When Martin Short was 12, his oldest brother died in a car accident. Five years later, his mother died of cancer; three years after that, his father had a stroke and passed away, leaving Short, at 20, the youngest of five, living alone at his family home in Hamilton, Ontario.
“That was a rough eight years,” Michael Short, Martin’s brother, says to him in “Marty, Life Is Short,” the new Netflix documentary that alternates between the star’s raucously funny career in show business and a personal life filled with enduring friendships and unbearable tragedy. In the film, Short responded to his sibling with a revealing take on this period of his life: “There were laughs,” he says, emphasizing the next sentence. “That’s the point.”
Asked to expand in a recent interview in a Manhattan hotel, with legs crossed, slight and dapper, Short recalled a grim moment right before his mother’s death when both his parents were in the hospital. Short tends to answer questions with anecdotes. He was again with Michael, this time across a breakfast table. “We looked at each other and started laughing,” he said. “It was like: How absurd, how ridiculous, how dark can this be? It’s why the phrase ‘dark comedy’ exists.”
This particular brand of resiliency — “laughing wild, amid severest woe,” as the poet Thomas Gray put it — is an undercurrent of “Marty, Life Is Short,” which takes its name from Short’s response to a talk-show question about how to cope with the death of parents. He said that you could despair, but that he chose to conclude that life was short and that there were tools developed in disaster. “You became your own therapist,” he told me, adding that this grieving period helped him develop “muscles to survive.”
He has needed them. In 2010, the love of his life, his wife, Nancy, died of ovarian cancer. In February his daughter, Katherine, died by suicide after struggling with mental illness. While Nancy Short is such a focus of the documentary that the comedian told its director, Lawrence Kasdan, “I had no idea you were in love with my wife,” Katherine’s death doesn’t come up until the end, in a dedication to her and Catherine O’Hara, Short’s “SCTV” colleague who died the month before she did and figures prominently in the film.
Now reflecting on the loss of his daughter, Short recalled that his wife’s final words, spoken in her bedroom as paramedics rushed in, were “Martin, let me go.”
He continued, “Katherine was saying: Dad, let me go,” and explained, “I don’t see any difference between mental illness as a disease and cancer as a disease. In some cases, both are terminal. And in some cases, both are survivable.”
Short clarified that this recent tragedy is different. “This is your child,” he said firmly. Adding later in a soft voice: “I am trying to head toward the light.”
AT 76, MARTIN SHORT is more popular than ever, with a long-running touring show with Steve Martin, a hit TV series, “Only Murders in the Building,” entering its sixth season and, because of appearances with Meryl Streep, a regular spot in the tabloid press. No one in Hollywood inspires more gushing. Conan O’Brien has called Short the “funniest person out there” and David Letterman told me that “by almost any definition, description or measurement, maybe the funniest man to appear on television routinely.”
When the Slate writer Dan Kois published his case against Short, calling him “unbelievably annoying,” the enraged response on social media — the kind of thing usually reserved for sexual abusers or celebrities saying slurs — was a reflection of the intense public affection for this performer.
His is a curious legacy, however: As he will be quick to tell you, his career is filled with failure, including sitcoms that didn’t work, movies that came and went (some, like “Three Amigos,” became cult classics), and talk and variety shows that flopped. Short still sounds as if he wished more people knew about his HBO special “I, Martin Short, Goes Hollywood.” (They should.) Despite a stellar sketch-comedy track record at “SCTV,” then a year at “Saturday Night Live,” Hollywood has had trouble figuring out a vehicle for him.
The argument for Martin Short’s greatness does not rest on a blockbuster movie or signature role so much as the indelible distinctiveness and range of his comic creations. Whether playing the celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick or the defensive lawyer Nathan Thurm or the indecipherable wedding planner from the “Father of the Bride” movies, he makes bold, often bizarre choices that no one else would. These characters don fat suits and ludicrous haircuts, but they are all undeniably the product of Short’s imagination. And in the internet era, they age well, because underneath his hustling work ethic is the ambition of someone who’s willing to risk coming off as annoying.
It starts with his song-and-dance man tool kit, a sneakily athletic physicality, those swiveling, prancing hips, and that signature Broadway belting voice. There’s audio in the documentary from his father, an Irish wit whose sarcasm is part of the inspiration for Jiminy Glick, criticizing his son’s singing voice, but also praising it as distinctive, which, he adds, will stand the test of time. That’s right.
If you were lucky enough to stumble upon Short as a kid, as I did with his first blockbuster character, the manic innocent Ed Grimley, his joyful eccentricity sticks with you for life. A few days after talking to Short, I interviewed Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords, who told me to thank Short for the Ed Grimley animated show, which left a formative impact on him as a boy growing up in New Zealand.
But there’s a knottier boundary-blurring element to Short’s talent. He’s most famous for comedy that comes from character instead of punchlines, but as he has proved in talk shows, he can deliver stinging pinpoint jokes as well as anyone. “Every time I’m in your company,” he told Jimmy Kimmel. “I’m whelmed.” His humor can be as cutting as it is endearing, and as he has aged, you increasingly get the sense that in private, he has a hilarious mean streak.
With Ed Grimley and the title character in “Clifford,” a truly strange and unjustly panned movie that deserves to be considered a modern comedy classic, his performances straddle the worlds of children and adults. All it takes is a telephone call for Grimley to light up in prancing excitement at who could be on the other line. Short said people thought Grimley was a boy, but he insisted that he’s an adult who never lost his sense of wonder. “I love the idea that you never become jaded by the things you experienced,” he said.
For an entertainer who has created such wild characters, Short comes off as remarkably organized, low-key and diligent. “If I hadn’t been an actor,” he told me. “I would have been really good as the executive secretary to Ted Sarandos.”
Short has no time for psychoanalyzing his traumas as the source of his humor. His confidence, he said, comes from a happy childhood, full of love. Short also has no interest in going to therapy, although he said that John Mulaney told him he should go to a mediocre one just to see the look on their face when they hear all the tragedies that had befallen him. A dark joke Short clearly enjoys. But he does find peace in an almost rigid commitment to routine.
EVERY MONDAY, Short reflects on the week and gives himself grades in nine categories of life, including Career, Family and Lifestyle. The fact that Discipline is one of the nine is telling. He’s done this for decades. Originally, it allowed him to feel good about himself during slow professional stretches. When his career wasn’t going well, he raised his score by working harder on something like Family. There’s clearly a best-selling self-help book here. “The more disciplined I am the better I feel,” he said.
The week I saw him, he told me he gave himself excellent marks in Career but not Discipline or Creativity. “Lifestyle is always an A,” he said.
Short is an honors student in Friendship. Kasdan said he wanted his documentary portrait to feel like hanging out with Short, and in remarkable amount of home movie footage shot by Short or friends, he shows us a procession of relationships with extremely talented peers.
His partnership with Steve Martin is well known. He’s longtime best friends with Eugene Levy. Both are in the movie, as are the cadre of “SCTV” stars, including Andrea Martin and the late O’Hara and John Candy. More surprising perhaps is his family’s tight bond with the families of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. Spielberg will probably never remake “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” so a home movie shot by him on a boat with Hanks and Short, performing as Forrest Gump and Ed Grimley, replaying the scene where the bandits jump off a cliff, is as close as you will get.
In his recent interview with Short for his Netflix show, Letterman told him he was jealous of his ability to maintain these friendships. To which Short retorted: “Well, you must be kind.”
Short is famously nice, which allows him to get away with more of an edge in his humor without risking losing the affection of the audience. His Jiminy Glick interviews are one of the most enjoyable rabbit holes online, in part because of the complete lack of respect he shows famous people. In recent years, Short has also dug deeper into dramatic roles, playing incredibly unsympathetic characters in “The Morning Show,” “Damages” and the movie “Inherent Vice.”
Short doesn’t see these as departures. That would imply comedy and tragedy are distinct. He illustrates this with the story of a producer on “Damages” asking him not to smile because the audience will then see Martin Short instead of the character. He balked, saying that is a problem, because, Short explained, “the worst villains in the world smile.” The producer apologized.
MARTIN SHORT WAS RAISED in a Catholic household, saying prayers every night and going to Mass every Sunday. But he no longer believes in organized religion. He stopped mentioning God in prayers when his brother died. When citing a higher power on the death of loved ones, he quotes Mike Nichols: “I see no reason why you just can’t keep the conversation going.”
In the documentary, he describes a dream his late brother appeared in. Asked if recording home video of his family, which appears in the movie, is a way to keep them around, he said: “I know that my wife, Nancy, felt she knew my parents intimately through all the tapes.”
Short was quick to add that he didn’t judge anyone for finding solace any way they can. And that there is a randomness to happiness.
“Some people are born with a happy gene,” he told me, before dropping the name of another longtime friend. “Goldie Hawn is born with a happy gene. Some people are not born with happy gene and so that’s luck. That’s DNA luck, but also, it’s trying to, I think, trying to find, what’s the Python song?”
Short looked up, trying to recall a song in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.” But he seemed to forget the lyrics after the first word.
This produced a very short, bizarre moment when an interview between journalist and celebrity turned into a musical. I am not quick to sing, especially at work, and yet, when I aimed to remind him, we accidentally ended up in the middle of a conversation about the darkest subject imaginable, doing a duet. “Always look on the bright side of life.”
It was absurd, but also not at all. Short considered the sentiment. “Yeah,” he said, lowering his voice to a murmur: “Head for the light.”
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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