WILD & CRAZY
On the eve of their new live comedy tour, STEVE MARTIN and MARTIN SHORT talk dirty Scrabble, who’s the biggest jokester and other secrets of their three-decade friendship.
Steve Martin feels a draft. “I’m kind of deciding what to do about it,” he muses aloud. He trades places with his comedy partner Martin Short on the couch. Nope, no good. “Sit on the chair,” Short orders in mock exasperation, pointing. “Then go out the door and close it behind you.”
Their close friends have been familiar with Martin and Short’s quippy, witty, friendlyfire banter for ages. But during the past seven years, the consummate entertainers and dear friends of 35 years have taken their act on the road for live audiences all over the country. The performance—which combines both showmen’s comedic as well as musical talents—also spawned the Emmynominated 2018 Netflix special Steve Martin & Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life.
The 2018 tour was so successful, they’re doing it again, with fresh material atop more of their greatest hits. The 2019 Now You See Them, Soon You Won’t Tour just hit the road.
“We absolutely love doing it and we want the audience to say that this was one of the best shows they’ve ever seen,” says Martin, 73, clearly not joking.
FRIENDSHIP IS BORN
Their professional relationship dates back to 1985, when they filmed the comedy Western
¡Three Amigos! (1986). Though they had never met before, there was a Saturday Night Live connection—Martin had guest-hosted several times in the 1970s; Short was a cast member in the 1984–85 season.
“When you’re making movies, you’re in this intense world for two and a half months and often never see each other again,” says Short, 68. “In this case, I made a conscious decision that, no, I didn’t want to lose this guy.” By his count, they’ve shared roughly 850,000 dinners, uncountable laughs—and one particularly memorable game of Scrabble. (Short slipped Martin a hilarious, desperate note that mentioned his wife and what he was willing to do “for a Q or an E,” recalls Martin.) There have been family vacations together and quality time in Short’s cottage in Canada with his three kids and his actress wife, Nancy Dolman (who died of ovarian cancer in 2010). They co-starred in two more hit movies together, 1991’s Father of the
Bride and its 1995 sequel. Their big comedy show-on-theroad was hatched after Martin and Short closed the Just for Laughs Festival in Chicago in 2011. Short, in fact, was already touring with a successful one-man show. Martin was playing bluegrass, recording and performing, but admits his act didn’t have anywhere near “the polish” of Short’s show. So they teamed up.
ROWING UP FUNNY
Their backgrounds are a study in contrast. Martin, the son of a housewife and a taciturn real-estate
salesman/aspiring actor, moved from Waco, Texas, to Southern California when he was a kid. As a youngster, he found his escape by listening to and watching comedy acts such as Laurel and Hardy. “I was not born funny, but I was born to love comedy,” he says. His first job was selling guidebooks at nearby Disneyland, then working at Merlin’s Magic Shop. Soon after he moved out at age 18, he did four comedy shows a day for $2 a pop at Knott’s Berry Farm in L.A. “I had the experience of learning how to fix jokes and change things that didn’t work,” he says. “I wouldn’t call it encouragement, but I was learning.” In time, his five-minute show morphed into a legendary stand-up comedy act. Wearing a white suit to better stand out onstage, he used his physicality and brazenly glib attitude to craft characters from King Tut to the zany “Wild and Crazy Guy” with a prop arrow through his head. His 1977 comedy album, Let’s Get Small, sold more than 1 million copies. At the height of his stand-up career in the early 1980s, he played to sold-out crowds who screamed for him like a rock star. Short, meanwhile, grew up the youngest of five siblings in the suburbs of Hamilton, Ontario. “Everyone was funny,” he says. He had grand plans to be a doctor, but while a senior at McMaster University in 1972, he landed a role in a local production of Godspell with other future comedy stars Gilda Radner and Andrea Martin, actor Victor Gerber and Paul Shaffer, who’d become David Letterman’s band leader. Soon he was in the improv group SCTV, which led to the cult-hit Canadian comedy series SCTV, which led to Saturday Night Live. In the 1980s and 1990s, the two both made the switch to films.
ESSONS LEARNED
Today, Martin talks about his movie career in the past tense. “I lost interest in movies at exactly the same time that movies lost interest in me,” he says. His last live-action role was alongside Jack Black and Owen Wilson in the 2011 comedy The Big Year . “If I were going to do movies the same way I used to do movies, I was the star. And now there are new stars. I don’t want to do cameos.”
Short notes that he turned down the Jeff Daniels role in 1994’s Dumb and Dumber. “They were really offering lots of money, but I couldn’t get through the script,” he explains. “Not because I didn’t think it was funny, but it was grosser than anything I had ever done. It wasn’t my cup of tea.”
For Martin, breaking from movies also means spending more time at his New York City home with his wife of 11 years, writer Anne Stringfield, and their 6-yearold daughter (he prefers to keep her, and her name, out of the spotlight). “I have a child and doing a movie represents three months somewhere,” he says. “Even doing
a week on a movie is a minimum 12-hours-a-day job, so you never see your family.”
Short is the father of three: Katherine, 35, Oliver, 32, and Henry, 29. “Oliver is an associate producer at NBC Sports, but that’s as close as the kids get to being in front of the camera,” he says with relief. “Just because [success] happened to someone’s parents doesn’t mean it can happen to the kids. Success in this business can be a fluke.”
But achieving four decades of accolades and laughs is a crowning achievement in itself. “Getting older, I believe you become plenty wiser about everything in life,” Short says. “You learn not to take it so seriously.”
They’re both serious about one thing: They love making people laugh together in their show.
“Whatever the travel effort is, whatever the complications are, it’s a small price to pay to be able to do it,” Martin says.
And they promise audiences will be entertained—by jokes, music and two nattily dressed funnymen. But no political humor—that’s too divisive, says Martin. “It’s not interesting to make the audience cheer or boo—except at Marty.”
His partner agrees. “That goes without saying,” quips Short.