Martin Short and Bill Murray are both comedy icons, but the “Only Murders in the Building” star almost gave it all up when he couldn’t contend with Murray’s early success.
Short recalled the moment in his upcoming documentary, “Marty, Life is Short,” saying that one night Murray and musician Paul Shaffer, who were both working on “Saturday Night Live” at the time, were visiting him in Los Angeles.
Murray was experiencing breakout success on “SNL,” and Short admitted he was feeling jealous and despondent about his own prospects, as he only had a credits to his name, one of them being the famous 1972 Toronto production of “Godspell.”
“Nancy [Dolman, Short’s late wife] and I were walking there,” Short said, per Entertainment Weekly “and I just was overwhelmed with, ‘I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t.’ I’m out of work now. Hadn’t worked in a couple months. Had no prospects and didn’t really know where I was going. And I said, ‘I can’t go and pretend to be happy for Bill, because I don’t know what I’m doing. I need to sit down.'”
The comedian called the moment his “breakdown corner.”
“We sat there for about 10 minutes and didn’t speak,” Short recalled. “Finally, Nancy said, ‘How long are we going to stay here?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’”
Short and his wife eventually returned home, and he remembered he “woke up in a funk.”
“And then we saw War Babies, who were an improvisational group. It was so funny. It was fresh. It was inspiring. I felt inspired just witnessing it. It was like the lightbulbs went off. ‘Of course, this is what I should do.'”
Short reached out to Second City Improv, said he wanted to join, and he did. That’s where he worked with other future comedy greats like Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, and the late Catherine O’Hara and John Candy.
He later worked on “SNL” as well during the show’s tenth season, though Murray was long gone by then.
“Show business is talent, luck, and endurance. But you can have talent, you can have tenacity. You can take the hits, but if you don’t have the confidence to get up there and fail, then you can’t do it,” Short said.
“Marty, Life is Short,” debuts on Netflix May 12.
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source thenationaldesk.com ’
