Two amigos saddle up one more time

Ahead of their eagerly awaited show at the 3 Arena next March, gods of comedy Steve Martin and Martin Short talk exclusively to Barry Egan about Trump, Seinfeld, darkness and the Bothy Band

Steve Martin’s 2007 memoir Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life isn’t a funny read. I would recommend it as required reading for anyone choosing psychoanalysis as a career path.

“When I moved out of the house at 18,” Steve writes, “I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

“He writes his own material,” his mother Mary Lee said of Steve in an interview. “I’m always telling him he needs a new writer.” His father Glenn was far more complex.

“Saturday Night Live is the most horrible thing on television,” Glenn wrote in his newsletter for the Newport Beach Association of Realtors, of which he was president, when his son made his star-turn on the iconic US show in the late 1970s.

“His performance did nothing to further his career.” In a May, 2016 interview with Howard Stern on his radio show, Steve talked about his father as being emotionally unavailable adding that: “I didn’t understand that there was an alternative lifestyle, that other people were raised in very happy homes.” Just before he died, Glenn said to his son (who was sitting on the edge of the bed) that he was ready to die but that he “wished he could cry”. When Steve asked him what did he want to cry about, Steve says he was forever grateful that he asked his father the question because of the reply he received: “For all the love I received but couldn’t return.”

Steve Martin, who has a sister Melinda, was born on August 14, 1945 in Waco, Texas; the family moved to California when he was still young.

Martin Short, born March 26, 1950, the youngest of five kids, grew up in Ontario, Canada.

“Being the youngest, I had more confidence because I was constantly told I was perfect.” Martin Short’s adolescence was not perfect. When he was 12, his eldest brother David was killed in a car accident; when he was 17 his mother Olive died of cancer; at 19, his father Charles — an Irish Catholic emigrant who hailed from Crossmaglen, South Armagh — died from a stroke. In 2010, Short’s wife of 30 years, Nancy Dolman died of cancer. So, talking to Steve Martin and Martin Short — two of the funniest men ever to walk onstage and who are bringing their internationally feted comedy show, The Funniest Show In Town At The Moment , to the 3 Arena in Dublin on March 11 next year — is an experience in itself as both of them bring so much stuff to the table.

Asked by GQ magazine last year about qualities they envy in each other, Steve Martin had this to say: “Marty is extremely comfortable in almost any situation, and I’m extremely uncomfortable in almost any situation.”

Getting to fling questions at two actual gods of comedy was the complete opposite of extremely uncomfortable, as it turned out. When I am introduced, they are full of their own brand of joie de vivre that, out of nervousness, I say: hopefully I won’t ruin their mood with my questions.

“Don’t worry,” laughs Steve Martin. “We are already so depressed that it won’t matter!” What is the biggest misconception about them? Steve: “That I’m nice! I really just care what Marty, my wife [Anne Stringfield] and my child [he prefers to keep her out of the spotlight] think of me.”

They became friends over three decades ago when they co-starred, opposite Chevy Chase, in the movie ¡Three Amigos! “We laugh a lot and we especially like to gossip,” says Marty who is the father of three grown-up children: Katherine, Oliver, and Henry.

“We have a lot in common,” says Steve. “But you can’t put your finger on it. I guess our demeanour is the same. We are both very easy going.”

When did Steve and Marty realise they were funny?

“When I was younger,” says Steve, “I was the one doing most of the laughing. I was laughing my head off — at myself! I don’t know if other people were laughing. But there was a big transition from being a funny person into being a comedian. It is a huge leap.”

I ask them how they look back on their childhoods?

Steve: “Go ahead, Marty!” So Marty does. “I don’t look back on myself. I don’t feel I have changed. I feel it’s a continuation of just being me. I don’t look back on myself and say: ‘Who was that? Who was he?’ I can totally relate. I don’t know, I had a very happy childhood. And that happiness permeated my life, I guess. I had a very funny family.”

I say that there are two types of funny: funny ha ha; and funny peculiar. Steve laughs. “When I was doing movies,” says the star of The Jerk [1979], Planes, Trains and Automobiles [1987], among many others, “I was trying to do something funny ha ha out of something funny peculiar. I think something funny peculiar is what you laugh about three days later when you are thinking back on it. We try to do both, I’d say.”

I ask them to describe the comedy they do. “That’s a good question,” says Steve. “This may sound like I’m criticising but I’m not — ‘It goes down easy.’ But that is a quality I admire in, say, Jerry Seinfeld or John Mulaney. The comedy goes down easy.”

I tell them Jerry Seinfeld told me in an interview once that darkness is another thing of essentially no value in comedy: “There’s funny. There’s not funny.” “I would say that is true for what we do,” says Steve. “I mean, we do some dark stuff. We read each other’s eulogies on stage. But... we just think of it as funny.”

How would they describe each other? “I would say Steve is a very kind, sweet fella. He is also very funny, very brilliant. He is always creating and always... not driven, but really intrigued by the creation of something, and filled with enthusiasm about solving the creation of that, be it a joke or a card trick. He is endlessly fascinating.”

Pipes up Steve, laughing: “I would describe Marty as a 69-year-old man.” Marty, laughing: “Thank you for the detail, for the scrutiny!” Steve (74) clarifies his position: “No, actually — here’s how I would describe Marty. If you are going to throw a dinner party next week, you invite some people. And you invite Marty. Then you get the word back that Marty can’t come. So, you cancel the dinner party.” They both laugh.

Has that actually happened to Steve? “I don’t know whether I have actually done it but it is what I think,” says Steve. “Which means,” adds Marty, “it is not true!”

Is it difficult to make or take a joke in America at the moment given who is leading America? Marty: “I know very few people who will say, ‘What a fantastic guy he is.’ So everyone is in the same boat on the fella [Trump].” Is it too obvious to make jokes about him? Marty: “No.

He is a walking joke. There is always something. What does he mean in this policy? Oh, I forgot he is wearing orange make-up.”

Steve: “I’d say that all our friends are left [wing]. So we are never really sitting at an uncomfortable dinner table. So, we’re all comedians having fun. It doesn’t affect us.”

Marty: “I think this president has broken down the lines of right and left. Right now, the Democrats want to impeach him and the Republicans secretly want to impeach him. He is dying to get back to Mar-a-Lago [in Palm Beach, Florida].”

As for this country — apropos of their show at 3 Arena — Steve says he has “a great affection for Ireland because early on, I fell in love with Irish music. Just the ...? What do they call it? The Spanish have a word for it? Duende? The Irish have that, and I am part Irish. I don’t know how much. But I have always gravitated towards Irish music. My own music is heavily influenced by Irish music. I love Ireland. Marty and I once did a tour of Ireland. It was so much fun. I had never been, so my eyes were wide open.”

“I grew up in a very Irish household,”says Marty. “My father was from Crossmaglen in Armagh. So that was a big influence in our family.” Did his dad tell him about the Troubles? “We would go back during the Troubles... Short’s bar is still there. It is still part of the family.”

I ask Steve about his musical side, which is part of the show.

“I play the five string banjo. So I am partial to blue-grass and the folk music that surrounds it. I also fell in love with Irish music, like the Bothy Band, Planxty, Sean Keane... I toured Ireland in my 20s and I bought hundreds of Irish music compilations from outdoor marts. Father Sydney MacEwan! The Raggle Taggle Gypsio!” sings Steve. It’s the last word he gets in. Then they’re gone. Dirty rotten soundrels.

‘My own music is heavily influenced by Irish music. I love Ireland’