I didn’t know too much about Martin Short before listening to the audio version of his autobiography, I Must Say. His time on SCTV and SNL came before I started watching those shows, and his late night talk show on Comedy Central — Primetime Glick — made me crazy (he has created a lot of intentional obnoxious characters — Jiminy Glick, Ed Grimley, etc.). But he’s been in a few of my favorite movies, The Three Amigos, The Father of the Bride movies and Jungle 2 Jungle (Mimisiku!), so I’m familiar with him as a comedic actor. And I’ve always heard that he’s just one of the nicest guys in Hollywood — and this book confirms it.
“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”
Short discusses his childhood, which was interrupted by tragedy when his older brother died when Short was 12, and his mother died when he was 18. Short was the youngest in the family, and loved to perform and make people laugh from an early age. He attributes his ability to get through tragedy to both his love of comedy, and his natural happiness (he really just seems like the nicest guy). He talks a bit about Gilda Radnor — they had a tumultuous on again, off again relationship for a few years — and then how he met and married Nancy Dolman. Their marriage lasted 30 years, until she died of cancer in 2010.
One of the greatest things about this book is Short’s stories about his friends. He has some awesome friends. He and his wife were very close with Steve Martin and his wife, with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, with Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi. They had crazy parties and pulled pranks on each other. The stories are great. If you do decide to check this one out — get the audio version. Short is a talented mimic and his impersonation of other Hollywood stars is fantastic.
