Comedy’s ultimate double act is coming to Australia
Steve Martin and Martin Short, who are bringing their sell-out show to Australia, are two of the great comedy performers of our time, but both set a pretty high bar for themselves when it comes to defining success.
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Steve Martin and Martin Short are two of the great comedy performers of our time, but both set a pretty high bar for themselves when it comes to defining success.
“I’ve never had that feeling because you’re always doing something new that you’re not convinced will work so you can’t rest on your laurels,” Short tells Insider.
“You’re always in the moment of creating something new and I don’t think you’re ever so confident that you think ‘I’m a certified hit’.”
Fans of the pair, who are bringing their popular stage show Now You See Them, Soon You Won’t to Australia later this year, would certainly disagree, given their almost century
of shared experience across television, movies, music and stage.
They starred opposite each other in box office hits The Three Amigos, Father Of The Bride and its sequel Father Of The Bride II, and have a string of hits on their own.
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Martin, a five-time Golden Globe nominee and honorary Academy Award recipient, was the go-to man for comedy gold in the 1980s and ’90s with such movies as Planes, Trains And Automobiles (1987), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), Parenthood (1989), and Leap Of Faith (1992).
Short shot to fame on popular Canadian sketch show Second City Television before a stint on hit-maker Saturday Night Live and roles in movies such as Mars Attacks, Jungle 2 Jungle and creating the hilarious Jiminy Glick.
Martin can at least pinpoint the moment when he realised he could probably stop worrying about the walls of his career crumbling in around him — although it took more than a decade of what would constitute considerable success for almost anyone else.
“I lived with ‘well, this is going to be over any minute’,” he says. “I had sort of some success in the late ’70s as a stand-up, then I did movies for 10 years and after that 10 years I thought ‘gee, I thought it was going to be over any minute and it’s not so I’m just going to accept that I’m around’.
“I started to relax and when I started to relax my work became better. Marty, maybe you should relax a little bit,” he adds, laughing at his colleague.
The road to comedic success is often paved with tales of tinned food and slumming on couches, and while Martin concedes it didn’t get that bad for him, there were definitely some tough times.
“I would do a job at a college to get paid $100 and it would cost me $125 to get there, that’s where I was — do the math,” he laughs. “You just keep plugging away at it, it’s incremental, it’s nothing that happens overnight.”
Short’s own story could have turned out very differently if not for a determination to push through a period of unimaginable pain during his formative years.
When he was just 12, his older brother David was killed in a car accident. At 17 his mother died of cancer and just after turning 20, his father passed away from complications following a stroke.
“I was the youngest of five children so there were still three siblings older than I and very protective of me, so it wasn’t like I was just a loose orphan at 20,” he says. “But I do think that when you go through things like that you’re either empowered by them or you become victims by them and maybe the way you’re raised, you’re inspired to go with one category
or the other.”
These two comedy heavyweights from very different backgrounds have been close friends since meeting on the set of western comedy The Three Amigos in the mid-1980s.
Both have spoken in the past about working on movies and not feeling the need to stay in touch with some co-stars once the cameras stop rolling. But when their worlds collided something clicked, although Martin jokes “Well, first I was first attracted to his wife”.
Interestingly their enduring friendship comes down to not giving it too much thought.
“We don’t worry about it too much, we’re just kind of friends and we don’t call each other every day,” Martin says. “There’s no neediness, although I think I’m a little more needy than Marty. We’re old so we have many opportunities to pick up and discard and retain important friends.”
Their sell-out US tour, which they have been taking on the road for a number of years now, was born out of a one-off show at the close of the Chicago Just For Laughs Festival in 2011 where the pair interviewed each other on stage. Both were touring individual shows at the time — Short with his comedy and Martin his music (he has played the banjo for more than 50 years and won three Grammys for his music) — and they realised they could combine the two.
World politics, and especially those in the US, are fodder for comedians of late. President Donald Trump has been the butt of many a stand-up’s jokes but you won’t see him lampooned
(too much) in Now You See Them, Soon You Won’t.
“We try not to be political because that is on television — and especially in America on chat shows and talk shows and it’s just constantly in your face,” Martin says. “We try to do a really entertaining, funny show and we have a minimal part which is kind of political but it’s also basically trying to be funny again.”
Where Short is quite vocal in his political thoughts away from the stage — sometimes appearing on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher — Martin doesn’t feel he has the political chops to engage in public debate.
“I try not to because I know that in order to be a good advocate for whatever you believe, you have to be experienced, practised, you have to know the arguments every which way and I am just political by voting,” he says.
The pair were interested to learn Australian politics has experienced some interesting challenges itself over the past few years, but Martin still conceded “America’s leading the world in crazy”.
Martin and Short are excited to bring their show Down Under, a place they both feel a special connection with.
“I was there the first time in 2009 touring around and then 2011,” Short says. “I think it’s the most beautiful continent imaginable and as a Canadian I always feel like we’re cousins.”
“I also feel a camaraderie with Australia for some reason,” Martin adds. “I’m not sure why — maybe it’s Crocodile Dundee.”
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