Marc: Why are we so afraid of joy?
Judd: That’s the question. And I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think it’s because we think right behind joy is a knife that will cut our throat if we really feel it. It’s almost like a laugh—your chin goes up and your throat is exposed. If I laugh too loud, someone will slit my throat. That’s the terror of joy.
This interview originally appeared on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast.
MARTIN SHORT (1984)
I spent a fair number of my teenage years sitting alone in front of the TV late at night, watching SCTV, which came on after Saturday Night Live. SCTV was a sketch show from Canada. It was not done in front of a live audience; everything was shot on tape. (The Ben Stiller Show was heavily influenced by SCTV. Ben and I used to say, “We’re like SCTV if they’d had money to work with.”) The cast was epic—John Candy, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis, Catherine O’Hara—but the person who made me laugh the most was Martin Short, with his impressions of Jerry Lewis and Katharine Hepburn and the epic characters he invented, such as Jackie Rogers Jr. and Ed Grimley.
I showed up at his hotel in New York, where he was promoting a new season of SCTV, to conduct our interview. Of all the people I interviewed in high school, he was probably the nicest. God, did he indulge me. I’ve gotten to know him a little bit since then, and it all makes sense now: This kindness and warmth is just the way he lives his life.
On the night that Steve Martin won his lifetime achievement Oscar in 2013, I was lucky enough to wrangle an invitation to go back to Steve’s house for a celebration. There weren’t many people there. For a while, it was just Steve Martin, his wife, Anne, Martin Short, Tom Hanks, Bill Hader, and me, and as a group, they were as funny as anyone I have ever been around in my life. Just a shocking level of intelligence and humor. That night, I went home and thought: Martin Short was the funniest person in that room; ergo, Martin Short is the funniest person in every room.
Judd Apatow: When did your comedy career begin?
Martin Short: In 1972, I did a show called Godspell in Toronto, and it was my first professional show. It was an interesting cast, because there were a lot of talented people in it who were doing their first professional show, too. Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Victor Garber. Paul Shaffer was the piano player. Everyone became good friends and it was great. We were just out of school, glad to not be in school. We did it for a year.
Judd: And what did that lead to?
Martin: It led to just kind of continually working in Toronto. Canada is a great place to work, because you’re not pigeonholed. There’s no star system. You’re not put in a kind of “He does that and that’s all we’ll ever ask him to do” role. So, you can do commercials and Shakespeare for radio and musicals—you can do anything, if you get the job. I did all that for about six years, until ’78 or so, when I joined Second City. Then I did that for a couple of years and then did it in the States and did a series called The Associates and then—
Judd: The Associates was highly acclaimed, but that also got canceled.
Martin: The story of my life.
Judd: How does Second City work?
Martin: It works in a—it’s very organized. The set show is from nine until ten-thirty and then there’s a break and there are improvisations. They are free, so if you’re arriving at eleven you can watch them, and they are based on suggestions from the audience—they fall under different categories of places or current events. Then you go backstage and you put up this piece of paper with all the suggestions and you have about ten minutes to come up with a scene. You might give the lighting guy a cue, like, “Okay when I reach this line, cut it” or “We’re going to go in this direction.” Sometimes the lighting guy is very important—he might look at a scene and take it out earlier, let it go. The scenes are taped, so four minutes later when it’s time to write another show, the main bulk of the show, the part that people pay for, you sit around saying, “Wait a second. There was a scene I did one night, an improvisation—what was that scene about a cabdriver?” And then they pull out the tape—when I was there, they were audiotapes, but now they’re audiovisual tapes—and you look at it and you remember what you said. Then you start rewriting and building it.
Judd: You have ten minutes to do fifteen different pieces. How do you handle that? Does it always work or—
Martin: No, often you bomb. You bomb bad. But it doesn’t matter because the audience knows you’re improvising, and so they’re kind of with you. I mean, it’s fun.
Judd: How does it work [on SCTV]? Is it all cast writers? Do you have additional writers other than the cast?
Martin: Yes, we do. The cast writes but there are five additional writers. You come up with an idea, you write it out, and you take it into weekly or biweekly meetings where everyone sits around in a circle over a big desk and reads the material. The material is voted on, whether they wanted it in the show, and sometimes, very few times, a sketch is totally thrown out. Usually what happens is suggestions are offered from everyone in the room about how it could be better, and that sketch is taken away and improved, and read again, and passed, and put up on a bulletin board, and through that a show is assembled.
Judd: Do you have an audience?
Martin: No.
Judd: Does that help the show, you think?
Martin: For the kind of show SCTV is, yes. You know, Saturday Night Live has the advantage of that energy that it gets from being live, but it has the disadvantage, too, of only being able to do a take once.
Judd: Do you have a laugh track?
Martin: Yes.
Judd: And do you think that hurts the feel of the show? Because sometimes those are not so good.
Martin: It’s like anything: If it’s done well, it doesn’t. If it’s done badly, it does.
Judd: Anybody that we would know who you worked with on Second City?
Martin: You mean, onstage?
Judd: Yeah.
Martin: Well, Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas…
Judd: They were all doing that at the same time they were doing SCTV?
Martin: Some had left and some would come back for a month. That’s what was great about Second City. You could go back if you wanted.
Judd: How do you become part of Second City? Isn’t there an audition where they make you do characters?
Martin: There is a system. There’s an audition where you have to do five characters coming in a door and then you leave and you come through the door again as another character. If you’re good at that, you usually get into the touring company, and you do resorts up north, like any touring company. From there, you go to the main company.
Judd: Did you ever do stand-up comedy, like in a club?
Martin: Yeah, I played with that a little bit in California, but it’s just not as much fun. When I was doing The Associates, I would go down—Robin Williams was a friend of mine, and he was doing Mork & Mindy in the next studio and he would go down every Monday and join the Comedy Store players at the Comedy Store, and so I started doing that. It wasn’t the greatest improvisational atmosphere, because the Comedy Store is primarily for stand-up comics, so I would watch, and tried it a couple of times, but it was just not as much fun.