Comedy legends’ new tour kicks off its 2019 leg on January 12

Steve Martin and Martin Short are back on the road again for their new tour Now You See Them, Soon You Won’t. The two comedy legends spoke recently about the tour, which kicks off its 2019 leg on January 12 in Atlanta, their friendship and when they knew that roasting each other was OK.

Is mostly new material?

Martin: A lot of it is. It’s very hard for us to judge what is new because a lot of it is new but it’s in the same framework. What we tried to do is salvage or keep what we suspected the audience wanted to see again, but we try to replace lines and do it a little different. But if somebody saw the show, they’d say ‘that’s mostly a new show!’

What is your process for determining what to cut and add?

Martin: It’s really tri... well, I should let Marty talk.

Short: Go ahead, Steve, I’m just doing something else.

Martin: OK. It’s trial and error. We work with writers, we work on our own and we put things in, we take things out, and every night after the show we walk off stage and we go, ‘What should we do, how should we fix that, should we move that line up to the front?’