Bernadette Peters wants everyone to know that Martin Short's bad breath joke is not about her

Back in 2018, Martin Short dished on a leading lady he’d once starred opposite in a play who had terrible bad breath. Eventually, the issue got so bad that he alerted a stage manager: “So the next night, we came out… and she had an Altoid in her mouth or something. But it now smelled like someone had put a peppermint in the morgue,” he said on The Late Late Show With James Corden. “No, really. It was Steve Bannon’s couch. It never got better.”

Who was this mystery lady suffering from severe halitosis? “I’m not telling you,” Short says in a new profile with The Hollywood Reporter (wherein the anecdote punchline is attributed to “John Goodman’s couch”). “Although Bernadette Peters always says, ‘Baby, everyone thinks it’s me.’ It wasn’t Bernadette Peters.”

And so we can eliminate Short’s The Goodbye Girl co-star from the list of suspects. One might peruse his Wikipedia page of stage credits to try to solve the mystery, but the comedian is not going to reveal the answer himself. He is, in the parlance of hyperspeed Internet trends, very demure, very mindful when it comes to naming names. For instance, in the THR interview he references attending a dinner party at Nora Ephron’s where “Everyone was famous around the round table,” but says he “won’t quote the names.” He asked the group about the “biggest prick” they ever worked with, but no one had any examples, except Ephron, who had nine. Short does not name any of Ephron’s nine biggest pricks. 

That’s probably just because he’s a pretty nice guy, which is a contrast to his often acerbic wit. Even Jiminy Glick, Short’s famous and very rude interviewer character, isn’t an outlet for the comic’s own cruelty: “What makes me laugh more about what Jiminy says is how he’s a moron with power,” Short says. And trading insults with his comedy partner Steve Martin is all in good fun. “We write them together with a writer’s help, and then we rewrite and assemble them. We’re often asked, ‘Have you guys ever gone too far or hurt each other?’ It’s never happened. Because even if I went too far with Steve, he wouldn’t believe that I had any agenda to be mean,” he explains.

There’s only one quip Short can remember that he felt was too far. “There was a joke John Mulaney wrote for Steve’s AFI [Life Achievement Award in 2015] that I didn’t use, like, ‘I’ve been through rough times, but Steve’s always been there for me with a weird, cold hand on my shoulder as he tries to mimic human emotion,'” Short recalls. “Later on, I told it to Steve, and he said, ‘Why didn’t you do that?'”