I spent twenty-one months with Second City Toronto, improvising throughout. We did all our shows in a handsome redbrick Victorian building known as the Old Fire Hall, which had the main theater downstairs and a restaurant upstairs. On Fridays and Saturdays we’d have dinner in the restaurant between the two shows, right alongside the customers we’d be performing for. Their presence didn’t restrain us from drinking and carousing and in general having a great, noisy, swear-y time in each other’s company. I think it was at one of these dinners in the summer of 1978 that I, overcome by our collective good fortune, turned to one of my castmates, Steven Kampmann, and declared, “Look at us. We’re eating steak for dinner. We’re twenty-eight years old. We’re a hit. The house is full for every show. This is as good as life can ever get.”
My experience at Second City was tremendously important in helping me develop a unique (some would say “off”) comedic voice. What we all learned at Second City was to trust the concept that our comedy wasn’t about jokes. Rather, it was about situations and characters—the peculiar moments that we encounter in life, the peculiar people that we meet, and how we (and they) react to these moments and meetings.
I think this approach was particularly Canadian, and especially emphasized in Toronto. While Second City Chicago’s comedy was often more pointedly topical and satirical, Second City Toronto’s material tended to be more character-based and just plain strange. Canada is a sparsely populated nation, a mere 34 million people across a vast expanse of land. Consequently, as you grow up there, you encounter more weirdos who have been given a wider berth to stew in their weirdness and become gloriously eccentric. These are precisely the kinds of folks who served as our comic muses in Toronto. On top of this, the performers in Second City Toronto were a particularly nice, un-mean group, so the characterizations were sweet and empathetic rather than cruel; an oddball as played by Catherine O’Hara or John Candy was an unusually agreeable oddball.
Soaking up all this influence, I began obsessively studying the sorts of odd people to whom I hadn’t previously paid much attention. There was a guy named Marion who worked behind the counter at my dry cleaner. I became fascinated by him. I was never quite sure if he had a bad hair weave or just really bad genetic luck, but his coiffure resembled something you’d chase out of your garden in the early morning as you were picking up your newspaper. With his madras clamdiggers and midriff tees, cut high to showcase his utter lack of abdominals, 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.” But Marion wasn’t a character on SNL, nor was he trying to be funny. And yet, as he earnestly tried to explain why the shop had failed to remove the ink stain from my shirt, he was utterly priceless: “Mr. Shorm, I tried to get dat ink stain from yer outerwear, I did. But dat fucker didn’t want to come out from where it had made a home, it didn’t.”
As broad as Marion was as a character, his pure sincerity made him totally believable. (Which was good, given that he was a real person.) The innocence with which he inhabited his eccentricities struck me. Don’t telegraph, don’t oversell—that was how you created an absurd yet three-dimensional character.
Now don’t get me wrong. 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. As a child, my parents took me to something called the Canadian National Exhibition, an old-fashioned summertime expo that featured everything from amusement-park rides to reputable nightclub headliners. My favorite part of the exhibition, though, was the freak show. We’d go into a tent and pay our quarter to see such memorable acts as Schlitzy the Pea Head (take your right hand, form a fist, and that was Schlitzy’s head); Spike Boy (a temperamental fifty-six-year-old guy who belligerently told the audience, “I can’t work with all this talking! May I have a little respect for my craft?”—and then shoved a two-foot-long spike up his nose); and my personal favorite, No-Middle Myrtle, whose measurements were 37-0-36. There was also Bones the Defensive Fat Man, who upbraided the audience by shouting, “What’re you lookin’ at?” These folks proved to be the underpinning of one of my most cherished showbiz philosophies, “More is more.”
Nancy and I had become homeowners in my Second City period, with a lovely house on Indian Road in the High Park section of Toronto. Provincial Canadian celebrity was ours for the taking: a lifetime of contentment doing husband-and-wife shows like Love Letters and The Gin Game in summer stock. Perhaps I could even become a spokesman for Tim Hortons! All damned tempting. But in my heart, I knew I wanted more. The reality at that time—and it’s different now—was that there was a low ceiling to Canadian show business. Really low. A Munchkin would have had to crouch.
Nancy and I were determined to try our luck out on the West Coast while we were still young. And we both did pretty well, considering. I landed a part in a pilot very quickly, for a sitcom called The Associates. This was 1979. The show was about a group of young lawyers who are new hires at a prestigious white-shoe firm in New York City. Its creator was James L. Brooks, the man behind The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant, and Taxi. Actually, it was better than a pilot. Jim Brooks’s track record was so good that ABC let us film thirteen episodes, half a season’s worth, all at once, sight unseen. An unheard-of deal. Nancy, who had always found steady work as an actress and jingle singer in Toronto, saw her good fortune continue in Los Angeles, quickly getting signed to a holding deal at CBS, which would culminate in a pilot the following year.
The Associates was a joy to do, with great writing and a great cast, including Alley Mills, later the mom on The Wonder Years, Joe Regalbuto, later of Murphy Brown, and, as our boss, the wonderful British character actor Wilfrid Hyde-White. (He played Pickering in the movie version of My Fair Lady, singing “The Rain in Spain” with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.) Nancy and I rented a furnished house in the Hollywood Hills with views of the Valley. Our first night, we stood there giddily, looking at all the twinkling lights below, while the sound of two gay men arguing—one saying spitefully to the other, “Randy, everything I do is wrong! Everything!”—echoed through the canyon.
Ahhh, I thought. Canyon views, same-sex domestic spats, and the smell of jacaranda trees in bloom. I could get used to this. Even the Dobermans that got loose from the house down the street and scared the shit out of us were kind of exciting, because they were Bill Shatner’s Dobermans.
You can probably figure out, since you’ve never heard of The Associates, that it didn’t become the massive hit we all assumed it would be. It was actually a pretty good show, worthy of the Brooks pedigree, and it won positive advance reviews in Variety and other publications. But the show just didn’t take with viewers. It was pulled from ABC’s lineup after four episodes. While it got a second shot in the spring of 1980, with five more episodes airing, no one particularly wanted to be associated with The Associates anymore, and off it went.
Still, I forged onward in L.A., undaunted. I was growing to love the place. Wilfrid Hyde-White, an endless font of show-business lore who had worked with everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Marilyn Mon-roe, as he pronounced her name, was nominated for a Golden Globe award—as was The Associates itself—so Nancy and I got to attend our first L.A. awards show. On top of that, Robin Williams, who was on fire at the time with Mork & Mindy, asked me to accept his award for him, since he couldn’t make the ceremony. I’d gotten to know Robin a bit from doing work on the side at the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, in an ad hoc group that he and I occasionally joined called the Comedy Store Players. Robin was staggeringly fast on his feet onstage and a truly considerate guy. His trick, when he wasn’t sure of your name, was to address you as “Doctor”: “Hell-o, Doctor! What’s goin’ on, Doctor? Ha-ha!”
That first Golden Globes was a dazzling affair for the likes of little Marty and Nancy Short from Ontario. We shared a table with Marilu Henner and her date for the night, John Travolta. We met Dustin Hoffman after his win for his performance in Kramer vs. Kramer. At one point I went up to Al Pacino, of whom I was a huge fan, and babbled on endlessly about what his work meant to me, and how every Al Pacino film is a master class in acting, and so forth. When I finally took a breath, he looked at me quizzically for a moment and said, “I ordered a vodka about twenty minutes ago. Can you find out what happened to that?” To be fair, Al was thirsty, and I did look like a kid waiter!
The following TV season, 1980–’81, Nancy was cast in Soap, the hit nighttime soap-opera parody that was pretty daring for the time; Billy Crystal was in it as Jodie Dallas, one of the first regular gay characters on television. Nancy’s character, Annie, was the second wife of one of Soap’s two patriarchs, Chester Tate, a WASP twit expertly played by Robert Mandan. I, meanwhile, was cast in I’m a Big Girl Now, a sitcom vehicle for Diana Canova, one of Soap’s young breakout stars. Both shows were on ABC and had been created by Witt/Thomas/Harris, a highly successful production team, so it felt like we were being well taken care of by the industry.
Well, it seemed that way until we encountered a slight hiccup: in July 1980, our union, the Screen Actors Guild, went on strike, temporarily halting production of our shows and every other scripted network TV program. Nancy and I figured that since we were stuck in a holding pattern, we might as well fly back to Toronto and resume living in our beloved house on Indian Road until the situation resolved itself. I arranged to return to Second City Toronto for an open-ended engagement as a member of the cast.
Shortly before we left L.A., I ran into Robin Williams at a party. He asked me, “What will you do during the strike?” I told him of my Second City plan. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he said, “Can I come and visit? Perhaps do a set or two?” I said absolutely, never expecting him to act upon my encouragement.
Cut to August. It was night, I was onstage performing, and who comes bounding into the Old Fire Hall, rumpled yet bright-eyed, but Robin himself. Bear in mind that Mork & Mindy was about to begin its third season and that Popeye, Robin’s first big movie, was coming out later that year. He still had most of his fantastic film career ahead of him, but never again would there be a moment when Robin was hotter. The Second City crowd went utterly insane at the sight of him, the audience members suddenly up on their feet.
Robin proceeded to do a set with us and totally killed. The speed of his mind, and the ease with which words, characters, and comic ideas poured out of him, was jaw-dropping—and, for the rest of us in the cast, both inspiring and intimidating. That night, Robin and I played Shakespearean father-and-son haberdashers, competing drunken choreographers with a bitter interpersonal history, and a two-headed man from Newfoundland singing gaily of the glories of Canada.
At one point, in his merry exuberance, Robin, unfamiliar with the dimensions of the stage, tumbled right off it and onto some delighted patrons. He was fine, though the white-linen pants he was wearing got smudged up pretty badly.
Only after the set did I learn from Robin the circumstances under which he had arrived at the theater. He had impulsively decided, in L.A., to take me up on my offer for him to visit. So off to LAX he went—with no cash and no luggage, only a credit card and the clothes on his back. He landed in Toronto, rented a car, and, in those pre-GPS days, drove around confusedly, getting lost a few times, until he finally pulled up at the Old Fire Hall.
We had Robin stay with us at Indian Road. While he slept, Nancy kindly took it upon herself to wash the clothes that he had arrived in. (I loaned him some of my clothes to tide him over until he bought some of his own the next day.) What Nancy didn’t realize was that Robin’s linen pants were dry-clean-only. After they’d been washed and dried, they looked like culottes, four inches shorter than they used to be. When Robin put them back on he immediately said, “When I get home, I’ll say to my wife, ‘I swear, I didn’t fuck anybody! I have no idea why my pants are four inches shorter!’”
Robin was our guest for a week. It was sort of like having an agreeable, very funny teenager in the house; he slept till about two or three p.m. every day. I was never privy to Robin’s wild nights out and the compulsions that underpinned them—he never went there with me, nor did he take drugs in my presence. For as long as I knew him, which was pretty much until the end of his life, I witnessed only his sweet and kind side—well, that, and the manic, unceasingly inventive comic side that everyone else witnessed, too. And here’s the other thing about Robin: he was such a tremendous audience to other people being funny. He so loved to laugh, his booming “Ha-hah!” filling the air. (Robin was later a very good sport about the “Ha-hah!”-heavy impression I did of him on SCTV.)
But, as we’ve all learned, the flip side to “manic” is “depressive,” and I did see in Robin, that week in Toronto, a certain melancholy. Our guest bedroom was up in the attic, and in the afternoons, he enjoyed simply staring out the room’s street-facing window, watching the local kids play road hockey as he sat quietly. “Ohhh,” he’d say in that vaguely Irish-sounding, wonderment-tinged Robin lilt, “they’re so won-derful, Marty. So utterly carefree. I wish I could stay here and watch them all day!” He reminded me of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince: wistfully surveying a world to which he felt he didn’t quite belong.
The actors’ strike was finally settled in October. Nancy and I returned to L.A. and plunged right into work, our Hollywood careers seemingly ascendant. Near the end of the year, with both of us raking in sitcom dough, we decided that we deserved a celebration. So on December 22, 1980, after six years of living in sin, we were married in St. Basil’s Church in Toronto, in the midst of a whirling, swirling snowstorm. Weather aside, our wedding reception, which was held at the Palais Royale, a gorgeous old waterfront dance hall where Count Basie and Duke Ellington had once played, was as raucous and sloppily fun as we’d hoped. (Though we did have one of those towering, elegant croquembouche cakes.) We’d booked a honeymoon suite in the swanky Windsor Arms Hotel, but as we were driving there, Nancy said, “Marty, do you realize that all the Shorts are back at our house right now, having one of the greatest post-wedding after-parties imaginable—and we’re missing it?” My bride, the genius! I made a quick illegal U-turn on Bloor Street and headed straight back to our place on Indian Road to swing with the Shorts. After all, Nan and I had already done the “consummation” thing years ago, that night I’d nearly blown it with Blazing Saddles interruptus.
Upon our return to L.A., Diana Canova and another of my I’m a Big Girl Now castmates, the bawdy, sexy Sheree North, organized a celebratory wedding dinner for us. When it came time to open our gifts, it was clear that someone—I suspect Sheree—had mandated that they all be pornographic in nature. I can tell you from experience that there’s nothing more awkward than listening to your waiter announce the night’s specials while you are unwrapping a brand-new set of Ben Wa balls. The presents only got filthier from there: vibrators of all shapes and colors, a potpourri of flavored lubricants, and, to cap it all off, a monstrous two-foot-long rubber dildo attached to a pair of rubber testicles. When the night was over and we got home, Nancy and I laughingly stashed our sex-toy haul into an unused bottom drawer of our dresser in the house that we were renting at the time.
We wouldn’t have given these wares another thought (I swear!) were it not for what happened a month later. We were back in Toronto on break during our shows’ hiatuses when we got a call from our landlady, Mrs. Vogel. She was a kindly German woman who lived three doors down from us. She was calling to inform us that our house had been broken into. “All da drawers in da bedroom vere pulled out,” Mrs. Vogel reported, “and their contents vere scattered around da bedroom.”
I said, “When you say all the drawers, do you mean all the drawers?”
“Jah, all da drawers,” she said. “And all da contents of da drawers vere dusted for fingerprints.” Normally Mrs. Vogel was very friendly, but there was an uncharacteristic coldness to her voice. Suddenly I understood why.
“Were the contents put back in the drawers?” I asked.
“No,” she said, even more coldly than before. “Ve vill leave that for you.”
Nancy and I wasted little time in flying back to L.A. We hurried from the airport to our robber-tossed crime-scene house, and when we got there, lo and behold, spread out on the floor for all of the LAPD to see were our carefully fingerprint-dusted wedding gifts.
As it turned out, our high-riding L.A.-sitcom days were short-lived. Soap was on its last legs by the time Nancy joined up, and the show was canceled after her one season on it. I’m a Big Girl Now fared no better. I played one of Diana Canova’s professional colleagues, Neal Stryker, the office whiz kid at a Washington, DC, think tank. But by the season’s eighth show, the writers found the think-tank setting too limiting so they decided, without any explanation to the audience, to turn our workplace into a newspaper. Needless to say, I’m a Big Girl Now was not renewed. On the plus side, I did get to meet Danny Thomas, who played the father of Diana’s character and had been a childhood favorite of mine on his 1950s TV show Make Room for Daddy. Danny was very nice to me, though, discomfitingly, he wore a holstered pistol on his person at all times. Diana would feel it pressing against her stomach when they would hug on-camera as father and daughter. Diana said that if the series had been picked up for a second season, she wouldn’t have asked for more money, but, rather, for Danny to lose the gun.
Eventually the chanciness and highly variable quality of television work chased Nancy and me out of town. Another pilot I did, between The Associates and I’m a Big Girl Now, was so bad that I was rooting for it to fail almost from the start. White and Reno was loosely based on the veteran black comic Slappy White’s experiences as part of an interracial comedy team called Rossi and White. In our show, Slappy played the manager of a young comedy team composed of me (Reno) and his nephew (White, played by William Allen Young). Reno and White were not only partners but also roommates whose friendly, foxy neighbors were played by the real-life sisters and Playboy models Audrey and Judy Landers. Audrey’s character was a nurse, while Judy’s was—and here, the word stretch comes to mind—a stripper with a heart of gold. Dick Martin of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In fame directed the pilot, and the humor was on the level of me saying to Slappy’s character, “Ben, jokes like this won’t get us a spot on The Tonight Show with Johnny,” and Slappy replying, “Yah, but jokes like this will keep you from going down the—Johhhh-nnny!”
Every time Slappy said that line during the run-throughs, I’d suddenly feel the sharp knife of a migraine ripping through my brain. Mother’s balls, I’d think, what if this horrid thing actually goes? About a month after we filmed the pilot, while we were awaiting word on the show’s future, I was at the Crocker Bank in Studio City when I noticed a familiar NBC executive standing in line. He saw me and beamingly flashed me a thumbs-up, as if to say, Looks like your show is getting picked up, kid. Me, the star of the freshman NBC sitcom White and Reno! It was a future I found so appalling that I had the audacity to walk right up to the guy and say, “Look, I don’t run your network, but I’m here to tell you that you’re making a terrible mistake.” To my relief, White and Reno went down the Johhhh-nnny shortly thereafter.
Nancy and I moved to New York for a spell after our respective sitcoms died. We had no jobs lined up, but we could afford to take the risk, because we had earned dual network incomes in L.A. and were childless, so the financial cushion was there. Nancy was already pulling away from show business. Though she never had trouble getting cast in TV pilots, she disliked the process more and more—the idea of driving over that hill into Burbank to sit, yet again, in a waiting room with a bunch of other girls who all looked alike and all wanted it so badly, even though the pilots she was reading for made White and Reno look like The Wire. Plus, we were trying to get pregnant, and Nancy saw segueing into motherhood as a natural way out of the performing phase of her life.
And me? I wanted to take a shot at Broadway. I auditioned to be a replacement in a hit musical that had been running for a while, A Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine. Didn’t get it. The Nine Categories served me well at this point, the early 1980s. I didn’t panic as I had on Breakdown Corner, but, rather, I started contemplating the reality that most people don’t make it as actors—and maybe I wasn’t going to, either. I was thinking about pursuing a more backstage involvement in show business, the way that my friend Harold Ramis had, brilliantly refashioning himself as a writer, with Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack, and Stripes already to his credit. Sure, the fact that I couldn’t really write gave me slight pause—but then, that hadn’t stopped a lot of successful screenwriters in Hollywood, so I remained upbeat.
As all these thoughts were churning in my head, Andrew Alexander, for the second time in five years, descended suddenly from the rafters with harp in hand, my guardian angel. He called me in New York and asked if I would be interested in moving back to Toronto and joining SCTV as a writer-performer. I had to think about it for, like . . . oh, I don’t know—zero seconds?
SCTV was, it’s not hyperbolic to say, the hottest thing going in comedy at that moment. The show had been on Canadian TV sporadically between 1976 and 1981, bouncing from commercial to public television. By its 1981–’82 season, though, NBC had picked up SCTV as a ninety-minute program that aired Friday nights after The Tonight Show. Its ratings were never particularly high, but it was during that season that SCTV really took off among the comedy cognoscenti—in marked contrast to Saturday Night Live, which was then in its post-Lorne period, with Dick Ebersol trying to salvage the show after a bad season with Jean Doumanian at its helm.
Andrew Alexander was the Lorne of SCTV, and he faced an issue not unlike the one that Lorne had discussed with me when Danny Aykroyd and John Belushi were poised to leave SNL: Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas were on the verge of departing to do, among other things, a Bob and Doug McKenzie movie called Strange Brew. Catherine O’Hara was thinking of leaving at season’s end, too. But Andrew wanted me to come north right away, to work on the remaining three 90-minute episodes of the 1981–’82 season alongside Rick, Dave, and Catherine, as well as Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, John Candy, and Joe Flaherty.
These people, with the exception of Rick, who had never been in Second City Toronto and had come aboard SCTV via his friendship with Dave (and, needless to say, his obvious talent), were all old friends. Not only were the performers and writers of SCTV like family to me, but in some cases they were family: Andrea was now my in-law, married to Nancy’s brother, Bob Dolman, who was working at the show as a writer . . . as was my own brother, Michael.
All that said, my exhilaration at being tapped by Andrew quickly turned into intimidation. It’s entirely possible to be awed by your old friends. While I had been away doing my L.A. thing, they had all honed and perfected their craft to a point where they were now doing work way beyond anything we ever did onstage at the Old Fire Hall. SCTV was so brilliantly realized: a sketch TV show organized around the premise of a fictitious network (the Second City Television Network) that operates out of a fictitious town (Melonville) and offers its own slate of dodgy programming, populated by its own constellation of demi-stars. Far away from the meddling hands of American network executives, Joe, John, Eugene, Catherine, Dave, Rick, and Andrea, along with Harold Ramis, who was the show’s original head writer and a cast member for SCTV’s first season, had created something stunningly layered and original.
Joe was Guy Caballero, the station’s owner, as well as the talk-show host Sammy Maudlin and the howling horror host Count Floyd. Andrea was unrelentingly hilarious as Edith Prickley, the network’s horny, leopard-print-clad station manager. Catherine was spectacular as the steely-needy-leggy showbiz survivor Lola Heatherton. John and Eugene were comic perfection together as the polka duo the Shmenge Brothers, and, individually, especially adroit at parodying low-budget local advertising (John, in snake face paint: “Hi, I’m Harry, the guy with a snake on his face!”; Eugene, with beard and flailing limbs: “Hi, my name’s Phil, and I got a warehouse full of nails!”), while Rick and Dave were great not only as Bob and Doug but as impressionists, their Woody Allen–Bob Hope homage, “Play It Again, Bob,” astonishingly well-realized. And those characters are just a fraction of those that every cast member wheeled out week after week. Everyone was acutely versatile, equally capable of playing broad or subtle.
And SCTV placed great faith in the intelligence of its audience, assuming that its viewers were as bright as or brighter than its creators. The nuance that its writers and cast brought to their parodies of showbiz made watching the show feel like a very smart, very insider experience. Conan O’Brien has told me that he and his brother, when they were very impressionable (and very pale) teens, would watch SCTV and say, “They’re saying the things that we just think!” It was almost disappointing, Conan says, when the brothers O’Brien discovered that people besides them knew of SCTV, because they considered it their show.
I felt the same reverence. I couldn’t believe how good SCTV was. And now I had to plunge in and become a part of it. But my nervousness swiftly fell away after the first read-through, where, to my surprise and delight, two pieces I’d written with my brother Michael not only got laughs but were actually approved to be filmed. One was a bit in which I played the paparazzo Ron Galella, who was known for pursuing Jackie Onassis everywhere she went, and the other was a takeoff on Richard Pryor’s then-massive Live on the Sunset Strip concert film—only ours was a promo for Martin Scorsese’s Jerry Lewis Live on the Champs-Élysées. After the read-through, Joe Flaherty congratulated me by saying, “Well done—and next time, write cheaper!”
I got my first sketch lead in a piece that Rick didn’t want to do, a parody of a 1950s-era Red Scare movie called “I Was a Teenage Communist.” I also made a positive impression in a Paul Flaherty–Dick Blasucci piece called Battle of the PBS Stars, in which I, as Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, squared off in a boxing ring against Julia Child, played, inevitably, by John Candy. (Mister Rogers won dirty, by decking Julia with his King Friday puppet.) I did a lot of flipping and tumbling as Mister Rogers, which excited Paul and Dick, who happily exclaimed, “Ah, a physical-comedy guy!” If nothing else, that was a niche I could occupy.
But what made me truly earn my SCTV stripes was Martin Scorsese’s Jerry Lewis Live on the Champs-Élysées. Having idolized Lewis my whole life, to actually play him—and to “run around like a monkey,” as Dave Letterman once described my Lewis shtick—was as fulfilling a moment creatively as I’d ever experienced. I appeared not as early slapstick Jerry, but as mid-period auteur Jerry, with the slicked hair, the blockish oversize eyeglasses, the attitude of superiority, and the legions of adoring French faithful. In one scene I wore a child’s sailor suit while smoking a cigarette and lecturing the crowd: “And the point is, they’re terrified of a perfectionist. And if a Jerry Lewis ain’t gonna get a distribution deal, because of some fakakta twelve-year-old with the pimples on his face who’s head of the studio . . . this week . . . who doesn’t know from Hardly Working or The Errand Boy or Cinderfella . . . where are you, the public, expected to find the love and the caring and the feeling and the good and the nice? And even if you did, it wouldn’t be the good kind, because of the difference caused by the earlier thing.”
My Jerry was a temperamental fellow who broke down while singing “You’ll Jamais Walk Alone” and went ballistic at his conductor (played by Dave) for not picking up this breakdown as a musical cue: “When I do the cry, you do the cue! Cry? Cue! You like your job? Do it!”
It was during this Jerry bit that one of the show’s producers, Nancy Geller, called people over to the TV monitor showing the live feed in her office and said, “Is everyone watching what’s going on here?”
I was in; I had proven that I was attuned to that not easily located SCTV frequency where each sketch, and each characterization, was rife with subtle, unexplained touches that lent the comedy unusual texture, even if they didn’t always make apparent sense. (This sensibility would also serve me well in working with Christopher Guest in the years to come.) It had all been pent up in me, these ideas, these characters, this energy. For the first time my career trajectory was coinciding with the hip energy in comedy. At thirty-two, I was finally able to give the world the Full Marty.
Rick, Dave, and Catherine did indeed leave the show at the end of that season, in May ’82. As I’ve said, I still think in terms of the school-year calendar, and the SCTV schedule neatly coincided with my mind-set: we didn’t have to go back to work until the day after Labor Day. I was beside myself with joy. It had been a long time since I’d had the perfect actor’s summer: two months off, with the guarantee of a good job in the fall.
It was daunting to carry on with SCTV with a mere five performers—John, Joe, Andrea, Eugene, and me—but the atmosphere that next season was total bliss. Collectively, the five of us were in great spirits and creatively fertile. We would go on to win an Emmy that season for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy or Music Program. There was literally no way for us to lose: all five nominees in the category were SCTV episodes.
John Candy—how fabulous was it to finally collaborate creatively with this man? Though he and I had known each other ten years, we’d never truly worked together closely, unless you count the time he (unintentionally) broke two of my ribs while we were roughhousing with a football on the set of The David Steinberg Show. The two of us just looked funny together, given our size difference, whether it was the Fred Rogers–Julia Child thing or him playing Ed Grimley’s evil, manipulative brother Skip Grimley in What Ever Happened to Baby Ed?, our homage to the Joan Crawford–Bette Davis kitsch classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
A typical John writing session took place at his huge house north of Toronto. John always radiated prosperity and magnanimity; he had movie roles in real movies way ahead of the rest of us (in Stripes, The Blues Brothers, and even Steven Spielberg’s 1941), and he loved playing host and picking up the check. Actually, we never really got much writing done at John’s. We’d drink a bunch of rum and Cokes, watch some delivery men load a new pool table into his rec room, eat dinner at around eleven thirty, and then I’d clap my hands and say, “John, we have got to write this scene.” “And we will,” he’d say, “but first, how dare your glass be empty, you bastard!” And there would go the night.
Which isn’t to say we didn’t work hard on SCTV. But it was all so idyllic. As a little boy, I’d watched The Dick Van Dyke Show and romanticized its view of show business: the way Rob Petrie’s job was to go sit in a room all day, write jokes with Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie, and then be home in New Rochelle in time for dinner with his sexy wife. SCTV was really like that. Every episode was labor-intensive, but we kept civilized hours. And the conviviality of our writing sessions was unlike anything I’ve experienced since—even when things got contentious.
One time, Andrea was pitching an idea that Eugene didn’t get. Now, Eugene was SCTV’s most prolific and selfless writer, generating more material than anyone else and giving himself the least flashy roles in the cast pieces he’d write. He was and is the sweetest human being ever created; I still address him by the nickname his mother bestowed upon him, Lamby. (Mrs. Levy was that rarest of specimens, an Orthodox Jew reared in Scotland; “Oh, my wee Lamby,” she’d tenderly say in her unique Yiddish-Scottish accent as she served Eugene an extra helping of brisket.) But in the writers’ room, Eugene could get very professorial. And in his slightly serious, analytical way, Eugene said, “Andrea, I wish I could understand the humor of that scene, but I just can’t.” Andrea, who was sitting next to Eugene, stared at him for a beat and then reached over with her pen and marked an X on the crotch of his pants, where his penis would be. “I’m just putting that there so Deb can find it later,” she said.
The working pace at SCTV was so civilized. We’d take six weeks to write and then six weeks to shoot, followed by another cycle of six weeks writing and six weeks shooting. The writing breaks were crucial, for they allowed inchoate ideas to develop, mature, ripen, and, on occasion, ferment into total, utter originality, all without the SNL-style pressure of “Whaddaya got for this week?” And when Catherine came back to do our Christmas shows, we had even more fun. (Catherine, I think, had the most unique, brilliant comic instincts of any of us—a fearless Canadian individuality coupled with a magical changeling’s ability to morph into any being her fertile, freaky mind could conjure—while Andrea was the most instinctively funny of us as a performer.)
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.