In a recent
conversation with Vulture’s great interviewer David Marchese, the actor and comedian
Martin Short talked a bit about the process he goes through when
preparing to be a guest on a late-night talk show. “What I do for a
typical talk-show appearance, and I’m not exaggerating, is I’ll send in
something like 18 pages ahead of time,” Short said, adding that he then
spends at least ninety minutes speaking with a show’s producer, cutting
down his proposed material and shaping it into a conversation he’ll have
with the host. What looks almost like an organic chat on TV is really a
tightly choreographed two-man bit, with Short doing, as he puts it, “an
impersonation of myself being relaxed.”
He’s not alone in preparing meticulously. During his last appearance on the
“Late Show with David Letterman,” in 2015, Short told a story about how
his friend Steve Martin would call him, from time to time, to tell him a
joke that he was readying for a “Letterman” appearance that was still months
away. (And less fastidious guests are compelled by most late-night shows
to at least have their material vetted before they appear.) Yet one gets
the sense that, of all his peers, Short is the hardest-working talk-show
guest in the business—and, as a result, he may also be the greatest. He
has starred in movies, sitcoms, variety shows, and stage performances, and he
even, for a season, hosted his own talk show. He’s won Emmys and a
Tony and nearly every award that Canada gives
out. Yet,
despite his wide success, some of his greatest comedic triumphs have
come while yakking with talk-show hosts.
YouTube is full of Short’s talk-show appearances, dating back to his
first spot on “Letterman,” in
1982, and regularly I find that
I’ve killed half an hour or so watching his old clips. Short, who is now
sixty-seven, has always been tirelessly boyish and energetic, and has
made several generations of hosts lean back in their chairs and laugh.
He cracked up Carson. He’s
cracked up Leno. And
Conan.
And Fallon. He’s funny
anywhere, even in places where laughter is hard-won, like on “Regis and
Kelly” or Chevy Chase’s
short-lived talk show.
He’s even funny when he’s
hiking. Of all the truly
great modern talk-show guests—a list that includes Amy Sedaris, Norm
Macdonald, and just a handful of others—it is Short whose clips I return
to time and again. Mostly, I think, it’s because his talk-show persona
is the purest, the most attuned to and at ease with the restrictions
and comedic traditions of the genre. Nobody tells a vacation story, or a
holiday story, or an awards-show story, or a recollection of some
industry folly better than Short does. He sings; he dances; he does
broad physical comedy; he tells the best one-liners.
Short has always understood that being a talk-show guest is itself a
performance, a role to cultivate and refine. The persona he has settled
into is that of a self-assured but ever so slightly bitter show-business
insider, a breezy phony, a Hollywood jerk. He walks onstage wearing a
little smirk, and then makes a show of basking in the applause of the
audience. He repeatedly refers to the “Daytime Oscars” he’s won, and
makes passive-aggressive jokes about the fact that the show didn’t send
a car for him, or about the cash bars that his rich Hollywood friends
have at their parties. Sometimes he channels the louche vibe of a lesser
Rat Packer. Other times, he drifts off into a Norma Desmond,
faded-grande-dame kind of thing. He often seems to be doing two or three
impressions at once. He likes to open his appearances with a series of
rim-shot jokes made at the expense of the host, in the style of Don
Rickles. “You look sensational,” he tells
Letterman. “Is it the kale
enemas?” To Jimmy Kimmel:
“Every time I’m in your company, I’m whelmed.” To Conan
O’Brien: “You look like
the film negative of ‘Django Unchained.’ ” To Jimmy
Fallon: “I bet you’re the
only late-night host that goes to a pediatrician.” The jokes, rehearsed
and not always original, nonetheless always kill, and they provoke glee
from the hosts, who take obvious delight in being roasted by Marty, as
they all call him.
Short’s bluster is tempered by what, one senses, is his realer
personality, characterized by Canadian self-deprecation and downright
decency. In 2012, during Short’s appearance on the boozy fourth hour of
the “Today” show, the host Kathie Lee Gifford asked Short how he and his
wife, Nancy Dolman, kept the spark alive in their marriage, and went on
to ask several more questions referring to Dolman in the present
tense—unaware that she had died of ovarian cancer, two years earlier.
Short appeared briefly taken aback, but managed to smile while answering
the questions as best he could—waiting to correct Gifford until they
were off the air.
Nowhere was Short in better form than in his fifty-plus appearances on
“Letterman.” This owed, in part, to his longtime relationship with
Letterman’s bandleader, his fellow-Canadian Paul Shaffer, whom he would
relentlessly tease. (“Paul looks like the maître d’ on a spaceship.”)
But mostly his Letterman appearances thrill because he so clearly has
the number of the host, a notoriously hard nut to crack. Short makes
Letterman laugh—really laugh, that great cackle—and this endorsement spurs the audience to even greater laughter. The talk-show guest is, in
a way, a supplicant—seated lower than the host, with just a few minutes,
between commercial breaks, to make a good impression and plug whatever
he came to plug. It’s a frankly ridiculous situation, and faintly
demeaning—a dynamic that Short at once embraces and mocks. Being a guest
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 is endlessly charming, but the characters he plays are
often pests or interlopers, grating and bizarre, and this friction,
packed into a few minutes, yields a perfect whirlwind of knowing wit and
wild abandon.
The last thing Short ever did on “Letterman” was sing a song. With his
body arched back and his legs spread wide, he belted out, “It’s the end,
my pretend show-biz friend, farewell! We’ll meet again, someday, in
hell.” Short told the audience that he had planned to deliver the number
as a eulogy at Letterman’s funeral. But since Letterman was quitting
television, he added, he probably wouldn’t show up when Dave actually
died—“unless, of course, I have something to promote.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
