Like many people who chase a dream, Martin Short had kept had a backup plan, but his was linked to a countdown. Long before he became a comedy fixture, he gave himself exactly one year to make it in show business. If he failed, he planned to become a social worker.
Short shared the deadline on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend after O’Brien asked whether he would have found another path without his big break. “It was very difficult for me to leave the stepping stones of school … I’d now done four years of university. I was now going to do a master’s in social work,” Short said.
Short, who earned a social work degree from McMaster University, lost his eldest brother, David, in a car accident when he was 12. His mother died of cancer in 1968, and his father died two years later. “I definitely gave myself a one-year contract to be in show business because my parents weren’t living at this point. I was 20 and my father had just died,” he said.
His father’s wishes still guided him. “I had an inheritance, but I knew that he wouldn’t support me being an actor … he’d support education,” Short explained. “So I thought I will do this for a year, but … I don’t want to be a waiter at 37.”
He was serious about the deadline. “Had I not worked in that year, I definitely would have gone back to school,” he said. The goal was to avoid lifelong regret, not to guarantee success. “I wanted to be able to say, ‘No, you did. Remember, no one hired you’,” he said of the conversation he imagined having with himself decades later.
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Someone did hire him. In 1972, Stephen Schwartz cast Short in a new Toronto production of Godspell. The show opened at the Royal Alexandra Theatre and ran for 488 performances. Short said hundreds of hopefuls showed up for callbacks, and the final choice for his role came down to him and “this other very talented guy named Andrew.” He remembered Schwartz settling it from the stage: “You are fabulous. I think we’re going to go with Martin.”
The cast also included Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin and Victor Garber. That group is now the subject of the documentary You Had to Be There, which reached U.S. theaters on Sept. 18. Short credits timing as much as talent. “I was just lucky that that show was happening. Was lucky that I got it,” he said.
Short went on to SCTV and Saturday Night Live. Decades later, he has taken Only Murders in the Building with Steve Martin to London for its sixth season. O’Brien summed up what that one-year bet produced. “I can’t think of another name of someone who’s brought me as much joy as you have,” he told his friend.
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