When Martin Short was 12, his oldest brother died in a car accident. Five years later, his mother died of cancer; three years after that, his father had a stroke and passed away, leaving Short, at 20, the youngest of five, living alone at his family home in Hamilton, Ontario.
“That was a rough eight years,” Michael Short, Martin’s brother, says to him in “Marty, Life Is Short,” the new Netflix documentary that alternates between the star’s raucously funny career in show business and a personal life filled with enduring friendships and unbearable tragedy. In the film, Short responded to his sibling with a revealing take on this period of his life: “There were laughs,” he says, emphasizing the next sentence. “That’s the point.”
Asked to expand in a recent interview in a Manhattan hotel, with legs crossed, slight and dapper, Short recalled a grim moment right before his mother’s death when both his parents were in the hospital. Short tends to answer questions with anecdotes. He was again with Michael, this time across a breakfast table. “We looked at each other and started laughing,” he said. “It was like: How absurd, how ridiculous, how dark can this be? It’s why the phrase ‘dark comedy’ exists.”
This particular brand of resiliency — “laughing wild, amid severest woe,” as the poet Thomas Gray put it — is an undercurrent of “Marty, Life Is Short,” which takes its name from Short’s response to a talk-show question about how to cope with the death of parents. He said that you could despair, but that he chose to conclude that life was short and that there were tools developed in disaster. “You became your own therapist,” he told me, adding that this grieving period helped him develop “muscles to survive.”
He has needed them. In 2010, the love of his life, his wife, Nancy, died of ovarian cancer. In February his daughter, Katherine, died by suicide after struggling with mental illness. While Nancy Short is such a focus of the documentary that the comedian told its director, Lawrence Kasdan, “I had no idea you were in love with my wife,” Katherine’s death doesn’t come up until the end, in a dedication to her and Catherine O’Hara, Short’s “SCTV” colleague who died the month before she did and figures prominently in the film.
Now reflecting on the loss of his daughter, Short recalled that his wife’s final words, spoken in her bedroom as paramedics rushed in, were “Martin, let me go.”
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nytimes.com ’
