Martin Short on His Crazy Career, His “Friend” Meryl Streep and Whether His Comic Tug of War With Steve Martin Has Ever Gone Too Far
Contrary to recent usage of the word “weird” as a pejorative, it was years of being weird at work that brought Martin Short the adoration and respect of pretty much the entire funny-people community, not to mention a big house in the Palisades and a vacation compound in his native Canada. As Short will attest, a slightly off-kilter affect is at the heart of his artistry and appeal, as evidenced by the delightful oddballs like Ed Grimley and Jackie Rogers Jr. he played on SCTV, and his starring role in Clifford, the 1994 comedy that was panned upon release but later reassessed as dementedly genius. “Most of the odd, weird stuff I’ve done, I love,” Short says. “I think, like SCTV, they’ll stand the test of time.”
Now, at the improbable age of 74, Short is more commercially successful than he’s ever been, in no small part thanks to his creative pairing with Three Amigos and Father of the Bride co-star Steve Martin. They’re now out on their fifth national tour, The Dukes of Funnytown!, and it’s not hard to imagine them zinging each other over poached-egg breakfasts on which of them, if either, will collect the Emmy for outstanding lead actor in a comedy for Only Murders in the Building.
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Disappointingly, Short insists that the not-at-all-weird pairing that the world’s been rooting for — namely, he and Meryl Streep taking their Only Murders romance into real life — is not happening. They’re “friends,” he contends. Just ahead of the fourth-season premiere of Hulu’s hit whodunit, out Aug. 27, Short joins THR on a jaunt through his life and career.
You’ve been at this for six decades, but it seems that now, at age 74, you’ve never been hotter. Do you see it that way?
Well, I’m aware that Only Murders in the Building is a successful show, and obviously that’s thrilling, but I can’t honestly say that there are crowds when I go to Gelson’s market. Nothing seems that different.
In the ’70s, I remember watching Tony Randall on Johnny Carson, and The Odd Couple had been going for four years, and Johnny said, “Tony, how long will you stay with this show?” And Tony just looked at him and said, “John, that’s the dumbest question I’ve ever been asked. I will stay with the show as long as it exists because it’s a hit, and a hit is a fluke. In show business, there are singles, there are doubles, there are triples, and there are strikeouts. But a home run is very, very rare.” And I totally agree with that.
Lawrence Kasdan is directing a documentary about you. You appeared in Steve! (Martin), a two-part documentary on Apple TV+. Will there be anything in yours as heart-poundingly exciting as watching Steve Martin use an electric egg poacher for several minutes?
It’s not going to be that high-energy, but it’s going to be something.
In his documentary, Steve talks about his father being distant and dismissive. You had a series of tragedies growing up: Your older brother died in a car accident when you were 12; your mother died after battling cancer for several years; and your father, a steel company executive, passed away two years after that, making you an orphan at 20. Do you and Steve ever compare childhood traumas?
Look, I didn’t know Steve’s parents, but I think that it’s interesting that in families in general, if you have one normal parent, the family’s fine. If you have two oddball parents, whether they’re drug addicts or narcissistic, whatever they are, that can damage a family.
All I know is that you only know your own life. At 20, I knew things about life and death and tragedy and loss that none of my friends knew about. I don’t know why this didn’t screw me up. The only thing I can think of is that these kind of life stresses either empower you or defeat you. But I think that by surviving all that and continuing on, I developed muscles to handle the disappointments in life. And I do think, in a weird way, it did make me braver as a performer, braver onstage. I’d try something, and if some people didn’t like it, I didn’t care because I didn’t know them. I was never doing this for the admiration of strangers. I was doing this to make my siblings and my friends laugh.
You’re also touring with Steve, which you’ve done on and off since 2015. So many great comedy teams break up — often over financial issues. What’s your secret?
Steve used to have a joke: “What I love working about Marty, he understands the concept of 60-40.” But the reality is no, these are not issues that mean anything to us. I think what would affect me with Steve is if he was rude to a waiter, or if he snapped at me, and that’s the furthest thing from anything he’d ever do.
This reminds me. I was once playing a game at a Nora Ephron dinner party. Everyone was famous around the round table — I won’t quote the names -— and I said, “Who’s the biggest prick that anyone has ever worked with?” It was amazing how many people said, “I don’t really think I have worked with any pricks, honestly.” Nora’s husband, Nick Pileggi, who of course wrote Goodfellas, said, “I can’t really think of anyone.” Nora said, “Nick, you work with murderers!” He said, “Yeah, but not pricks.” And then it got to Nora. She said, “I can’t believe this table. I have a list of nine people! I’ve been trying to whittle it down!”
The jokes that you tell about Steve concern his whiteness, his remoteness, and how he was very big in the ’70s. But the ones that he tells about you are lacerating — like, “The only thing that keeps Marty out of the Oscars’ ‘In Memoriam’ is no good films.” Who writes those brutal lines?
We write them together with a writer’s help, and then we rewrite and assemble them. We’re often asked, “Have you guys ever gone too far or hurt each other?” It’s never happened. Because even if I went too far with Steve, he wouldn’t believe that I had any agenda to be mean.
There was a joke John Mulaney wrote for Steve’s AFI [Life Achievement Award in 2015] that I didn’t use, like, “I’ve been through rough times, but Steve’s always been there for me with a weird, cold hand on my shoulder as he tries to mimic human emotion.” Later on, I told it to Steve, and he said, “Why didn’t you do that?”
In the new season of Only Murders, Eugene Levy, Zach Galifianakis and Eva Longoria play actors who portray Steve, you and Selena Gomez, or rather your characters, in a scripted adaptation of the show’s podcast. Is there a line in the show explaining why Eva’s character is older than Selena?
It’s at a party that they throw for all of us. Eva and Selena’s characters are talking, and Eva says, “You’re probably wondering why they cast older.” And Selena goes, “Yeah, I was, kind of.” Eva says, “Well, the studio did testing and they thought it was too creepy that someone your age would hang around with those old guys.”
It did get me thinking. You and Steve are playing two older straight guys. I have known a lot of straight men in their seventies. It’s kind of remarkable that every time Mabel leaves the room the two old guys aren’t constantly talking about her appearance and wondering, however implausibly, if she might be into one of you.
No, I think that would be creepy if we were lusting after Selena. In the early scripts they’d have me saying, “No fucking way” or “Fuck off” in front of Selena. And I said, “I wouldn’t say that in front of Selena, a 29-year-old girl.”
What do you consider the project that is your platonic ideal of who you are as an artist?
SCTV. And I joined the show late. I was the interloper and by the time I joined it, it had already won Emmys and things. But I loved it because first of all, the people you’re working with were just endlessly brilliant, and no one was going after ratings. We were going after whatever made everyone in the room laugh. If Eugene and I wanted to play Sandler and Young, obscure singers who would appear on The Merv Griffin Show, no one said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. No one will know them.” They said, “Oh, funny.” Nothing ever had to get approved. As fabulous as SNL is, there’s always a show on Saturday, so it’s kind of like final exams every week. At SCTV, you’d write for five weeks, then shoot for six weeks. It was done with calm.
SCTV was what got you a ton of attention. But you grew up singing standards into a tape recorder in your attic as a kid, and eventually were cast in the now mythical 1972 Toronto production of Godspell — which included your future girlfriend Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, Victor Garber, Paul Schaffer and Dave Thomas.
I was still in university then. It was insane. Insanely brilliant.
You joined SNL in 1984 for one season. Lorne Michaels had left, and new producer Dick Ebersol hired established comedy ringers — you, Billy Crystal, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest. Given your amazing characters Ed Grimley, Nathan Thurm and Jackie Rogers Jr., I was kind of crushed to learn how miserable you were.
I went through a fraught, tough few weeks near the beginning. I had a one-year contract, so I was treating every show like a special. The first three, especially the first one, had gone very strongly for me. I was like, “How do I top that? Oh God, do I do another Ed Grimley? Am I whoring the character?” So then we had a week off and I went back to our house in Toronto, and we had a new little baby and I remember on Sunday, I had to start the next week of SNL, and I didn’t want to go back. Dick Ebersol was very, very smart. I went in during the fourth show to quit, and he just said, “If you want to leave at Christmas, you can leave.” He also said, “Hey, you want to have dinner with me and my wife, Susan Saint James?” I thought, “Susan Saint James!” My God, she was on McMillan & Wife. “Yeah, I do!”
So he used the wife as an enticement?
Absolutely.
You once described yourself coming off your year on SNL as “’80s hot.”
How obnoxious of me to say that, by the way.
Then, in 1997, after a few films and a TV series didn’t do well, you decided that you were finished. How does that happen in 11 years?
Talk to anyone who’s been in show business for 11 years. You think, “Let’s see, my last few movies haven’t worked, so no one’s going to want me there. I could do a Broadway show, but I have my kids and we live in L.A.” It was a lot of trying to figure out what I do next. I wasn’t even bemoaning. I know a lot of people who have had fabulous careers for about six or seven years, but then other people take over.
What do you mean by “other people take over”?
Well, in ’86, people were talking Martin Short, but by ’97, they were talking Jim Carrey.
Does any part of you think that if you’d chosen different movies, you might have been the Jim Carrey of the ’80s?
No. There’s this assumption that actors have these 15 great movies to choose from and they go, “All right, I’ll pick that one.” It doesn’t work that way. The reality was Three Amigos was a box office disappointment. Innerspace was certainly a box office disappointment, and so was Cross My Heart, which was always supposed to be a little small-deal movie with Larry Kasdan. So, after that one-two-three, by 1990 I was feeling, “I guess I’m not in the movies.”
Do you feel any kind of irony, or sense of satisfaction of having this kind of success at this point in your life when you had a run of projects deemed failures in your thirties?
I never saw any of these things that didn’t work out with the public as failures. [1994 comedy co-starring Charles Grodin] Clifford is a perfect example. That was a film that the critics hated, and no one saw but I thought was fabulous. I looked at Clifford as a work of art that will be appreciated someday. I think it’s the Canadian in me that makes you try as hard as you can, prepare as much as you can, and if it doesn’t work out, you toast yourself because you weren’t in control of that. It’s like [director] Larry Kasdan said to me after Silverado came out, which was a brilliant movie. He said, “Who knew Westerns were out of style? No one told me.”
I have to admit, I didn’t watch Clifford until recently because I was like, “I’m not going to watch a movie about some big red dog.” Did others think it was a dog movie?
Of course they did.
Your performance is a comedy tour de force, but it’s an incredibly weird movie.
Yes, it is.
I didn’t know how I should feel about wishing bodily harm on Clifford, the creepy 10-year-old kid you play.
You’ll have to work that out with your therapist.
Roger Ebert did a review of Clifford that’s famous, and you included it in your memoir. He wrote that Clifford is “not bad in any usual way. It’s bad in a new way all its own … as if it’s based on the sense of humor of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe.”
But here’s the thing. You could have Roger Ebert, God love him, review a Taylor Swift concert. He might say, “I don’t get it.” And you’re going, “Well, it’s not for you, Roger.” Clifford is a weird movie for 23-year-old stoners. Not that it was my intention, by the way, to make it for 23-year-old stoners, but those are the people who would come up to me and talk about it.
Is it a strange feeling having films like Clifford and Three Amigos dismissed by critics when they were released but then decades be reconsidered and deemed brilliant?
I’m not on social media. I think that artists have to protect their filament a little bit and not abuse it by just randomly looking for negative energy. But if I’m doing a talk show, I will go back to the last appearance and see, Oh, okay, I did that joke, and I’ll make my notes. And then you’re seduced by the comments below, and they’re always kind of the same. “Oh, he’s great.” “Oh, I love him.” And then, “He’s so horrible.” “I’ve hated that guy my whole life.” All I know is that comedy is subjective, but I’m looking at that talk show appearance and thinking, how could he hate that? So in my heart, I just realize, oh right, if I had dinner with that guy who hated me, I’d be bored.
Jiminy Glick, the clueless celebrity interviewer, first appeared in 1994 on The Martin Short Show and then on his own spinoff for three years. Kids in the Hall member Dave Foley once said to you, “You’ve created a character who’s actually as mean as you are in real life.” Is there something to that?
No, no, no. What makes me laugh more about what Jiminy says is how he’s a moron with power. The idea that this guy could have his own show, but also have a staff where there is an assistant who’s terrified of screwing up the lunch order. That’s what makes me laugh about him.
Have you encountered many idiots with power occupying Hollywood C-suites?
Oh, absolutely. I’ve just met people that I kind of go, “Wow, you are so uninteresting and you are running the studio.”
You said not long ago that you once played opposite an actress whose breath was so bad, it was like “John Goodman’s couch.” Who was that?
I’m not telling you. Although Bernadette Peters always says, “Baby, everyone thinks it’s me.” It wasn’t Bernadette Peters.
It’s impossible not to fall in love with your late wife, Nancy, after reading your memoir. You met in 1974 after she joined the Toronto Godspell production you were in, and together you raised three kids. She died of ovarian cancer in 2010 at 58. My wife and I are in our 50s, with kids about the same age as yours were at the time, and I was just thinking how devastating it would be to lose a spouse at this point in our lives.
It was absolutely horrible, obviously, and as sad as anything, but I will tell you what I said to my kids at the time: “I believe Mom has zoomed into our souls,” and I think … What’s the George Eliot quote?
I’m not well read enough to help you out here.
I’m going to find it right now. It’s worth it. George Eliot, let’s see, I wrote it down somewhere. I have a thing where I keep a list of things that I forget, like people’s names. Morgan Freeman was on it for a while. I’d be getting a massage and forget his name. Here it is. George Eliot said, “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.” We were together for 36 years. I didn’t want to forget Nancy.
On this topic, in Steve!, Jerry Seinfeld asks Steve a pretty indelicate question: What happens if Marty dies? And Steve says he probably wouldn’t perform again. What would you do if Steve dies?
Oh, I’d phone Billy Crystal.
Wow, you responded so quickly! You’ve obviously thought about it.
In the show, we do each other’s eulogies, and there was one joke I did about Steve: “I miss you so much, although Billy’s been looking so great in rehearsal.”
This story first appeared in the August 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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