My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend
Our third selection for this year’s Siblings’ Book Club was the one book out of our 80 selections that got the most overall votes, which is surprising, because I didn’t think this crowd knew much about Martin Short. I sure didn’t.
Beyond two of my favorite movies as a kid—Pure Luck with Danny Glover and Three Amigos with Steve Martin and Chevy Chase—I think I had seen him in only one other film, The Father of the Bride. His time in the Canadian sketch-comedy show, Second City, was before my time, and I wasn’t allowed to watch Saturday Night Live or anything else on late-night TV, so I only got the few cult classics under my belt.
This autobiography by “a humble comedy legend” was enjoyable but way more vulgar than I would have expected. Again, Pure Luck and Three Amigos! My dad gave up reading this one early on (likely during the five-page Irving Cohen sidebar) for all the blasphemy and vulgarity. I skipped that whole section and otherwise didn’t come across any blasphemy. Crudeness and foul language, though, for sure.
Everyone else in the club that read the book recommended that I try to find it on audio, since Short sings and does voices for his characters and whatnot. I had already purchased the paperback, but when I found it available on my Libby app as audio, I cut my losses. And they were right: much better to listen to this one than to read it!
The book isn’t quite a job-by-job review of Short’s career, but rather more his recollections of the highlights and lowlights of his rise to stardom. He emphasizes his love life, his relationships with other comedians, and especially the difficulties and losses and he’s faced through the years. Most sensitive and raw is the loss of his wife, Nancy, to cancer in 2010.
This book of Martin Short’s life is yet another reminder to me that the folks we watch every day on the screen—entertainers we like to think we “know”—are nothing more than caricatures, facades behind which are real people, real souls with struggles and needs and hurts and kids and lives we really know nothing about. This book offers us “a peek into [Short’s] Fortress of Solitude” (as Amy Poehler writes in her blurb), but I still come away from it…lacking.
I don’t know if this lack is a desire to know more about Martin Short or a sadness at what this “successful” life without Christ actually looks like, a life where Jesus is nothing more than a punchline. I’m sure it’s the latter. So while there was plenty in the book that made me laugh, it was a hollow laugh. This was a bittersweet book.
©2022 E.T.
Check Out These Other Books by Comedians:
- Fatherhood by Bill Cosby (1986)
- Why Geese Fly Farther Than Eagles by Bob Stromberg (1992)
- This is a Book by Demetri Martin (2011)
- Point Your Face at This by Demetri Martin (2012)
- Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan (2013)
- Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan (2014)
- I Must Say by Martin Short (2014)
- Is This Anything? by Jerry Seinfeld (2020)