The single biggest regret of Martin Short’s career: “I wish I’d done more”
With a beloved comedy career stretching across half a century, spanning the farthest reaches of the stage and screen, it is fair to say that Martin Short has done rather well for himself, and thus it is difficult to envision the performer boasting many regrets about his many years in the industry. Then again, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
There is, of course, little doubt that Short has typically made the correct decisions with regard to advancing his career, breaking into the film world with still-beloved classics like Three Amigos and expanding his personal repertoire from acting to sketch comedy to live performance and everything in between. With that diversity, however, comes a career that is always rather fast-paced, leaving Short with little time to appreciate the here and now or, in the case of a job he held for a brief period in the mid-1980s, time to fully enjoy himself.
After years of carving out the success of the Canadian sketch comedy triumph Second City Television, Short was called to the highest office of North American alternative comedy: Saturday Night Live. Having already rubbed shoulders with the world created by that legendary show, Short was a natural fit for the show and entered the cast for the tenth season in 1984.
While perhaps not the all-time greatest season of the show, that cast did feature its fair share of star power, with the likes of Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Harry Shearer making up some of Short’s fellow cast members.
During his time on the programme, Short developed and struck upon a litany of comic characters, many of which remain a much-loved part of his career to this very day. Nevertheless, his time on the core cast was pretty short, in the grand scheme of things; Short lasting just one year on the show, before Lorne Michaels’ return to the show for season 11 sparked an entirely new cast and crew.
Looking back, the brief nature of his time on the show is one of Short’s only career regrets. “I also only did one year of Saturday Night Live, and I wish I’d done more,” he once revealed to Backstage. “I had a one-year contract, so I treated every show like a special. I wish I had thought, ‘No, you’re going to be here for five years.’” Alternatively, had Short not treated every show like a special, there is no guarantee that his time on the show would have been quite so, well, special.
There is also an argument to be had, of course, that the demanding nature of being on the SNL cast could easily have meant that Short would have been limited in the number of external projects he could have taken on were he signed to a five year contract. 1986’s aforementioned Three Amigos, for instance, might never have come to fruition, along with a deluge of other projects that advanced Short’s career tenfold.
Ultimately, some performers stick around at SNL for years – decades, even – on end, while others spend a few glorious months on the show before moving on to bigger and better things. Over the years, it has proven itself as a vehicle for career progression in American comedy, and Martin Short certainly felt the effects of that himself.
Now that he has breached the glass ceiling, though, perhaps it is easier to look back on that period in the mid-1980s without the hunger for success and creative freedom that Short undoubtedly harboured at the time.
