I Must Say (19 page)

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?”

S
CTV
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.

Lawrence was one of the more unsung carryover characters to travel with me from
SCTV
to
Saturday Night Live
. He began his life as a simpleton I played in a sketch written by Eugene Levy called “Half-Wits”: a game show whose contestants were slow people. I'd been toying with the idea of a character who had never gotten his second teeth—his first teeth never fell out, so he was an adult with baby teeth. Bev Schechtman,
SCTV
's endlessly inventive makeup wizard, would simply blacken the bottom halves of my upper teeth and the top halves of the lower teeth. It worked brilliantly. For Jackie Rogers Jr., Bev started painting my teeth white, giving them a cheesy bad-cap look. Years later I met Carol Burnett and told her about this trick, and she loved it. “How could I have been working in comedy all these years,” she said, “and no one told me about
painting my teeth
?”

So that was the beginning of the character, Lawrence Orbach. I wasn't planning to go particularly broad with Lawrence's appearance, because we'd received a request from hair and makeup to tone down the massive looks to spare
SCTV
's exhausted staff. But one day I walked into the makeup room and saw this huge honker of a prosthetic nose sitting on one of the molds. “Who's that for?” I said. Judi Cooper-Sealy, our hair and wig chief, responded, “Oh, it's for Joe. He's gonna wear that in ‘Half-Wits.'”

Well, that did it. If I'm competing with that nose, I thought, I've got to amp it up. It had always made me laugh, in a sad kind of way, when I'd see guys in their late twenties going prematurely bald. So as Lawrence I would wear a bald pate covered by a receding hairline. I also requested pockmarked skin, just to add a certain je ne sais quoi. As for Lawrence's demeanor, I
knew a TV writer who had a nervous, slightly mouth-breathing way of talking—I'm leaving him nameless because he's actually handsome, successful, and not a moron—that I borrowed for Lawrence.

Lawrence gained his greatest fame in the very first episode of
Saturday Night Live
I did, appearing in a pretaped segment with Harry Shearer in a sketch about two brothers going for the gold in the Summer Olympics.

HARRY:
My brother and I know it's not going to be easy. Men have never done synchronized swimming in a sanctioned competition in this country. Officially it's got, like, zero acceptance.

LAWRENCE:
I don't swim.

HARRY:
My brother doesn't swim. So no one is going to walk up and hand us a gold medal, especially since men's synchro isn't even in the Olympics . . . yet.

LAWRENCE:
But that's okay, because we could use the time. 'Cause I'm not that strong a swimmer.

I
wish I'd enjoyed
Saturday Night Live
more. I wish I hadn't felt so perpetually under pressure when I worked there. But I think that's just what the show does to some people. I certainly knew that I was at a pivotal moment in my career, and that if I made this
SNL
thing work, it would open doors for me that would have otherwise remained closed.

And don't get me wrong—I really enjoy the show
now
. I've been back to host three times, I'm friendly with roughly 90 percent of everyone who's ever worked there, and I've kissed Lorne Michaels on the mouth on national television. But my one season in the cast of
SNL
was a roller coaster of elation and anxiety. With thirty years' perspective, I now recognize that I should have allowed myself to step back for a moment and simply exult in the privilege of doing that show.

I had trepidation about
SNL
from the moment I told Dick Ebersol that I was in. (As a reminder, Dick, not Lorne, was the executive producer of the show in 1984.) I'd had as perfect a life-work setup imaginable on
SCTV
, and whatever followed was going to have a hard time topping that experience. To complicate
matters further, Nancy and I rented a house in Pacific Palisades right after
SCTV
wrapped its final season, and I found myself falling in love with the California way of life; I couldn't get over the rush of seeing the ocean on my left as I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway. I put off the decision to join
SNL
for as long as possible, sitting outdoors in the sunny Palisades with a notepad, listing the pros and cons of doing the show.

The cons, to me, were many. One was essentially the same fear factor that had dissuaded me from auditioning for Second City Toronto in 1973: I didn't like the idea of being funny on demand. While by 1984 I was a proven sketch performer, I had grown accustomed to
SCTV
's gentle, if laborious, pace. After each take, we'd all crowd around the monitor and watch the playback, and everyone would discuss how to recalibrate the scene for the next take: “Okay, maybe a little less from John, a little more from Andrea, and a lot less from Marty.” (Incidentally, Mitch Hurwitz, the creator of
Arrested Development
, works the same way, which is why I had such a spectacularly fulfilling time working on that show in 2005, playing Uncle Jack, an elderly, Jack LaLanne–like fitness legend who can no longer move his legs—another in my gallery of what Joe Flaherty calls “Marty's disgusting, unlikeable characters.”)