Marty, Life Is Short, the new Netflix documentary about comedian Martin Short, begins with an incongruity: It\u2019s Boxing Day in sunny California in the early 1990s. That a holiday celebrated across British Commonwealth countries on the day after Christmas should be marked in the U.S. feels curious, but suddenly a slew of stars arrive\u2014from Tom Hanks and Steve Martin to Eugene Levy and Catherine O\u2019Hara<\/a>\u2014the latter pair of whom are, like Martin Short, who\u2019s filming this old home-movie footage, famously Canadian. It\u2019s a fitting scene on which to begin given that for much of his career, Short has felt to many people like he doesn\u2019t quite fit in Hollywood, that he is somehow alien and out of place. He\u2019s too short (literally). Too strange. Too much. And yet, as evidenced by the endless stream of celebrities who show up across the documentary in both archival camcorder video and as talking heads wanting to sing his praises, Hollywood has not been able to resist him. \u201cLet\u2019s say you\u2019re going to host a dinner party and you invite Marty,\u201d Steve Martin tells viewers, \u201cthen it turns out Marty can\u2019t come? You cancel the party.\u201d<\/p>\n Short\u2019s career has been a peculiar one. For a long time, he seemed to struggle to truly reach leading-man status, always slightly eclipsed by his co-stars, serving as the second banana to Martin\u2019s straight man. (Short self-deprecatingly insisted on calling himself \u201cthe cheap Amigo\u201d in 1986\u2019s Three Amigos, in which he co-starred with Martin and Chevy Chase.) He can\u2019t do the understated deadpan that Levy can or play it straight like O\u2019Hara did in Home Alone. He has, by his own admission, had a string of commercial failures\u201480 percent of his work, he estimates. Yet Short hasn\u2019t just endured; he\u2019s thrived. Now in his mid-70s, he\u2019s enjoying arguably his greatest period of success, thanks to the Hulu hit Only Murders in the Building<\/a> and sold-out live comedy shows across the country. He is beloved by fans and the industry.<\/p>\n Still, detractors remain, with criticism of Short\u2014that he is grating, that he tries too hard to create shtick that\u2019s divisive at best and unfunny at worst\u2014having received space on this very website. A 2023 Slate piece by Dan Kois pulled no punches in its examination of Short\u2019s \u201cmanic, slightly creepy intensity<\/a>\u201d\u2014and prompted some forceful defenses of the comedian from both readers and fellow celebrities<\/a>. But at the heart of Kois\u2019 piece is a question that this new documentary, which began streaming on Tuesday, seeks to answer: Why are you being like this? It\u2019s left to Tom Hanks to offer a solution of sorts at the film\u2019s end: \u201cMarty is busier and more in demand now than he has ever been. That is not coming out of a desire to stay on top or to fill his coffers or to stay relevant,\u201d Hanks says. \u201cMarty is doing it because the opportunity is there to have a blast.\u201d<\/p>\n In part, Short is who he is because of his family. \u201cI profited from trickle-down comedy,\u201d Short says in the documentary of a childhood in Ontario as the youngest of five children where the goal was to make each other laugh. When Short was 12, his eldest brother, David, was killed in a car accident. Both of Short\u2019s parents would also be dead by the time he was 20. Short says this period of darkness left him with a choice that became an important life lesson: Collapse and \u201cbecome defeated forever?\u201d Or \u201clearn that life is short and have a glass of wine and fun?\u201d<\/p>\n After graduating with a degree in social work, he and best friend Levy left to try their luck in entertainment in Toronto, where he was cast in a now legendary 1972 production of Godspell that also starred Levy, Andrea Martin, Gilda Radner, and Victor Garber. From there, he eventually found his way to sketch comedy, joining the Toronto outpost of the Second City improv group, which later produced the Canadian sketch show Second City Television. By the mid-1980s, he was at Saturday Night Live in the U.S. Across these gigs, Short developed his particular brand of comedy: one that is sketch- and character-oriented and that requires his fellow comedians to place a great deal of trust in him.<\/p>\n Short\u2019s most famous comedy creations\u2014the manchild Ed Grimley, with his hair forever gelled into a cone, and the obnoxious entertainment journalist Jiminy Glick, in thick glasses and a voluminous fat suit (views about which have evolved<\/a> since the character was created in 1999)\u2014embody his first rule of comedy: An outrageous appearance is half the job. \u201cI always figured that if you walked on stage and you looked totally insane, you\u2019d get a laugh,\u201d Short says, \u201cand then you were halfway there.\u201d But this approach is also one that some find off-putting. Short\u2019s comedy doesn\u2019t so much worm its way into your brain as it does strike you over the head.<\/p>\n And yet, inherent in swinging for the rafters is getting comfortable with striking out. Short bemoans that a string of movies in the 1980s and \u201990s flopped fantastically at the box office or became legendary objects of critical loathing, like 1994\u2019s Clifford, in which he played a 10-year-old boy. (\u201cIt\u2019s not bad in any usual way. It\u2019s bad in a new way all its own<\/a>,\u201d Roger Ebert wrote of the movie.) But Short\u2019s mantra\u2014\u201c98 percent of it is failure; nothing works and then something works\u201d\u2014is also proof that big risks can sometimes earn big rewards, especially in the hands of someone who seems fascinated by idiots and is deeply good at playing them. \u201cIt\u2019s actually quite hard to make a completely bizarre character real,\u201d Steve Martin says, \u201cand that\u2019s what he does.\u201d<\/p>\n Short seems to know he\u2019s not everyone\u2019s cup of tea, that his art is \u201cspecific\u201d and \u201cunusual.\u201d But in his mind, playing a role that 200 other actors could do would be a waste of time. It\u2019s the weird stuff, the niche material, that makes him the happiest.<\/p>\n One of the more interesting things that Marty, Life Is Short does to stand out from the slew of other recent biographical documentaries (there has been a spate in recent years on comedy icons, in particular, including Steve Martin<\/a>, Mary Tyler Moore<\/a>, Eddie Murphy<\/a>, Gene Wilder<\/a>, Chevy Chase<\/a>, Albert Brooks<\/a>, and Lorne Michaels<\/a>) is adopt a slightly meta approach to the whole process. The film is made by Lawrence Kasdan, the writer-director of The Big Chill<\/a> and the writer of Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/a>, who Short tells us right away is a dear friend with whom he\u2019s dined a million times. (Short jokes at the top that he\u2019s worried the movie will be a hatchet job that he\u2019ll refuse to promote.) The comedian frequently looks to the camera and breaks the fourth wall whenever he\u2019s asked to film B-roll, and at one point, as Kasdan films Short sipping coffee, the Canadian says, \u201cWe\u2019re staging a breakfast I\u2019ve already eaten,\u201d before proceeding to take mock bites of the eggs and bacon before him. \u201cMmm! That\u2019s so good!\u201d<\/p>\n
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