, of the Canadian comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall, had the same takeaway: “What he said to me was ‘You’ve finally come up with a character who’s as mean as you really are.’ ”
On the Road Again
Of late, Short has busied himself with the sort of free-agent work available to polymath entertainers like him: voicing characters in animated films, serving as a judge on Canada’s Got Talent, doing multi-episode guest spots on such TV shows as How I Met Your Mother and Weeds.
A couple of years ago, he veered into dramatic acting—always a dangerous move for a dedicated comic, a threat to set off the Maudlin Meter. (Think of Lucille Ball playing a homeless woman in the TV movie Stone Pillow.) But he proved to be outstanding in his full-season arc on the cable series Damages, a program with a history of hiring comic actors for straight parts—among them Ted Danson and Lily Tomlin—because, said Daniel Zelman, one of the executive producers, “we feel there’s a looseness to them, a more improvisational spirit, which can be very refreshing in serious roles.”
Short played Leonard Winstone, the sad-sack lawyer-enabler of a Bernard Madoff-like character. To see his familiar features put to unfamiliar use—registering despair at the deposition table, conveying self-loathing during a desultory tryst with a hooker—was, in its quiet way, as thrilling as watching a new Grimley routine. “He turned out to have this appetite to go where he’d never gone before, and it was amazing to witness,” said Zelman. For Short, it was gratifying, he said, to for once play a role where “there wasn’t this little twitch saying, ‘It’s Marty under here!’ ”
But in real life he remains irrepressibly Marty, still hopping on chairs at parties, still crashing the Letterman set whenever he’s in town. (Shaffer’s band plays the same swellingly saccharine entrance music every time Short appears on the show, the theme from Hollywood and the Stars, an early-60s NBC documentary TV series about American filmdom’s golden age that both Shaffer and Short watched avidly as children.)
And though he vows that he will soon dial down the travel and return to something resembling a routine home life, Short is still trotting out his stage revue, in which he revives Grimley, Rogers, Cohen, and Glick. “December I’m in Birmingham,” he told me in his pluggiest tones, returning us to our little talk show.
“December in Birmingham,” I said.
“And Glick is always a great one to do. You can always interview the mayor of the city. They’re happy to do an interview with Jiminy, and it’s the most fun, because it’s all improvised.”
“Do you get physical with the mayor?”
“You hump the mayor.”
“That’s your credo, Marty? Hump the mayor?”
“Yeah. When in doubt, hump. That’s the name of my book: Hump the Mayor.”
Folks, we’re out of time here. Marty Short, December 14 at the Alys Robinson Stephens Performing Arts Center, in Birmingham. Thanks for remembering!
