‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast — Martin Short (‘Only Murders in the Building’ and ‘Saturday Night Live’)

Martin Short, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is one of the funniest people in show business and has been for the past half-century. A writer, actor and variety specialist, he has been nominated for 14 Emmys and two Tonys, winning one of each. This year, he’s Emmy-eligible as a producer and star of the second season of Hulu’s comedy series Only Murders in the Building, on which he plays a bankrupt Broadway producer who teams up with two neighbors — played by Short’s longtime friend and collaborator Steve Martin and Gen Z queen Selena Gomez — to solve murders in their New York City apartment building; and for co-hosting, with Steve Martin, the Dec. 10, 2022 episode of NBC’s Saturday Night Live.

Short’s comedic abilities have long been revered. In 1994, The New York Times described him as “a comic chameleon”; in 2018, Esquire called him “a living legend, one of the last real utility players of comedy”; and, that same year, New York magazine labeled him a “comedy god,” noting that “he’s carved out a singular career as a show business jack-of-all-trades” and is “the type of funny where talk-show hosts introduce him as ‘the funniest man alive,’” adding, “It’s a testament to [his] talent that he’s attained pantheon status in the comedy world while never quite solely carrying one thing — blockbuster movie or hit sitcom or live special — that was a true mainstream success.”

Five years later, that caveat can be removed from the equation thanks to Only Murders in the Building, which, over its past two seasons, has become one of the most celebrated series on television.

Over the course of a conversation at his home in Pacific Palisades, the 73-year-old Canadian reflected on his lifelong passion for comedy, even in the face of tragedy (between the ages of 12 and 20, he lost his oldest brother in a car crash, his mother to cancer and his father to complications of a stroke, and 13 years ago he lost his wife of 30 years to cancer). He also spoke about his roots in sketch comedy — at Second City and SCTV in Toronto and then at Saturday Night Live in New York — prior to his move into movies and series TV, and his ultimate return to sketch comedy on The Martin Short Show, most famously as Jiminy Glick. And he talked about his special relationship with Steve Martin, with whom he made the films The Three Amigos in 1986, Father of the Bride in 1991 and Father of the Bride Part II in 1995, and also toured extensively, prior to Only Murders in the Building and their SNL hosting reunion (they first co-hosted the show, with Chevy Chase, back in 1986).