Martin Short

Martin Short is a Canadian comedian and actor who has spent more than five decades building one of the most recognizable comic personas in North American entertainment. Born on March 26, 1950, in Hamilton, Ontario, he came up through the theatrical world of Toronto before landing the kind of television exposure that changes careers overnight. He's best known for his work as a sketch performer, a stage presence, and a film character actor capable of swinging between broad farce and something genuinely strange — a quality that's harder to pull off than it looks.

The breakthrough came with his 1984 season on Saturday Night Live, where Short introduced characters like Ed Grimley, the gap-toothed, triangle-playing innocent whose social awkwardness somehow read as both absurd and oddly moving. What's striking is how committed Short was to the physical grammar of those characters — the posture, the specific hand gestures, the way Grimley's optimism kept colliding with his complete inability to read a room. That commitment carried into his film work through the late 1980s and 1990s, including Three Amigos (1986) alongside Steve Martin and Chevy Chase, and the remake of Father of the Bride (1991), where he played Franck Eggelhoffer, a wedding coordinator whose accent defied geography and whose energy bordered on performance art. Those two films alone established his screen template: he doesn't play supporting roles so much as he colonizes them, making you forget the film's nominal leads are standing right next to him.

His collaborations with Steve Martin — both on screen and in their long-running stage show — form the backbone of his post-SNL career. The two have a chemistry built on mutual respect for craft and a shared willingness to look completely ridiculous in service of a joke. Short's work has consistently occupied the space where comedy tips into something slightly unsettling (his appearances on Late Night television, for instance, where the performance never quite drops even when the format suggests it should). He's done Broadway, he's done animated voice work, he's done prestige television. The range isn't always acknowledged the way it probably should be.

Recent work has pulled Short back into the orbit of legacy Hollywood — and not in a nostalgic, self-congratulatory way. He appears in I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not (2025), a documentary examining the career and controversies surrounding his former Three Amigos co-star. Short's involvement there is worth noting because it places him in an interesting position: a witness to a specific era of American comedy, someone who worked closely with Chase during a period when Chase was both at his most commercially powerful and, by many accounts, his most difficult. Hard to say if Short's participation is reflective or simply archival, but either way, I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not benefits from having voices who were actually in the room.

He's still working. Consistently, without the long gaps that mark careers that have run out of momentum. That's not nothing — especially for a comedian whose style is so distinctly of a particular era of physical and character comedy, and who has somehow kept finding contexts where that style doesn't feel like a relic but like a specific, irreplaceable thing that the current generation of comedy hasn't quite figured out how to replicate. Short doesn't reinvent himself every few years. He doesn't need to. The craft is the constant.