“This one just didn’t sing,” a critic tells theater director Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) about his dull return to Broadway in the third season of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building. “Even your worst productions sing.” No one will see her negative review, written before the show’s leading man was murdered on opening night, but she assures Oliver that it was appropriately negative. “I never hold back,” she adds. “Neither should you.”
For half a century now, Martin Short has been not holding back. Short has been synonymous with a kind of eager-to-please flamboyance since his days at Toronto’s Second City, where he would do anything, anything, for a laugh. In his very first sketch with the troupe, Short introduced a character named Ed Grimley, based on his brother-in-law but with the weirdness dialed way up. He found that the character was so bizarre that he’d get laughs even when other actors onstage were talking—“an utter revelation to me,” he writes in his 2014 memoir I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend. As the season went on, Ed became quirkier and quirkier. Short recalls that the night he greased Ed’s hair up to a point like a unicorn’s horn, “my entrance drew its biggest laugh yet.” The character of Ed Grimley, later to be popularized on Second City Television and Saturday Night Live, would forever have pointy hair. After all, Short thought, basking in the audience’s laughter, “isn’t that what we’re trying to achieve here?”
I know that I’m not the only one who finds Ed Grimley—who finds, indeed, nearly all of the over-the-top characters that Martin Short has played in his long career—unbelievably annoying. Short himself acknowledges that some people love him and some people have always hated him. “You’re never gonna win those people over,” he said in an oral history of perhaps his most divisive movie, 1994’s Clifford. The one thing he knows about the people who hate him, he added, laughing, is that “if I had dinner with them, I’d be bored. That’s the only thing I can say back to those bastards.”
I am one of those bastards. I find Martin Short’s whole schtick exhausting, sweaty, and desperately unfunny. Throughout his evolution from sketch-comedy standout to uneasy movie star to twice-failed talk-show host to enthusiastic song-and-dance man, I’ve wrinkled my nose. Every time he dresses up in a silly outfit or says something outrageous or mugs for the audience, I want to shout at the screen: Why are you being like this? Only Murders in the Building has fun with this reputation, making Oliver Putnam a try-hard only in comparison to his staid friends Mabel (Selena Gomez) and Charles (Short’s longtime comedy partner Steve Martin)—a gentler version of Short, one who in Season 3 must tamp down his personality further to avoid a second heart attack. But even in this quasi-naturalist mode—directing actors, interviewing witnesses, or wooing Meryl Streep—you can always see the mischievous glint in his eye.
What’s funniest about Martin Short, I believe, is that despite this exhibitionist stage presence, it seems that in real life he’s mostly a calm, well-adjusted guy—friend to many, loving husband and father. If he had dinner with me, perhaps he would be bored. But I bet I would find him a lovely gent.
But really, I’d ask him at the end of the meal. Why are you being like this?
Short grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, and endured some terrible tragedies before he even reached adulthood. His oldest brother died in a car accident when Short was 12; by the time he was 20, both his parents had gotten sick and died as well. Short writes that he’s always resisted the simplistic psychologizing that writers like to do with this sad story: “Aha! He went into comedy as a way to alleviate the pain of a tragedy-scarred childhood! Great stuff!” Short points out that his childhood was mostly happy and that even the difficult times gave him a certain fearlessness. Most importantly, he notes, he was a ham long before his parents died, recording Sinatra songs in his attic, dreaming of a showbiz career.
In 1972, the spring of his final year at McMaster University, Short was cast in a now-legendary Toronto production of Godspell that also launched the careers of Victor Garber, Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, and Paul Shaffer. While many of those performers went on to immediate fame, Short floundered for several years afterward, landing on wan TV commercials and a Canadian variety show. At one point he was cast in an intense dramatic role, as a cruel, predatory prisoner in a production of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes. After seeing the show, Radner hugged Short and said, “Aw, honey, don’t ever do a play like this again.”
He didn’t. In 1977 he finally joined Second City Toronto, where he honed neurotic Ed Grimley. He joined SCTV in the spring of 1982, just as the show, recently picked up by NBC, was becoming a critical and inside-comedy darling. In a cast that included such comic geniuses as Catherine O’Hara, Rick Moranis, John Candy, and Levy, Short immediately made his mark with a wild, unhinged impression of Jerry Lewis in Paris, shrieking, singing, and abusing his musical director. There’s nothing subtle about Short’s Lewis: Big-eyed and flailing, the sketch starts at 10 and cranks it up from there—and Short calls the sketch “as fulfilling a moment creatively as I’d ever experienced.”
“It had all been pent up in me, these ideas, these characters, this energy,” he writes. “At thirty-two, I was finally able to give the world the Full Marty.” In Short’s sketch-heavy 1980s, he rarely gave the world anything less. The bigger the audience, the bigger his characters got, and his breakout during the 1984–85 season of Saturday Night Live doomed his comedy.
Short’s single year at SNL was a notable one. Following the departure of Eddie Murphy, producer Dick Ebersol cleaned house, staffing the show with experienced comedians like Short, Billy Crystal (who’d already hosted the show twice), and, fresh off This Is Spinal Tap, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest. Short has said he found his year in the SNL pressure cooker stressful, and his success soon depended on a rotating cast of fan-favorite wacky characters, many of them imported from SCTV, all of whose appeal soon ran thin: albino crooner Jackie Rogers Jr., elderly songwriter Irving Cohen, sweaty lawyer Nathan Thurm.
But first among all Short’s characters was spike-haired man-child Ed Grimley. In Ed’s first appearance on SNL, the joke was that he’s entirely unendurable: The receptionist (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) can’t stand him, and the casting agent he’s meeting with throws himself out a window as soon as he departs. The audience laughs uncertainly but doesn’t seem to know what to make of him. But by his fifth appearance on the show, Ed Grimley had clicked: The audience cheers when they see him, and cheers again when he announces he’s going to “practice my triangle.” Prancing around Ed’s apartment, Short milks the character for all he’s worth, until he’s visited by “the love of my life, I must say,” played by host Tina Turner. It’s a measure of how popular the character had become that a game Turner was asked to flirt with Ed Grimley and then end the sketch doing his signature herky-jerky dance moves.
Short is proud of Ed Grimley. The character has become a touchstone, spawning a Saturday morning cartoon and making occasional triumphant returns to television. Short describes him as an adult who still has the excitement of a kid, and you can still occasionally see that idea shining through. But in the hurly-burly of an anxious SNL season, Ed’s character, such as it was, quickly flattened into a gimmick, seeming to exist solely in order to deliver catchphrases: “I must say!” “It makes me completely mental!” “Give me a break!” Short was much better on SNL when he portrayed less ornate characters, like Lawrence Orbach, whose whole deal is simply that he is incredibly stupid. Playing Lawrence allowed Short to channel his huge energy into physical humor, often alongside underplaying straight men: Lawrence, in life jacket and nose plugs, attempting synchronized swimming, or Lawrence as a World War II soldier, utterly unable to climb stairs like a human being.
In the nearly 40 years since Short left SNL (he says he finally had enough of the pressure), Hollywood has never quite figured out what to do with Martin Short. He appeared in not-that-bad movies that did poorly at the box office, like Innerspace and Mars Attacks!, and not-that-good movies that made some money, like Three Amigos and Three Fugitives. Most of his movies simply sank without a trace. His one franchise hit, the Father of the Bride series, features Short’s most unfunny character of all: Franck, the wedding planner whose ambiguous gender, sexuality, and nationality are all played for laughs. Watching a once-proud weirdo like Steve Martin, of all people, pretend to gruffly take umbrage at Franck’s flamboyance is the most dispiriting thing about the series.
The one glorious artifact of Hollywood’s multidecade attempt to make Martin Short a star is Short’s most off-putting movie, Clifford. The comedy failed so thoroughly with critics and audiences that Roger Ebert’s take became the conventional wisdom: “a movie that should never have been made.” But the movie’s die-hard fans, many of whom watched it over and over on basic cable while baked, are deeply grateful it was made, and I have to admit that it’s one of the few Short vehicles that utilize his manic, slightly creepy intensity to good effect. Playing a character with as simple a remit as Lawrence Orbach’s—10-year-old Clifford is, simply, evil—Short delivers a grating, upsetting, fully committed performance, the deranged center of an inspired comic ensemble that includes Charles Grodin, Richard Kind, Mary Steenburgen, and Dabney Coleman.
If movies weren’t the ticket, maybe television would be the key to Martin Short’s success? Such was his name recognition that he hosted two separate programs called The Martin Short Show, both of which traded, in title and in tone, on the idea that audiences simply could not get enough of Martin Short. The first Martin Short Show, a 1994 sitcom, was canceled by NBC after three weeks. The second, a late-night-style variety show that inexplicably ran as early as 9 a.m. in some markets, made it through one season from 1999 to 2000. Short admits that around this time he suffered a real career crisis. In his memoir, he recalls telling his wife, Nancy, “I think it might be over,” and her responding, “You’ll never go away. People just wouldn’t have it.”
He never went away. Is it because people just wouldn’t have it, or because Martin Short can’t stop? Once again, Short resists the deeper explanation—when an interviewer asked if there’s something compulsive about Short’s need for a laugh, or any psychological explanation for his style, Short said, “No. Zero. My style is not remotely psychological.” In front of a crowd, Short turns into a parody of a preening attention whore, one who eats up every last bit of the audience’s love and demands more: “Love me,” he proclaims upon his entrance during a recent Netflix special with Steve Martin, “even more than I love myself!” The public hasn’t exactly been crying out for more Martin Short material since those dark days of the early 2000s, but as he’s moved his focus away from the traditional signifiers of showbiz success for a 20th-century comedian—the sitcom, the high-concept movie comedy, the talk show—he’s found more profitable vehicles for his somewhat old-fashioned showmanship.
While he’s basically washed his hands of movies—other than voice work, his only role in a real movie in the past 16 years was a delightful two-day cameo as a stoned dentist in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice—he’s found an interesting niche as a character actor in TV dramas. Short has mostly heeded Gilda Radner’s long-ago advice about sticking to comedy. There’s no Oscar-bait role on his résumé, à la Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting or Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. But he’s made an interesting addition to the cast of Damages, for example, playing a shady lawyer, or The Morning Show, as a director/predator who just so happens to also be a song-and-dance man. (Both roles netted him Emmy nominations.)
He brought that love of song and dance back to the stage, winning a Tony for his hammy, multicharacter performance in the Neil Simon musical revival Little Me. And he has found his métier in being not a talk-show host but a talk-show guest, acclaimed by no less than the New Yorker as the best in the world at that odd performance outlet. “Being a guest,” Ian Crouch writes, “suits his seeming need to impress, to relentlessly wear down an audience, to paw at a person sitting a few feet away until he forces a laugh.” Short has said he spends hours preparing for such appearances, sending in 18 pages of ideas and jokes, all so he can perform “an impersonation of myself being relaxed.”
The host-guest relationship gets turned on its head when Short portrays Jiminy Glick, an enormous, horny, unprepared, unbelievably rude interviewer who insults famous people on television. It can be a sight to watch celebrities handle—or not handle—Glick’s schtick, though I confess I am less entranced by Short’s gleeful explanation that in his live shows, he likes to have Glick interview a local luminary. “Occasionally Jiminy will get aroused by a lady mayor and will jump her and start pumping her,” he writes. “But all in good fun.”
What makes Jiminy’s behavior tolerable, I think, is that all evidence suggests that Martin Short—despite the naked desperation for laughs, the love-me wailing onstage, the frequent bad taste in projects, the fact that he once started a network special with a hideous James Brown parody—is basically a nice, decent guy. Yes, he makes old-man pronouncements about Comedy These Days. Yes, he will not admit that Chevy Chase is a big jerk. But he devotes long chapters of his memoir to how much he loved his wife, to the extent that he tells a slightly uncomfortable story about doing Ed Grimley just for her, in tender moments. Nancy Dolman died in 2010 of ovarian cancer, and it’s impossible to read the sections of the memoir about her illness—or about the way his Hollywood friends stepped in to help—without feeling warmly for the guy.
“My natural tendency, no matter what difficult period I’m going through or have been through, is to be happy,” he writes in his memoir. Martin Short actually seems incredibly healthy; one friend calls him the only comedian in the business who’s laughing on the inside. His job is to entertain, and he loves his job—maybe a little too much, sometimes, but may any of us have such problems.
Oliver Putnam, the director and occasional podcaster he plays on Only Murders in the Building, only occasionally displays the traditional Shortian desperation to please. He’s a sendup of washed-up artists, who tend to share with Short’s comedy persona a certain self-regard. But he’s also, despite his foibles, a good friend to Charles and Mabel. And as he slowly falls for Meryl Streep’s flibbertigibbet actress character Loretta, we see how badly he wants to connect to someone else who cares as much as he does. That the thing he cares about is a very bad musical called Death Rattle Dazzle—well, he’s still Martin Short. Only Murders in the Building may have the Emmys’ blessing, the prestige-TV imprimatur, and the New Yorker font, but Martin Short will still do anything, anything, for a laugh. After all: Isn’t that what we’re trying to achieve here?
