Martin Short's Jiminy Glick - Oddly Amusing Tub

"Where does the funny Larry David start, and where does this Larry David stop, and when do we get to the stop part?"

Martin is not a nice person according to DL but his Jiminy Glick is very funny. Mel Brooks. Peter Gervais, and Nathan Lane are especially funny.

Glick was based on Skip E. Lowe.

My favorite Jiminy Glick is this one with Nathan Lane... Lane laughs so hard when Jiminy asks if his former co-worker George C. Scott was "a drunkie" that he has to wipe tears from his eyes.

Oh man, Jiminy Glick. Martin Short is a comedic genius - his commitment to character is unsurpassed; not many comedians create characters these days.

I didn't know Nathan had such a great giggle.

Jiminy Glick is such a brilliant comedic creation. And by the way, a LOT of the Jiminy Glick interviews result in the one being interviewed breaking up in laughter.

I’ve been bingeing on Jiminy this past week. I can’t believe that the character wasn’t informed at least somewhat by Merv Griffin.

Another great Jiminy Glick interview, if only because he mentions DL favorite "Viv Vance." (Jiminy frequently refers to "The Lucy Show"--he once claimed he attended Gale Gordon High School.)

The best Jiminy Glick interviews like this one and the Nathan Lane clip are when the guest is willing to play straight man to Short and let him crack them up (which he almost always is able to do). The worst ones are when the interview subject insists on being in on the joke, like Kathie Lee Gifford does.

He never interviewed the DeCastros!

Jiminy narrates to children the fable of Anne "Celestia" Heche and the spaceship, as enacted by puppets.

Jiminy Glick was one of Martin Short's funniest characters. I loved Ed Grimley, too.

Michael McKean was the leader of his houseband. He played the harp.

Interviewing Kurt Russell.

"I didn't DO Elvis, I played him."

I adore Martin Short and hes not a cunt regardless of what DL says. I really dont know why he didnt have a bigger career (though his is nothing to sneeze at) ,hes just so naturally funny and brings his characters to life.

Brilliant.

I could never understand how Jiminy could believe in OJ's innocence.

Jiminy got his start as a (longtime) busboy at Chasen's (where he worked with George Maharis's brother) & it was there that he caught the attention of Roddy McDowell, who was catering a party. This association led to him touring in Forty Carats with Lana Turner.

Do you smell burning toast. LOL.

Watching these, it seems to me that Martin Short was a big fan of Dame Edna.

The first time Jiminy's show aired, i used to love his verbal interplay with his guests, but hated the slapstick comedy: when he shoves all the food into his mouth, or when he falls off his chair.

Now that I've seen so many of his interviews, I realize he actually does it to put his guests at ease. They know he's letting himself look ridiculous and be the butt of his own jokes early, so he seems less cruel when he's skewering them.

I loved when Jiminy interviewed Steve Martin. A highlight: "You share a birthday with Catherine Bell of JAG. Do you think women should serve in the military?"

Kurt Russell in the Elvis movie (1963) he refers to.

I had never watched these - they are so weird - quite funny, but weird.

His sons are Matthew and Modine.

He's a combo of Skip E. Lowe and Merv Griffin, for R3 and R7.

I've worked with Marty Short and he's a hoot. Adore him. He always said that he was reluctant to interview women as Jiminy because the audience would feel like he was picking on them and not find it funny.

He has interviewed women but he holds back and they're not nearly as funny.

He was the only interviewer brave enough to ask Jimmy Fallon if he is in a relationship with Justin Timberlake.

At 2:40

He also pulled his punches with African Americans. They as well are not nearly as funny. He treads very lightly.

The 'unfunniest' are Tom Hanks and Ricky Gervais. Neither was into the interview, Ricky was almost hostile. Tom seemed interested in topping Jiminy, not wanting to be taken advantage of. I LOVED Nathan Lane...he got into it.

Ben Stiller's was quite funny also

The Mel Brooks one is a hoot.

That was aggressively unfunny.

Silly funny

The Catherine O'Hara one was funny

That Catherine O'Hara interview works only because they are friends from years gone by and knew each other through many hours, and sketches of improv and SCTV. It would never fly today, even if she were in on the jokes.

R22 This is the movie were he plays Elvis. Your link is the movie where he met Elvis when he (Kurt) was 10 years old.

Jiminy's comment about Kurt 'doing' Elvis was hilarious. Kurt says "no, I didn't DO him. I played him!"

Yes, I know, R37. Russell discusses both movies. I wanted to post the movie where he acts with Elvis.

If he lives long enough, I see Martin Short being celebrated like George Burns, someone who played second fiddle - to either Gracie or Jack Benny - for most of his career, only to become much bigger late in life.

Billy Eichner was right about one thing: It's a cryin' shame that Martin Short doesn't have an EGOT.

I saw Steve Martin and Marty together in the audience at a matinee of the recent revival of Angels in America. Now I want to see Jiminy Gluck as Roy Cohn!

R41 Marty has some acting ability beyond comedy. He could probably pull off a serious role that didn't require singing. God knows he's had a sad life offscreen.

Marty was very good in a dramatic role on that Glenn Close series, Damages.

R43 He also played a lawyer with a few fetishes on Weeds, and was on the line between funny and dark.

I love Martin.

Here he receives the Canadian Lifetime Achievement Candy Award named after John Candy. The clips of his movies and tv appearances though is a reminder of how many bad movies he did. He was always great in them, but he had a string of real clunkers.

I love his story about Elizabeth Taylor telling him about her call to QVC!

In the opening passage of his memoir, “I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend,” Martin Short describes a fight in 1977 with his partner, Nancy, who would soon become his wife. Short had just joined the Second City comedy troupe in Toronto (a hop and a skip away from his hometown of Hamilton, Ontario), and he had started to develop characters that made use of his compact physique and his ability to contort both his voice and his face with rubber-band elasticity. One such character was Ed Grimley, an overenthusiastic dork in high-waisted pants who sports a tall spike of hair like a supercharged Alfalfa. During the fight—which Short notes was about nothing at all, as most relationship squabbles are—Nancy did something unexpected. She asked to speak with Ed rather than with Martin. Short immediately transformed into his alter ego. When Nancy asked “Ed” what her boyfriend’s problem was, he suggested that Martin was “jealous of your beauty and wisdom and saddened by his own tragic limitations.” He then added, “Although his endowment has certainly been blessed by the Lord.” Nancy thanked Ed and told him to go away. Argument over.

The scene provides a small but illuminating window into Short’s approach to life in comedy. He’s always going bigger, broader, lunging headlong for the joke to break the tension. But his flamboyance carries an undercurrent of sweetness and boyish play, a Canadian gee-golly geniality that has never really left him. Short seems as excited about his work today, at seventy-one years old, as he was when he first joined the cast of the Canadian sketch show “SCTV,” in 1982 (an all-star lineup that included Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Rick Moranis, Andrea Martin, John Candy, and Harold Ramis). When I met Short recently for lunch at an outdoor café in his neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, in Los Angeles, he was as spry and mischievous as one would imagine. I ordered iced tea; he immediately suggested that we switch to midday wine. We were there to discuss his upcoming Hulu series, “Only Murders in the Building,” co-starring his longtime friend and regular stage partner Steve Martin, and, somewhat unexpectedly, Selena Gomez. They play an intergenerational trio who form a sort of Scooby Doo gang in an attempt to solve a murder in their ritzy Upper West Side apartment complex. (This being 2021, they also turn their sleuthing into a podcast.) Short plays Oliver Putnam, an idealistic Broadway director who is broke, having sunk all of his savings into a disastrous stage adaptation of the movie “Splash.”

In the new series, as in many of Short’s projects, his Energizer Bunny zip seems to keep the whole endeavor aloft. Whether during his time on “S.N.L.” or as the iconic wedding planner Franck Eggelhoffer in “Father of the Bride”—or even in his box-office flop (and cult hit) “Clifford,” in which he plays a ten-year-old child—Short provides a jolt of vivacity. He is a beloved late-night-show guest who is always trying to one-up his previous appearance. It may be tempting to see his delirious ebullience as a kind of compensation for a difficult personal history—he lost one brother and both parents by the time he was twenty—but Short is emphatic that he doesn’t see his humor as a cover for deeper pain. (In his memoir, he writes freely about Nancy’s death, from cancer, in 2010. “That stuff came easily,” he told me.) In our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity and length, we discussed his early ambitions to be a singer, his circle of funny people, and the wisdom he’s gleaned from the likes of Joni Mitchell and Neil Simon. Once, Short told me, the actor Tony Randall called him up and told him, “You mustn’t make silly movies.” Short didn’t listen.

I have to say, I’ve only seen eight episodes of “Only Murders” so I still don’t know who did it. I thought it was Nathan Lane, but. . . .

Nathan’s good in it. [His part] had long speeches. He wouldn’t bring his script. He wouldn’t blow one word. It was intimidating, but I’ve known him for a long while.

When did you meet him first?

Backstage at “The Goodbye Girl.” 1993. Broadway. I think he was doing, not “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” but he was doing something. He was always doing something. Maybe he was doing “Guys and Dolls”?

Did he feel very New York to you when you met him?

We had a lot of mutual friends. Wait, no, I think I met him at the Pilot Bar, or whatever that bar was, the hip place we used to go to, Beringer’s maybe? He came up and was very nice and I was nice back. And then there was a dinner. Andrea Martin’s a mutual friend of ours.

You seem to make friends easily. In your book, you’re just collecting people all the time.

Well, I think you make a choice, when you make a movie. People are asking a lot how Steve and I became friends. Well, I didn’t know him until “Three Amigos!”

Yeah, you went to his house to meet him, right?

Yes, I went to pick up a script and said to him, “How did you get this rich? Because I’ve seen your work,” which is true. But I didn’t know him until we really started shooting. And then, at the end of that film you kind of go, “Do I want to keep this person in my life or not? Oh, I do. O.K. Then we’ll arrange a dinner; then we’ll arrange a second dinner.”

Always a dinner. You love a dinner.

Yes, but I’m not a big foodie. I would never say, “Ooh, where will I go to lunch?” I remember a friend of mine wanted me to join him for breakfast at Du-Pars, in the Valley.

And you’re, like, “Why would I go to the Valley?”

More like, why would I eat a pancake? How about a Balance Bar and get going?

Are you and Steve going to go back out on the road?

Yes. We have shows in August, in California.

Are you nervous?

I’m never nervous about performing.

But it’s been a minute, right?

I learned early on that a nervous person doing comedy you just don’t like. You cannot care which joke works. The one who proved that brilliantly was Johnny Carson, where he’d come out, do a monologue, half the jokes would bomb, and he would make it the funniest monologue by acknowledging it failed and tap dancing. So nerves don’t affect me.

Are you doing any topical material about the past year and a half, or are you avoiding it?

We wouldn’t avoid the pandemic. The trick of doing anything live is, half your audience is one party and half your audience is the other party, so do you make them feel idiotic, because they don’t agree with you politically? No, you can’t do that. If we’re going to do a joke on Marjorie Taylor Greene, we have to make a joke on, I don’t know, Governor Cuomo.

Do you read your reviews?

If I’m on the road with a show, if I’m in development of a show, I do, because it’s important. There’s a difference in reviews between when you think you’re really there, and someone says, “I don’t like you.” I go, “Well, Jesus. I’m sure I wouldn’t like you if I had dinner with you. I’d be equally bored.” But when you’re the most vulnerable is when you know it’s not there, and you don’t want it confirmed.

I remember, in 1996, I did a play here called “Four Dogs and a Bone.” We opened at the Geffen Playhouse. It was a big opening. Larry Kasdan was directing. It was Elizabeth Perkins and myself, Parker Posey, and Brendan Fraser. I knew I was not good in it. I was missing something. And Dennis Quaid, who’s an old friend, came to a preview and he went, “Oh, you’re so great.” And I said, “Come in here. Close the door and lock it. I’m not good. What the fuck am I doing wrong? Just please be honest, I beg of you.” And Dennis said, “Well, you’re a regarded physical comedian. You play a producer with severe hemorrhoids. I’ve had hemorrhoids. You can’t sit down. And you just sit down! So in an attempt to not overplay it or go for the comedy always, you’re not being truthful to it.” Genius.

So then you just played the hemorrhoids broad?

I was Jerry Lewis on acid the next night.

Do you find that you are always more successful when you’re going big?

Well, what I’ve always noticed with character is, you go and pick up your shirt at the cleaners and the guy says [affects a dopey, stoner-y voice], “I couldn’t get the stain out, I really tried” and he’s wearing madras shorts and he’s got a ponytail. And you look at him and you say, “He’s not trying to be a character on ‘S.N.L.,’ but he could be.” But the difference is, he’s being sincere in his weirdness. When I made “Father of the Bride,” the first day we shot, Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers were, understandably, a little concerned as to what my tone was, because suddenly this heightened thing seemed to arrive. And I kept thinking, We’re fine as long as I’m not trying to be funny, as long as I’m being funny through the eccentricity of the character.

So Franck’s accent wasn’t forced.

Well, we did it like a faucet turning it on. I mean, the concept was that Steve [Martin] was so alienated from the wedding that Diane [Keaton] and Kimberly [Williams] understood this guy, but he didn’t. I had to figure out the middle ground where you could understand it, if you were the audience, but you could understand why Steve couldn’t understand. When I saw the film, I realized they ended up going with the bigger style.

You’ve said that directors don’t always pick your best takes.

Well, it depends who the director is. When you’re working with a director and you go, after a week, “O.K., he’s a moron,” or “She’s a moron,” I can only protect my experience of doing this, because they’ll pick the wrong takes. They’ll screw it up. I’ll give them every option, every speed, every high, middle, low, and they’ll pick the wrong one, but I can’t control that.

How do you know which take is the right one?

I don’t know. I wouldn’t know until I was involved in the edit. I think when directors go into a scene, especially in comedy, knowing what it is, I think that’s a mistake. I think it’s a blank canvas, and if you were going to paint a painting, you would want an array of different colors as you figured it out, and the actor’s job is to provide as many colors and shades as the director, so that a director who knows what he’s doing can say, “Oh, I love that take, if we only had one faster. Oh, we do have one faster. O.K., great.”

That has to come out of your improvisational background, right?

Certainly it does. I did this summer series a couple years ago with Maya Rudolph and Kenan Thompson. And Maya would be in the dressing room with four kids screaming and shouting and then she’d walk on for action and it would be the perfect level, perfect choice, perfect, perfect. Kenan, exactly the same thing. I’m not that way. I want to try everything. I go, “O.K., so what do you think? Should we try one bigger?” I’m a director’s dream, in that respect, that I don’t want to walk in determined, I want to give an array of options. But I don’t know what the right choice is for me. What I always ask for is freedom takes.

What’s that?

A freedom take is, now that you’ve given everyone what they need regarding the script, now you can improvise a little change.

Have you ever had a director push back on how many takes you wanted?

It’s amazing how many people from that time are still working. Does it seem odd to you, the high batting average for that group of people?

It’s my normalcy, but I am aware it’s very odd. When I was doing “Godspell,” so that’s March of 1972 until June, 1973, I met Danny Aykroyd and John Candy and Gilda and Andrea and Victor Garber and Eugene. And Paul Shaffer. Paul was the first one to go to New York.

Did you ever think you’d leave Canada?

No, but you kind of instinctively felt like you hit a ceiling and wanted to expand, wanted to give it a shot. I always had a philosophy of, even when I decided not to be a social worker, I always imagined myself looking in the mirror at fifty and saying, “Maybe you should’ve tried, really committed, given it a year of trying to be an actor. Oh, that’s right, you did, and you bombed. No one hired you.” So even when I was going to New York and trying to look for work, I never really thought I’d get it.

My agenda was to work as hard as I could, try as hard as I could, and what would happen would happen. I was more the type of, “If you don’t hire me, you don’t get it,” as opposed to “I’m not worthy.”

Comedy is a field full of insecurities. But you were able to somehow transcend it or float above it, it seems?

I would say Eugene Levy is right there, Catherine O’Hara is right there, I don’t know what that is from. But I think maybe I’m drawn to similar types that way. I mean, [the composer] Marc Shaiman always says to me that I’m one of the few comedians who’s actually laughing on the inside. And I don’t know where that comes from. I mean, I’ve never been into analysis, so I don’t analyze myself at all.

I’ve heard you say, in the past, that you can’t pathologize your youth, where you had all this grief and loss of losing your parents and your brother. Some people might say, “Oh, that would turn you into some kind of a method actor, full of dark corners.”

Well, it makes for a great interview. The writer can get to lunch earlier, because they’ll say, “Well, this is simple. He’s a victim.”

You’ve staunchly said, “That’s not my story, so I’m not going to go there.”

I’m not ashamed if it was, but it just isn’t. I do think early loss does teach you. At twenty, having lost a brother, mother, and father, I knew things that most of my friends had no idea about. But you make that decision. You become a victim or you become empowered.

But that connection people try to draw about how it made you funny feels put upon?

There is a cliché, “Out of the laughter, there are tears.” But I don’t really think, in my world of knowing so many funny people, that’s true. I don’t think that’s true of Billy Crystal. It’s not true of Christopher Guest, or Steve. I mean, I’m sure it’s true for some, and there are some actors that have to create World War III on the set, and out of the ashes come their characters. But you don’t want to hang with those people, do you?

Are you studious when you’re trying to develop characters? Do you take notes? Mental pictures?

To a degree. What I would do for “SCTV” is sit in the mirror and create a look. When I was thirty, I was going to play this character Lawrence Orbach, who was a half-wit. I’ve never had hair issues, but I always thought, I feel so badly for the twenty-six-year-old who’s losing his hair. And then you add pockmarks, which is just a drag. I said, “We’re on to something.” And the voice will start when I’ll be channelling someone I met as a kid or someone I’ve worked with. The Jiminy Glick laugh of “Ha ha ha huh!” I was doing this TV show and I could hear from the hallway a production designer going, “Ha ha ha huh!”

Early on, you started writing with people. Did collaboration come naturally to you?

Yes, that was through improvising. When I write specials, I’ll work with my brother Michael and Dick Blasucci and Paul Flaherty. We’ll have tape recorders going all over the place. If I do something as the character and everyone laughs, we try to find exactly the wording on the tape. But if someone said, “What did you just say?” I’d go, “I don’t know! What did I say?” When I did Jiminy Glick, that was all improvised. We’d shoot for seventeen minutes to get down to five. Maybe we’d do two passes. At one point, Jiminy says to someone, maybe Alec Baldwin, “I take great umbrage.” What does that even mean? I’ve never used that expression in my life.

When you were writing back in the day with Christopher Guest or Harry Shearer, did you feel like they could just key into your humor?

The first two pieces I did on “S.N.L.,” I wrote with Harry. It is a strange thing. Because I didn’t know Harry. We wrote “Synchronized Swimming” together.

You were in three sketches in your first episode, right?

I was. I didn’t understand how “S.N.L.” worked. I remember my wife was so pissed off at me, because she came at five after eleven, we have already done a dress run, and I said to her, “This is terrible. This does not work. They should show a rerun from last year.” And her face falls. But what I didn’t realize is that between dress and show we shuffled everything. “Synchronized Swimming” was supposed to be in the second show, but they moved it into the first show. Well, after the show, Nancy said, “O.K., you cannot do this to me. You cannot let your neurosis spoil my night.” I said, “It wasn’t neurotic. If you saw the dress [rehearsal], you would be with me.”

How do you choose who you are going to impersonate?

Sometimes it’s out of necessity. I remember Eugene Levy wrote this piece on “SCTV” where there was a famous fight with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. Eugene thought it could be a funny commercial for Tide. It was, like, “Marty, can you do Gore Vidal?” So what I would do then is get a lot of tapes. What I would do—with my Walkman, in those days—is transcribe an interview with Gore Vidal. Because when you look at transcriptions of someone’s interview, you see the pauses and the uhs. And that day, when I look at it, I do a damn good Gore Vidal. But ask me to do it a week later, and I can’t.

So, some of it is out of necessity, but some of it comes from if you’re a fan. I could do Jerry Lewis, because I was a fan of Jerry Lewis. It’s like an Al Hirschfeld sketch.

Good New Yorker reference.

When [Hirschfeld] did a caricature, he would draw the warts as well as the compliments. The first piece I did on “SCTV” was “Jerry Lewis live on the Champs-Élysées, directed by Martin Scorsese.” It was important for me to try to make him look funny. But then, when you cut to him in a little-boy sailor suit lecturing the audience about why Hollywood is farkakte, it wasn’t just a hit piece, because you had also shown him running around being funny.

Did you ever, at one point, say, “I’d like people to take me seriously as an actor?”

No, never.

Really? You never had your Juilliard moment?

No, I never did, because I always felt, when I was doing these characters, I was acting. The trick was to make the eccentricity believable and yet funny. So I never felt like, “Oh, but if I could only play in ‘Long Day’s Journey [Into Night],’ I’d prove to the world I was worth something.” When I was asked to be in “Damages,” I jumped at that, because I loved the series. But I remember the first scene we shot, it was a deposition. Glenn Close was on this side, and I was representing Lily Tomlin. And Glenn kept saying, “Guys, this isn’t fair. How can I be looking at these people and get through this scene?” And then, at one point, we’d done a bunch of takes and one of the producers came up and said, “Marty, can we try one where you don’t smile? When you smile, you become Martin Short.” And I said, “Well, you’re kind of stuck.”

We went into the corner. I said, “The worst thing you can ever do is cast someone funny, but not have them smile, because it looks like they become self-conscious. They’re doing a drama now.” I mean, even the evilest of characters will do jokes or smile. I’ve actually seen comedic actors do that stretch, and they are afraid to show the light side. Is it sincere if people going through tragedy don’t, at one point, smile?

When did you start to sing?

Early. I just always sang. I was doing imaginary shows and specials, and I did an album when I was fifteen, “Martin Short Sings of Songs and Loves Ago.” What I’d done is take Frank Sinatra’s album “September of My Years” and I would use the intros and extros, so I was stuck in his key.

Did you ever want to be a singer as a career?

I thought, early on, I would’ve loved to have been a singer. But I realized that, at a certain point, the audience makes a pact. I remember this guy, his name was George Kirby, I saw him on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He did the greatest impersonations of everybody. And one week, on “Ed Sullivan,” he just was going legit. He was just going to sincerely sing. And I’m going, “Is there a sandbag that drops on him at one point? You’re breaking your contract with us.” Lorne Michaels has this thing where he says, “You go to the zoo and you see the monkeys and they have a right to be reflective, but if they’re not swinging by their tails and jumping around, we go, ‘I’ll come back later.’ Marty, you’re one of the monkeys.”

Do you think you want to stop ever? Do you have a point at which you’re, like, “I’m going to be done?”

Steve has always said, about show business, you’re finished five years before anyone tells you. Your wife doesn’t tell you, your agent doesn’t tell you, your lawyer doesn’t tell you, but should you have stopped? Are you on fumes? Forgetting that part, I think that, as long as you can be effective, you don’t want to become a parody. You don’t want people to say, at the end of your career, “Well, he was so great in the eighties and nineties.” If you’re a chef, you have to keep baking and saying, “Oh, I know, we need less vanilla.”

Are you looking at comedy as an art form or as a craft?

It is definitely a craft, and I think it can be an art form, but I think you’re also always trying to make it your art. You know that line from “Sunday in the Park with George”—“Bit by bit, putting it together, small amounts add in to make the work of art”? That’s my philosophy.

It’s about fastidiousness, right? That entire show is about getting it right and sacrificing to get it right.

Yeah, the art of making art is putting it together.

And you share that with Steve Martin, it seems like.

Absolutely. I did three Broadway things with Neil Simon in the nineteen-nineties, and I was very influenced by his work technique. He was creating a mosaic. He didn’t worry if a preview didn’t go well. He didn’t worry if the review out of town didn’t go well. He’d come up to me before we opened, and he would go, “Can you try a new line?” His thing was, If I go home and I’ve put three great jokes into this puzzle I’m creating, give me the glass of champagne, I’m going to toast myself. I don’t care whether the audience liked the jokes tonight. I have my eye on the end, the opening night. And he never panicked. I once saw him do the most brilliant thing I’d ever seen. He saw the design for the set of “The Goodbye Girl,” which was a moving apartment. I had to enter from stage right, and he went, “All right. You’re going to come on, and they know you, and they’re going to applaud,” because I was already in the movies. He said, “You need something to do, you can’t just walk over.” In the script, I just knocked on the door, but, seeing the set, it didn’t work. He paced back and forth for about fifteen minutes, and he came back and said, “Marty, what if you came out, and because you’re from out of town, you look at the audience and go [glances around as if taking in his shoddy surroundings], ‘New York, maybe they’ll fix it.’ ” I did it every night and it got a huge response. And it was just from that little moment that I saw him create. That is always part of me. Bit by bit. Just keep chugging away and trying to improve and be open and never delude yourself that this is great.

OP- When that video was made it had TWO closet queens in it.

Is Jimmy Glick still on? Id watch this expanded to other people in the news. I’m ok but over the Colbert, Fallon and Myers program setup. It could use a do over.

Petition to have Jiminy Glick eat James Corden and take over his show!

Did anybody see Martin Short on Broadway in the musical FAME BECOMES ME, a zany "quasi" biography of his life? It was kind of like the best of SNL skits strung together with Marc Shaiman musical numbers. He also appeared as Jiminy Glick in Act II and brought up a different guest celebrity every night. I loved it.

There must be a DLer who’s not a Martin Short fan, right? But he’s getting nothing but (much-deserved) love so far.

A Big Black Lady Stops the Show

LOVE Jiminy. Love Marty. Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall once quipped to Short: "You've finally created a character that's as mean as you are in LIFE!"

Starting at 0:40 in this clip, Nathan Thurm is another great Short character.

Love that number at r62. Adorable!

One of my favorite Jiminys is Larry David and Short makes a reference to Funny Girl and really cracks David up. I'm sure most people don't get it. David plays it straight but starts insulting Jiminy and it works.

When Short is asked where he got Jiminy from he might have mentioned it it initially but then he started leaving Skip out. Lowe must have been very hurt and Short felt bad. But the similarities are undeniable.

Jiminy interviews Ben Stiller

At 1:05 he grills Ben about his failure on SNL.

While he's not in the Jiminy character here, this little conversation on Letterman was hilarious - discussing when he met Bette Davis.

The Carson clip Short is talking about.

The Ben Stiller interview might be the rare interview where I think Short got too mean and personal, except Ben Stiller is such an asshole he deserves much worse.

This thing about Martin Short being a cunt is new. I’d always heard he was nice. Oh well.

I've always enjoyed Martin Short's characters, but honestly, OP, by showing that first one with Anderson, you have now shown the younger gaylings why Anderson is beloved, and has even transcended ICON status. He is like, even more than a saint. He is...dare I say it...a God among men. I love him. I always loved him. This video is adorable. Where's the Tom Hanks one. It was pretty damned funny too.

Oh, dear god, I can't stop laughing. Swear to god, you gotta watch him with Rob Reiner. I could not stop laughing. Shit this was funny.

Let's face it with Anderson the bloom is off the rose.

R73, in the NYer article posted above, Martin Short notes that Rob Reiner told him that he would give him $100 to do his Bette Davis impression in front of Bette Davis when they were both on the Tonight Show in 1986.

Reviving this ancient thread to remind people of Jiminy Glick.

He really is Data Lounge in human form. Gross, rude, ignorant of basic facts, but still lovable.

Great thread OP. Love Martin and Jiminy.

I count one person in this thread who doesn’t think Glick is funny. And one accusation that Short’s a cunt but no anecdote to back it up, and at least two anecdotes refuting it.

Pretty good score overall.

Jiminy Glick is a hilarious character. I bought a ‘Best Of’ DVD that Comedy Central released; my partner and I love him. If they’d release a box set of the entire series, I’d buy that, too.

Here's a clip of Martin Short as Bette Davis - A friend gave me a Jiminy Glick DVD some time ago and it contains a few segments of Short as Davis. The quality of the YT video is rather poor but you get the idea of Short's great talent.

The first time I ever saw him do Jiminy Glick, it was on his own TV show. I turned it on, and they announced that the show had been cancelled and instead The Jiminy Glick show would replace it. I'm pretty sure Catherine O'Hara was the guest. I fell off my chair laughing.

"My next guest has been called the Mistress of Comedy Improvisation. And I don't know about improvisation part, but I sure bet she's somebody's mistress!"

"I don't mean this negatively, but you looked like this big bull-dyke, saying 'Where's my kid? I gotta hit that plane!'"

"I heard you were loose. You put out for Scorsese! There's NO WAY you didn't want it!"

[quote]Also, has anyone ever made pre-out Anderson Cooper giggle like this?

Si papi muchas veces.

This one is funny with Mickey Rooney - when he asks about Anne Miller

Jiminy interviews Bill Maher on Real Time.

R84. Jimmy was funny but the hot repug on Bill's panel with biceps popping out of his suit was the highlight for me.

I can't stand Martin Short but I LOVE Jiminy Glick. I will go on youtube spirals once or twice a year watching his old 90/00s clips.

I fall on the floor laughing.

He was a little out of practice on Bill Maher last night, but it was still funny as shit.

I think that segment on Real Time last night was excellent.

R19, I used to think that Jiminy could be Short's Dame Edna . . . but for me the crucial difference is that Short doesn't have the discipline that Humphries had, sticking to the character at all times.

Short's extremely gifted and can be uproarious, but at heart he's a laugh whore -- anything to get the audience going. It's telling to me that the best Jiminy interviews are the pre-taped ones -- there he's far more consistently in character, since he's not playing to the audience.

I disagree with whoever posted that he's not as pointed with black guests. Watch the ones he did with John Salley and Ice Cube, to name two examples.

Another delightful feature of many episodes of PRIMETIME WITH JIMINY GLICK -- Miss Gathercole! ("Rita Mae refuses to give me my puddin'.")

“Your smile is like an e-mail from Grandma. All caps.”

Michael McKean as bandleader Adrian VanVoorhees, playing the harp, rocking out. Love him.

Jiminy's latest - interviewing Bill Maher about his new book - is great! Jiminy's best guests are comedians who appreciate the character and go with it.

When I take off my glasses, I see Harry Caray.

To me, R91, that interview with Maher illustrates perfectly how frustrating I find Martin Short. He gets off some great lines here, but there's very little effort to maintain the established character -- he doesn't even do the Jiminy voice for most of it.

[quote] he doesn't even do the Jiminy voice for most of it.

There has never been one Jiminy voice.

R93, I was randomly watching Jimmy Kimmel last night and Short was guest hosting. He did a taped Glick bit with Bill Hader that felt much more like 90s Glick.

He was much more committed. It was fall down funny to me (and to Hader - who couldn't keep a straight face throughout).

The Bill Hader interview.

That was hilarious. Martin rules. I can heartily recommend his autobiography

The Hader interview is much better than the Maher one. I maintain that when Short doesn't have a live audience to play to, he's much more likely to stay in character.

R94, of course there's a range to Short's usual Jiminy voice(s) -- and I don't hear much of it in the Maher interview. (The Hader one is far more consistent in that regard.)

Jimmy gets very upset over the death of Vivian Vance in this interview. Starts around 2:41.