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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Martin Short
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September 17 - October 1, 2024
Part of my trepidation about improvisational comedy was that I thought I would have to come up with funny lines all the time, on the spot. What I discovered, through Ed, was that I simply needed to commit: to not worry about jokes. The reaction seemed to get the biggest laughs, not the action. I didn’t need to be a stand-up comedian delivering punch lines. If I just sincerely devoted myself to Ed’s panic with every fiber of my being, the audience would commit to him.
“Oh, I’ve heard of you,” said Bill Murray the first time I met him, when he came up to Toronto from Chicago in one of Second City’s occasional talent swaps between the two branches. “I hear you’re known,” he said in that deadpan of his, “as Mr. Entertainment.”
The gents of our group were standing elbow-to-elbow in our tuxedos: Steve, me, Tom Hanks, Frank Oz, and, to lower the median age a tad, Judd Apatow and Bill Hader. We must have looked uncommonly smart, for the director Nancy Meyers, who was snapping photos of us with her iPhone, kept telling us, “You look just like that picture!” The picture to which she was alluding is the famous “Kings of Hollywood” shot taken by the great photographer Slim Aarons on New Year’s Eve, 1957: Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart gathered together at the restaurant Romanoff’s, all of them in
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Outside my attic walls, the hip sentiment was the Who’s “Hope I die before I get old.” Me? I was hoping I’d get old before I turned seventeen.
Dad was smart, funny, and, as you might have surmised, witheringly sarcastic. His bluntness and condescending wit were hysterical as long as you yourself weren’t bearing the brunt. Years later, when I was playing the celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick on TV, I’d watch the playback of my totally improvised scenes—things like Jiminy telling Conan O’Brien, “Look at how wonderful you look; whatever cosmetic surgery you’ve had done, I’d say twenty percent more and then stop,” or asking Mel Brooks, “What’s your big beef with the Nazis?”—and think, where on earth did that instinct come from? Oh,
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Yet in the days and weeks after David died, well-meaning family friends and members of the clergy constantly advised me that “God works in mysterious ways, and you can’t understand the will of the Lord.” This sentence not only failed to reassure me, it angered me. Yeah, well, God also created my mind, which is questioning everything, including His will, so your theory doesn’t hold.
I learned what would turn out to be a valuable lesson: that something terrible can happen to you, and yet, the day after this something terrible, the sun still rises, and life goes on. And therefore, so must you.
You tink you’re in pain? Last night my doctor had to give me a prescription for urine softener.
We saw Sammy Davis Jr. in the Broadway musical Golden Boy. Sammy broke up during the show, momentarily losing himself in laughter—something that apparently wasn’t in the script—and he actually came out onstage after the final curtain call to rap with us all and make amends. Cigarette in hand, he said, “I feel like I’m cheatin’ the audience, man. Let me just explain something to you cats, if I may, about what transpired . . .” (You can see how this experience might have had some bearing on some characters in my later television career.)
Her congenital happiness, her cheerful approach to life, informed the way our entire family operated.
When you’re met with fire early, you develop a certain Teflon quality.
My big song was “We Beseech Thee,” what I would learn is known in theater as the eleven o’clock number—a showstopper that occurs late in the second act.
Years later Steve Martin and I had a discussion about how exhilarating that first season of SNL was, even to those of us who were mere spectators. Steve was living in Aspen at the time, and when he saw those first few episodes, his reaction was, “They’ve done it. They did what was out there, what we all had in our heads, this new kind of comedy.” Meaning that someone (Lorne Michaels) had finally worked out a way to channel our comedy generation’s loose, weirdo, hairy, nontraditional bent—Belushi’s manic energy, Aykroyd’s subversiveness, Chevy’s smart-ass leading-man thing, Gilda’s woman-child
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Gilda’s cancer had indeed returned, and she passed away in 1989, when she was only forty-two. I found out through Steve Martin, who phoned me with the bad news in the morning. It was a Saturday, and he was hosting SNL that night. On the show, Steve abandoned his planned monologue and introduced an old clip: a wordless, poignantly funny sketch that he and Gilda had done on the show in 1978, in which they spotted each other across a crowded room at a disco and launched into an MGM-style dance routine, to the tune of “Dancing in the Dark” from the Fred Astaire–Cyd Charisse musical The Band Wagon.
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Recognizing that prolonged periods of unemployment are part of an actor’s lot, I devised a rigorous self-evaluation system that I call the Nine Categories.
I decided to systematically compare my performance in that one specific category of my life—work—with my performance in the other important life categories, and to give them all equal importance. My mind has always worked systematically to begin with. For example, I still operate according to the school-year calendar, where September heralds a new start and May/June the conclusion of another grade; as I write this, in the spring of 2014, I am finishing up what I think of as Grade 59.
CATEGORY 1: SELF The logical starting point. Without a highly functioning self, nothing else works.
Whether you’re Christian, Jewish, or . . . you know . . . help me out here—Who are those crazy people constantly blowing things up for no reason? Americans!
he was the type of guy who, if I had pitched him as a character at Saturday Night Live, anyone in the room would have said, “Too broad; divide by three.”
Don’t telegraph, don’t oversell—that was how you created an absurd yet three-dimensional character.
As anyone who has seen a reel of my work will attest, I’m also not afraid to explore the world of “Going Big.” But even this world has to be rooted to some extent in reality.
one of my most cherished showbiz philosophies, “More is more.”
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.
dress shirts worn with the top button buttoned—what scholars of ’80s fashion call the “air tie.”
The most poignant thing about Nick during Three Fugitives was that he set a bedtime for himself of 8:00 p.m. I found this astonishing. “When do you get up?” I asked. “Around three thirty in the morning,” he said. “And what do you do at that hour, Nick?” “I take a long bath.” “And then what?” “Well, I try to read, but I get kinda tired.” “So why do you go to bed at eight, then, Nick?” “To avoid those dangerous hours, buddy.”
Sammy was a magnanimous host and tour guide, leading us around while clutching an unlit cigarette in one hand and an empty cognac glass in the other. He explained to us that the cigs and booze had been his traditional rewards after a performance, but that he needed to avoid them now. “But the props still make me feel comfortable, man,” he said.
Nancy was also aware that I, more than she, am susceptible to that condition sometimes ascribed to actors known as neediness. I was driving once, late at night on a quiet road, and the solitude and darkness sent me into a torrent of thought about how small we are in the infinite scheme of the cosmos, how fleeting our time is, and how mortal we are. I started contemplating the fact that someday I will die and be no more. I started thinking of the sadness that would overcome my family and friends at the news of my death. And I actually started tearing up. When I got home, I reported this
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The big takeaway from this for me was that, while such troughs of despair as I’d experienced in the summer of ’97 were valid and important, and maybe even necessary, they did not need to be repeated. That lakeside moment of reckoning and anxiety would only be valuable to me if it was instructive—if I squeezed every bit of wisdom out of it so that I would not repeat it.
What I’d learned—and the lesson seemed to stick this time—was that I could and would survive quite handsomely in show business because I had the versatility to just keep moving. You don’t want me in movies? Fine, I’ll do TV. You don’t want me in TV? Fine, I’ll do theater.
I think we all remember where we were when the Queen had Diana killed.
Aren’t you in wonderful shape, for someone who’s let himself go? And whatever cosmetic surgery you’ve had, I’d say twenty percent more and then I’d stop!
as Nora Ephron, a true student of the gossip’s nature, told her, “You tell one, you tell twenty.”
when Marc and Scott arrived at our place, and Nancy, a serious look on her face, told them, “We have to talk,” Marc was braced for a stern lecture. Marc’s joke is that he was so relieved that Nancy wasn’t angry with him and Scott that he said, “Cancer? Oh, thank god! I was afraid you were mad at me!”
“Henry, I know it seems unimaginable, but you are being empowered tonight,” I told him. “You are being given something that is horrible, but is also a life lesson. This will make you stronger. This will make you more determined. You’ll be in your office somewhere, someday, and some pompous asshole will say something to you. And you’ll supposedly be upset, and you’ll supposedly be fearful of your boss’s reaction. But then you’ll think, ‘This is gravy. This is fine. I couldn’t care less about this prick. I’m not upset now. I was upset the night my mother died.’”
At one point Mel Brooks phoned me. He had lost his wife, Anne Bancroft, five years earlier, and he gave me what he felt was the most important advice he could impart: “Don’t go out with any fucking couples. They’ll just piss you off.”
Mike Nichols also called, urging me to “just keep the conversation going.” This was valuable wisdom, because the constant banter I maintained with Nancy was like oxygen to me, and to suddenly no longer have it in my life seemed incomprehensible—and, in bad moments, suffocating.
We were, as a couple, like a big 747 jet plane, powered by two engines. But now one engine is out. Nevertheless, the plane is still filled with passengers, and there’s a lot of responsibility, a lot of lives still to influence. So the plane must continue to fly with one engine. It travels onward, but with a bit more effort and struggle, and with no time to flirt with the stewardess or get a coffee.
To the crowd, Jiminy said, “There are very few people as pale as Steve who actually have a heartbeat. He looks like a coloring book that hasn’t been colored in yet. He once got a sunburn from his Kindle reader.”
As Deb Divine said after Nora died, “I think it’s getting more interesting on the other side.”
Nora’s sister Delia good-naturedly claimed authorship of a brilliant line I attributed to Nora, “Hazelnuts are what’s wrong with Europe”),
Rob’s sister Kathleen heard that they were attending, and quickly sent Nora an e-mail asking her if she would go onstage and read a letter from Mayor Bloomberg. Nora’s e-mailed response was, “Oh, Kathleen . . . How could I ever say no to you—and yet I have.”
My natural tendency, no matter what difficult period I’m going through or have been through, is to be happy.
Scott Wittman likes to joke that, of all the comedy people he knows, and he knows many, I am “the only one who’s truly laughing on the inside.”
tough experiences Teflon-coat you and strengthen you against further adversity. This lesson is, I suppose, a major reason I wrote this book: because along the way I’ve picked up the wisdom that bad things happen, and yet the sun still comes up the next day, and it’s up to you to carry on living your life and keeping your setbacks in perspective. You also have to understand that on some level, these horrible and sad things happen to everyone; the mark of a man is not just how he survives it all but also what wisdom he’s gained from the experience.
The guest spots I do unfold loosely, but not without careful preparation—I always send ahead pages upon pages of material, their gist being, “What if the host asked me this? Might that be a rich, fruitful area where the two of us will find common ground and have a good TV moment?”
for me, it’s very tricky to separate the idea of moving on from the act of forgetting, of closing the chapter on something.
After Nancy died, I read a 1910 sermon by the Oxford theologian Henry Scott Holland that has evolved over time into a funeral prayer. It begins: Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Everything remains as it was. The old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no sorrow in your tone. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
your entire life: “between the forceps and the stone,” as Joni Mitchell once put it.
