Movies

Actors often find themselves followed around by strangers quoting their most famous bits of dialogue at them. This happens to Martin Short ... a lot.

"It's all very odd," says the Tony and Emmy Award-winning stage, film and television actor, who's touring behind a comical and musical career retrospective. "When I was doing Fame Becomes Me on Broadway, I would leave the stage door and people would call out lines from sketches I did 25 years (before). And on the drive home, I'd sit there and think 'What was that line from? That sounds so familiar!' "

One can forgive the Canadian native for not being able to recall every hilariously catchy line he's uttered. From his early 1980s stint on the Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV, his work on Saturday Night Live, his memorable characters from movies like The Three Amigos and Father of the Bride and the Broadway shows The Goodbye Girl and Little Me, he's created a diverse collection of interestingly askew guys.

There's Wheel of Fortune-loving man-child Ed Grimley ("I must say!"), elegantly indecipherable wedding planner Franck Eggelhoffer of Father of the Bride ("Armani ... don't make polyester") and blustery celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick ("So, what's your beef with the Nazis?"). All come out during his stage show.

"This is all done under the guise of letting the audience know the real me," explains Short. "It's a party with Marty."

Q: So tell me a little about the show.

A: This is me, going out as myself but doing all (my) characters. I go out in the audience and drag people up onstage. Jiminy Glick shows up. Franck discusses the presidential candidates and (adopts Franck's indiscriminately European accent) what is chic and what is not chic. ... It's very tongue-in-cheek. At one point I select three terrified guys from the audience to be the Three Amigos and give the Three Amigos salute.

Q: Do they know it beforehand?

A: Some of them. But whether or not they know it, they sure can't do it.

Q: Do your characters have a common thread?

A: I don't think so, actually. Jiminy is a moron with power. He could have been the dean of a school or a congressman. And the idea that there would be a secretary somewhere who was scared whether she got his lunch right makes me laugh. Ed Grimley is just a man-child, fascinated by all the elements of life, even how his phone worked, and that helped people identify with him.

Franck is pretentious and wants the best for everybody, but he's more interested in what's chic and what's in style.

Q: Most people first got to know you in SCTV.

A: There was no audience. We did it like a movie. The cast shared similar sensibilities. What was interesting is how the comedy has stayed funny. Sometimes you look at old sketches from Saturday Night Live from the '80s, and they're very much of that time. SCTV was so character-oriented that my kids look at it and still laugh.

Q: How do you know which characters will work and which won't?

A: Sometimes things would work brilliantly, and a couple of pieces I thought would have really worked bombed, because they were too subtle. On SCTV we didn't have an audience telling you "We approve, we disapprove." It was "This is what we, the cast and the writers feel is funny, and you'll like it or not!" By the time you (disliked) it, we had already moved on.

Q: But that changed on SNL, which famously has a live audience.

A: Funny is a very, very subjective reaction. No one's really right, and no one's really wrong. And what's really daunting is that it always started up again on Monday. It was like a continuous set of final exams.