by Martin Short
The unsung heroes of SCTV were its hair, makeup, and costume people. Our head of makeup was Beverley Schechtman, whose constant refrain to me was “Give me the look”—meaning, show her the signature facial expression(s) of whichever character I was trying to formulate. So, for Jerry Lewis, I’d do a series of Jerry faces, and I’d have a robe on, to which Bev would tape photographs of the real Jerry while trying to achieve the ideal synthesis of what he looked like and what I was doing with my face. For Jackie Rogers Jr. I did my palsied, cockeyed Sammy Davis Jr. face, and Bev did her magic with makeup to bring out Jackie’s full albino grotesquerie. Our hair and wig designer, though that title barely covers the full extent of her gifts, was Judi Cooper-Sealy. She would not just hand me a wig but present me with five albino-white versions of Jackie’s hair—among them a Veronica Lake swoop, a Farrah Fawcett shag, and a pageboy—and I’d try them all on before deciding, “Judi, let’s go with the pageboy.”
Our costume designer was a man named Juul Haalmayer, who was almost like another comedy writer. I could say to him, “Jackie should be Vegas-y, but low Vegas-y, bordering on Reno,” and he’d intuitively get it, without any rigmarole. I’d show up the next day, and there on the costume rack would be the shimmery silver tunic and leggings: the Jackie look as horrified viewers would come to know it.
SCTV deliberately veered away from any comedy concept that seemed too obvious, e.g., a note-for-note parody of some current show like Three’s Company. Eugene and I, for example, did this routine in which we donned tuxedos and painted our teeth white to play Sandler and Young, a real-life nightclub singing duo (I was the Belgian-born Tony Sandler, and Eugene the American-born Ralph Young) who were a constant presence on TV specials in the 1960s and ’70s. Sandler and Young specialized in performing hopelessly dull, hopelessly square duets. Surely no human being in North America was clamoring for a parodic rendering of Sandler and Young, yet we plowed ahead, and it worked, regardless of whether the viewers had ever even heard of the act. (Sandler and Young were occasional guests on The Sammy Maudlin Show—Eugene singing “Feelin’ Groovy” in counterpoint to me singing “Alouette,” that sort of thing.)
Ed Grimley, my old Second City stage character, was someone I’d initially resisted bringing to television, because I thought he was just too weird even for SCTV. Well, that, and because he had by that point become a very intimate figure in my personal life—the character Nancy summoned to mediate our arguments, and whose face I sometimes pulled as I walked out of the shower, dripping wet and naked, just to get a laugh out of her. You know, you put together the concepts of “naked” and “marital aide” and “Ed” and you start to think, this is way too personal for anyone besides Marty and Nancy Short to see.
But there was a call at the end of the 1981–’82 season, before Rick and Dave left, for one-off low-budget pieces that could be shot quickly, against a wall, and I came up with the idea of Ed being a guest lecturer on “Sunrise Semester,” a recurring SCTV bit that parodied dull early-morning educational television. It was pretty simple: Ed talking about snakes—“The snake is a hypnotic thing, I must say . . .”—and then falling under the sway of a cobra with whom he comes face-to-face: “Yes, master . . .” No one was particularly taken with the piece in the writers’ room, but I filmed it anyway, barely having any idea what I was doing.
SCTV was filmed at Magder Studios in Toronto. The way it was laid out, the writing offices were upstairs, and you had to walk down the stairs and across the actual studio floor to get to the dressing rooms and hair-and-makeup area, as well as to the Italian restaurant on the ground floor that we all frequented. Dave Thomas was passing through the studio while I was filming Ed’s Sunrise Semester, and I showed him the playback, asking him how I could make the piece better. Dave regarded the screen for a moment and answered, “Just do it. Keep going. I have no idea what you’re doing, but I think you do.”
The lead producer of SCTV that season, Don Novello, best known as Father Guido Sarducci on Saturday Night Live, didn’t know what to make of the “Sunrise Semester” bit and didn’t slate it for an episode. That might have been the end of Ed right there. But the following season, a new producer, Pat Whitley, found the snake piece sitting on the shelf and thought it was hysterical. So Ed finally made it to network television on Friday, November 19, 1982, and, for reasons no one on this planet can fully explain, connected with viewers. Dave was right: I just had to keep going and trust that someone would find these dispatches from my odd little mind appealing.
From there, Ed became a regular, an actor who worked at the Second City Television Network, appearing with John in What Ever Happened to Baby Ed?, as a lovelorn dweeb in the Jerry Lewis–movie takeoff The Nutty Lab Assistant, and as the star of the after-school special The Fella Who Couldn’t Wait for Christmas: “This waiting is, like, making me mental, I must say. What time is it now? Aw, two oh four, this is a joke!”
Going home from work late one night, I picked up a copy of New York magazine to read on the subway. Leafing through its pages, I was flabbergasted to find an article by James Wolcott, the future Vanity Fair columnist, that was basically a two-page paean to me. “Short has brought to SCTV the elfin twinkle he had on The Associates,” Wolcott wrote, “but he’s also chipped in something novel and unanticipated—a brash, cavorting, crazy-legged kickiness.”
I’d learned long ago not to put much stock in reviews, but this was something different: an unsolicited love letter to what I personally had brought to SCTV. I can’t tell you how good it felt, how validating. Of my Jerry Lewis impression, Wolcott said that it played as “a pitilessly detailed piece of caricature,” but “when Short vamped with the orchestra, braving whiplash as he flung back his head in mad abandon, he reminded us of how much fun Jerry Lewis was in his bounding prime, when his anarchistic exuberance threatened to burst his seams.” Yes, exactly. I wasn’t above poking fun at Lewis, but I brought affection and a sense of tribute to my Lewis bits too. I considered them the performance equivalent of Al Hirschfeld’s pen-and-ink caricatures. Yes, you had to show the warts, but you also had to prove why the subject was worthy of your attention.
What SCTV was for me, I came to realize, was the culmination of all those routines I did as a child in the attic on Whitton Road—right down to the idea of an imaginary television network stocked with imaginary programming. The way I see it, you spend the first fifteen years of your life as a sponge, soaking up influences and experiences, and the remainder of your life recycling, regurgitating, and reprocessing those first fifteen years.
Ed Grimley owed a lot to the Harpo Marx routines I saw on TV in old Marx Brothers movies. Harpo was my favorite of the Marx Brothers. To me, his movements, facial expressions, and unpredictable sight gags (effortlessly positioning his thigh to hang from a lady’s arm, reaching deep into the folds of his trench coat to produce a full glass of water) were infinitely funnier than any punch-line-driven joke.
There was some Jerry Lewis in Ed, too. What I loved most about Lewis was his penchant for the absurd. There’s a lesser-known film in his canon, Three On a Couch, in which he has to pose as an experienced cowboy to impress a girl. When they go to a rodeo, she, trusting him to know what he’s doing, pushes him out into the ring when the emcee asks for volunteers. You don’t actually see what happens next. You see the rodeo audience’s impressed reaction turn into shock, and then the camera cuts back to the ring, where Lewis is lying on the ground with his arms and legs trussed up, the cow standing calmly beside him. In the best Lewis bits, as in the best Harpo bits, you can’t just sit there passively, waiting for a cue to laugh—you’re a participant in a ping-ponging comedic journey that ends up somewhere completely different from where you expected to be.
Jonathan Winters, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Dick Van Dyke—all were also huge influences. What they had in common was that their comedy was more about the character than the joke. That, and the fact that they were on television. My favorite TV show of them all was probably The Jack Paar
Program, the Friday-night variety show that Paar reemerged with from 1962 to 1965 after he had given up the nightly grind of The Tonight Show. (Another parallel between childhood and SCTV: the joy to be found on TV at the end of the week, when you got to stay up late.)
Among Paar’s regular guests were the comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, whose true gift, as with everyone I’ve mentioned above, was for layered, fully inhabited characters. I sat awed as I watched May, as a Jewish mother, place a phone call to her rocket-scientist son, played by Nichols, and via an unrelenting onslaught of guilt and manipulation, reduce him in five minutes from an annoyed, busy professional to a jabbering, infantilized toddler.
I’ve since gotten to know Mike, and he’s the one person, of all the many famous figures I’ve met, of whom I’m still in awe when I’m with him. I mean, I keep a vintage vinyl LP of the album An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May in my office as a kind of aspirational talisman—and yet I actually have Mike Nichols’s e-mail address! In fact, whenever I get an e-mail from Mike, I want to print it out and have it framed. He’s as funny in person as he was on TV in the 1960s, too. A few years ago David Geffen invited us both onto his spectacular yacht, the Rising Sun. As we sat down to dinner one night, I took in the sight of all David’s guests—each one famous and accomplished—and decided to initiate a game called “Who Has Met Whom?” Surely at least one member of this crowd had met just about any great twentieth-century figure you could think of. “Did anyone here ever meet Eleanor Roosevelt?” Warren Beatty responded, “Actually, I met Eleanor Roosevelt.” From the far end of the table, Mike called out, “Did you fuck her?”
SCTV was where I got to emulate these comedy heroes, to bring their influences to bear—often, ironically, in the service of playing delusional non-talents like Jackie Rogers Jr. or Irving Cohen. The name Jackie Rogers, by the way, was a borrowing from my TV-obsessed childhood: a stage name I thought up for myself in my teens, when “Martin Short” seemed too pedestrian. I was totally intent on becoming a doctor back then, but for the sake of dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s of my imaginary show-business career, I needed to have the stage name nailed down too.
I never wanted to leave SCTV, or for it to end. After the 1982–’83 season, Dick Ebersol approached me about joining the cast of Saturday Night Live, and I turned him down. For a moment this looked like a foolish decision; NBC dropped our show in the spring of ’83. But SCTV received a stay of execution when Cinemax, the premium cable network, stepped in to underwrite and air another season. By that time the show was down to a four-person cast, since the siren call of Hollywood had become too persuasive for John Candy, ever beloved and in demand, to ignore. Joe, Eugene, Andrea, and I banded together for the negotiations with Cinemax, and with the aid of expert management secured an absurdly lucrative deal—the biggest payday any of us had ever experienced.
There was another reason to stay with SCTV, besides the fact that it was the best job I’d ever had: Nancy and I were about to become parents, and we didn’t want to disrupt what had become a pretty perfect life in Toronto. We had struggled for a few years to get pregnant the usual way, with no luck. Then we tried in-vitro fertilization, and still no luck. Nancy was eventually diagnosed with endometriosis, in which the cells that form the uterus’s lining (the endometrium) also grow outside the uterus, where they’re not supposed to—a condition that, in some women, causes infertility. So we decided to pursue adoption, and in December of ’83 we welcomed into our home our first child, the most beautiful baby girl maybe ever. We named her Katherine Elizabeth. She was joined in ’86 and ’89 by, respectively, her dashing brothers Oliver Patrick and Henry Hayter.
By the good graces of Cinemax, Nancy and I enjoyed one last season of SCTV bliss, joined midway by little Katherine. My three castmates and I carried on happily for eighteen new forty-five-minute episodes, with guest appearances from John, Catherine, and Dave, our ranks occasionally augmented by such friends and Second City associates as John Hemphill, Valri Bromfield, Jayne Eastwood, Mary Charlotte Wilcox, and, as Ed Grimley’s love interest in the fairy-tale fantasia The Fella Who Was the Size of Someone’s Thumb, my own bride, Nancy.
As a now-confident core member of SCTV, I pulled off some work I’m truly proud of in that final season, even if hardly anyone saw it, since Cinemax was not as widely available as it is today. The weirdness of Jackie Rogers Jr. reached its apogee in Gimme Jackie—a send-up of the controversial Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, the one that depicted the concert at Altamont Speedway in which a spectator was killed by Hell’s Angels who had been hired as security. In our version, Jackie’s Australian manager (played by a visiting Dave Thomas) had hired fez-capped Shriners to be the security goons. Jackie promised an outdoor-concert experience that would be “about music, good weed, and some heavy-duty balling,” but his decision to open his set with the theme from The Love Boat incited a riot. In typically serpentine, nonsensical SCTV fashion, this eventually led to a scene in which Jackie had to submit to a lie-detector test administered by the attorney F. Lee Bailey (Eugene), where Jackie ended up admitting through tears that he was still a virgin.
SCTV folded its tent for good in the spring of 1984, with Ed making one last appearance in the network’s futile pledge drive, offering a copy of his new concept album, Did She Call?, to viewers who pledged $60 and up.
Once again, after the season had wrapped, Dick Ebersol called to see if I would join the cast of Saturday Night Live. This time I said yes.
INTERLUDE: A MOMENT WITH LAWRENCE ORBACH
Lawrence was one of the more unsung carryover characters to travel with me from SCTV to Saturday Night Live. He began his life as a simpleton I played in a sketch written by Eugene Levy called “Half-Wits”: a game show whose contestants were slow people. I’d been toying with the idea of a character who had never gotten his second teeth—his first teeth never fell out, so he was an adult with baby teeth. Bev Schechtman, SCTV’s endlessly inventive makeup wizard, would simply blacken the bottom halves of my upper teeth and the top halves of the lower teeth. It worked brilliantly. For Jackie Rogers Jr., Bev started painting my teeth white, giving them a cheesy bad-cap look. Years later I met Carol Burnett and told her about this trick, and she loved it. “How could I have been working in comedy all these years,” she said, “and no one told me about painting my teeth?”
So that was the beginning of the character, Lawrence Orbach. I wasn’t planning to go particularly broad with Lawrence’s appearance, because we’d received a request from hair and makeup to tone down the massive looks to spare SCTV’s exhausted staff. But one day I walked into the makeup room and saw this huge honker of a prosthetic nose sitting on one of the molds. “Who’s that for?” I said. Judi Cooper-Sealy, our hair and wig chief, responded, “Oh, it’s for Joe. He’s gonna wear that in ‘Half-Wits.’”
Well, that did it. If I’m competing with that nose, I thought, I’ve got to amp it up. It had always made me laugh, in a sad kind of way, when I’d see guys in their late twenties going prematurely bald. So as Lawrence I would wear a bald pate covered by a receding hairline. I also requested pockmarked skin, just to add a certain je ne sais quoi. As for Lawrence’s demeanor, I knew a TV writer who had a nervous, slightly mouth-breathing way of talking—I’m leaving him nameless because he’s actually handsome, successful, and not a moron—that I borrowed for Lawrence.
Lawrence gained his greatest fame in the very first episode of Saturday Night Live I did, appearing in a pretaped segment with Harry Shearer in a sketch about two brothers going for the gold in the Summer Olympics.
HARRY: My brother and I know it’s not going to be easy. Men have never done synchronized swimming in a sanctioned competition in this country. Officially it’s got, like, zero acceptance.
LAWRENCE: I don’t swim.
HARRY: My brother doesn’t swim. So no one is going to walk up and hand us a gold medal, especially since men’s synchro isn’t even in the Olympics . . . yet.
LAWRENCE: But that’s okay, because we could use the time. ’Cause I’m not that strong a swimmer.
* * *
LAWRENCE ORBACH
High-lo. I am talking into a recorder that is inside my portable telephone. It is my understanding that this will be transcribed.
Although I have a strong command of the English language, I can neither read nor write. So words like transcribed are such a mystery to me.
My morning glass of milk comes from cats.
Even though I’m in my mid-twenties, I’m having some degree of difficulty getting through high school. But I’ll do it, because I have certain goals in life I feel compelled to achieve. One of which is becoming a circuit court judge, and the other is to perhaps play professional hockey.
* * *
FAST TIMES AT 30 ROCK
I wish I’d enjoyed Saturday Night Live more. I wish I hadn’t felt so perpetually under pressure when I worked there. But I think that’s just what the show does to some people. I certainly knew that I was at a pivotal moment in my career, and that if I made this SNL thing work, it would open doors for me that would have otherwise remained closed.
And don’t get me wrong—I really enjoy the show now. I’ve been back to host three times, I’m friendly with roughly 90 percent of everyone who’s ever worked there, and I’ve kissed Lorne Michaels on the mouth on national television. But my one season in the cast of SNL was a roller coaster of elation and anxiety. With thirty years’ perspective, I now recognize that I should have allowed myself to step back for a moment and simply exult in the privilege of doing that show.
I had trepidation about SNL from the moment I told Dick Ebersol that I was in. (As a reminder, Dick, not Lorne, was the executive producer of the show in 1984.) I’d had as perfect a life-work setup imaginable on SCTV, and whatever followed was going to have a hard time topping that experience. To complicate matters further, Nancy and I rented a house in Pacific Palisades right after SCTV wrapped its final season, and I found myself falling in love with the California way of life; I couldn’t get over the rush of seeing the ocean on my left as I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway. I put off the decision to join SNL for as long as possible, sitting outdoors in the sunny Palisades with a notepad, listing the pros and cons of doing the show.