How Martin Short became a new generation's Don Rickles on late-night TV

For decades, there wasn’t a better, more reliably nasty talk-show guest than Mr. Warmth himself, Don Rickles. His whole act, whether on a Las Vegas stage or a talk show, was predicated on the notion that he could (and would) say anything about anyone, no matter their gender, race, or religion, and it would somehow manage to be hilarious even though it was also scabrously offensive. Since his passing in 2017, there has been a splintering of talk shows across broadcast and cable, and only one guest has ably and consistently taken Rickles’ torch: Martin Short. 

Although Short has had a career rejuvenation thanks to the funny, whip-smart series Only Murders In The Building, which is in the middle of its fourth season, the actor has been a mainstay on late-night shows since the ’80s, with some of his best jabs airing on Late Night With Conan O’Brien and Conan. In spirit, Short’s snide remarks to O’Brien are similar to what Rickles said to Johnny Carson, mocking, among other things, the host’s pale skin. “You make Mike Pence look like a character in Black Panther,” he once chided, his secret weapon (that thousand-watt smile and grin belying all of the scathing one-liners) always at the ready. (If anything, Short’s spritely air only made his knocks on O’Brien that much funnier.)

Some of the punchlines that Short unleashes on late-night TV are not unlike the ones his Only Murders character Oliver throws at Steve Martin’s Charles, many of which boil down to, yes, Martin’s paleness. And as was the case with Rickles, the iffier the subject, the funnier the joke, although Short is averse to going to the well of racially tinged zingers. Instead, Short gets creatively personal. He was one of Conan’s final TBS interviews, and on that occasion, he calmly asked, “Who’s your last guest? I assume it’s Jay Leno?” before acting aggrieved that he may have offended the gasping crowd. (O’Brien, unsurprisingly, laughed heartily at the reference and quickly slipped into his well-worn, high-pitched impression of Leno, complete with head waggle.)  

Really, the key difference between Rickles and Short is the latter’s sneaky little smile, which can be so disarming as to make audiences all the more shocked when he roasts a host like O’Brien or Stephen Colbert. And some of that surprise could be generational. Whereas audiences of the Johnny Carson era knew immediately what was about to happen when Don Rickles stalked out onstage (that he’d invariably lay into Carson, Ed McMahon, whichever guest was on the couch, or anyone, really), younger crowds can sometimes be a bit more baffled by Short’s nonstop jabbing. In one of Short’s appearances on Conan, he noted that one commenter on YouTube took offense to his roasts, not realizing that O’Brien is an incredibly receptive audience and a real-life friend who’s very much enjoying the jokes.

One of the network-TV bright spots this past summer was when Short took over as guest host for a week on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Though he appeared as himself for most of the run, he gave the last night over to his talk-show persona, the outlandish parody of a Hollywood-junket journalist, Jiminy Glick. (In an interview with GQ, Short said The Kids In The Hall‘s Dave Foley remarked that Glick’s celebrity put-downs allowed Short to be “actually as mean as [he is] in real life.”) For Kimmel, Glick sat with Bill Hader, who spent most of the interview laughing so hard that he cried, with non-sequitur questions about Willie Mays’ recent passing and the word “lisp” breaking his fellow SNL alum. 

Short also pulls the curtain back a bit more than Rickles. In that aforementioned YouTube bit on Conan, he admitted that he was reading comments in the middle of the night because he’s “needy and desperate.” Which is all to say that part of  what makes Short’s roasts more palatable to a modern audience is that he is more than willing to turn the target on himself. During his live shows with Martin, one of which was filmed for Netflix’s Steve Martin And Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget For The Rest Of Your Life, he does drop bombs (“Working with Steve is like the movie Deliverance: It’s all fun and games until the banjo comes out”), but he’s also able to laugh at his own career. In one one of the pair’s standard back-and-forths, he asked Martin what the he’d be doing if he wasn’t a comic legend. The response? “Probably what you’re doing.”

In a way, Short feels like an essential talk-show throwback, as he brings a type of insults-spiked energy and old-Hollywood fascination that has begun to feel sadly out of step. If you find yourself in a YouTube rabbit hole of classic late-night clips, you may stumble upon some of the Carson-era stalwarts like Rickles and the late-great Bob Newhart (the two of whom were best friends, as fate would have it) telling old war stories about their days in the business to Conan, Colbert, Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon. Similarly, Short has been pulling out his own Hollywood stories for years, as in a mid-2000s spot on Late Night With Conan O’Brien where he recounted a tale about infuriating Lucille Ball in the early 1980s (roughly around the same time that Short’s fellow SCTV writers playfully mocked Milton Berle while accepting an Emmy). What Short does so effectively on these talk shows is straddle the line between the old and the new, just as he and Martin do with co-star Selena Gomez on Only Murders.

The days when people’s lives could be dominated by a particularly memorable talk-show spot have pretty much fallen by the wayside, partially because there are too many options from which to choose. But certain guests promise the closest we can get to old-school, late-night appointment television, and Short is the cream of that crop. If Primetime Glick, which ran on Comedy Central in the early aughts, was just too pure for this world, at least we can rest assured that Short will occasionally grace the couch and kill it for ten minutes every so often, gleefully savaging big names to their faces just like in the good ol’ days.