I Must Say (18 page)

But what made me truly earn my
SCTV
stripes was
Martin Scorsese's Jerry Lewis Live on the Champs-Élysées
. Having idolized Lewis my whole life, to actually play him—and to “run around like a monkey,” as Dave Letterman once described my Lewis shtick—was as fulfilling a moment creatively as I'd ever experienced. I appeared not as early slapstick Jerry, but as mid-period auteur Jerry, with the slicked hair, the blockish oversize eyeglasses, the attitude of superiority, and the legions of adoring French faithful. In one scene I wore a child's sailor suit while smoking a cigarette and lecturing the crowd: “And the point is, they're terrified of a perfectionist. And if a
Jerry Lewis
ain't gonna get a distribution deal, because of some fakakta twelve-year-old with the pimples on his face who's head of the studio . . .
this
week . . . who doesn't know from
Hardly Working
or
The Errand Boy
or
Cinderfella
. . . where are you, the public, expected to find the
love
and the
caring
and the
feeling
and the
good
and the
nice
? And even if you did, it wouldn't be the good kind, because of the difference caused by the earlier thing.”

My Jerry was a temperamental fellow who broke down while singing “You'll
Jamais
Walk Alone” and went ballistic at his conductor (played by Dave) for not picking up this breakdown as a musical cue: “When I do the cry, you do the cue! Cry? Cue! You like your job?
Do it!
”

It was during this Jerry bit that one of the show's producers, Nancy Geller, called people over to the TV monitor showing the
live feed in her office and said, “Is everyone watching what's going on here?”

I was in; I had proven that I was attuned to that not easily located
SCTV
frequency where each sketch, and each characterization, was rife with subtle, unexplained touches that lent the comedy unusual texture, even if they didn't always make apparent sense. (This sensibility would also serve me well in working with Christopher Guest in the years to come.) It had all been pent up in me, these ideas, these characters, this
energy
. For the first time my career trajectory was coinciding with the hip energy in comedy. At thirty-two, I was finally able to give the world the Full Marty.

R
ick, Dave, and Catherine did indeed leave the show at the end of that season, in May '82. As I've said, I still think in terms of the school-year calendar, and the
SCTV
schedule neatly coincided with my mind-set: we didn't have to go back to work until the day after Labor Day. I was beside myself with joy. It had been a long time since I'd had the perfect actor's summer: two months off, with the guarantee of a good job in the fall.

It was daunting to carry on with
SCTV
with a mere five performers—John, Joe, Andrea, Eugene, and me—but the atmosphere that next season was total bliss. Collectively, the five of us were in great spirits and creatively fertile. We would go on to win an Emmy that season for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy or Music Program. There was literally no way for us to lose: all five nominees in the category were
SCTV
episodes.

John Candy—how fabulous was it to finally collaborate creatively with this man? Though he and I had known each other ten years, we'd never truly worked together closely, unless you count the time he (unintentionally) broke two of my ribs while we were
roughhousing with a football on the set of
The David Steinberg Show
. The two of us just looked funny together, given our size difference, whether it was the Fred Rogers–Julia Child thing or him playing Ed Grimley's evil, manipulative brother Skip Grimley in
What Ever Happened to Baby Ed?
, our homage to the Joan Crawford–Bette Davis kitsch classic
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

A typical John writing session took place at his huge house north of Toronto. John always radiated prosperity and magnanimity; he had movie roles in real movies way ahead of the rest of us (in
Stripes
,
The Blues Brothers
, and even Steven Spielberg's
1941
), and he loved playing host and picking up the check. Actually, we never really got much writing done at John's. We'd drink a bunch of rum and Cokes, watch some delivery men load a new pool table into his rec room, eat dinner at around eleven thirty, and then I'd clap my hands and say, “John, we have got to write this scene.” “And we
will
,” he'd say, “but first, how dare your glass be empty, you bastard!” And there would go the night.

Which isn't to say we didn't work hard on
SCTV
. But it was all so idyllic. As a little boy, I'd watched
The Dick Van Dyke Show
and romanticized its view of show business: the way Rob Petrie's job was to go sit in a room all day, write jokes with Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie, and then be home in New Rochelle in time for dinner with his sexy wife.
SCTV
was really like that. Every episode was labor-intensive, but we kept civilized hours. And the conviviality of our writing sessions was unlike anything I've experienced since—even when things got contentious.

One time, Andrea was pitching an idea that Eugene didn't get. Now, Eugene was
SCTV
's
most prolific and selfless writer, generating more material than anyone else and giving himself the least flashy roles in the cast pieces he'd write. He was and is the sweetest human being ever created; I still address him by
the nickname his mother bestowed upon him, Lamby. (Mrs. Levy was that rarest of specimens, an Orthodox Jew reared in Scotland; “Oh, my wee Lamby,” she'd tenderly say in her unique Yiddish-Scottish accent as she served Eugene an extra helping of brisket.) But in the writers' room, Eugene could get very professorial. And in his slightly serious, analytical way, Eugene said, “Andrea, I wish I could understand the humor of that scene, but I just can't.” Andrea, who was sitting next to Eugene, stared at him for a beat and then reached over with her pen and marked an X on the crotch of his pants, where his penis would be. “I'm just putting that there so Deb can find it later,” she said.

The working pace at
SCTV
was so civilized. We'd take six weeks to write and then six weeks to shoot, followed by another cycle of six weeks writing and six weeks shooting. The writing breaks were crucial, for they allowed inchoate ideas to develop, mature, ripen, and, on occasion, ferment into total, utter originality, all without the
SNL
-style pressure of “Whaddaya got for
this week
?” And when Catherine came back to do our Christmas shows, we had even more fun. (Catherine, I think, had the most unique, brilliant comic instincts of any of us—a fearless Canadian individuality coupled with a magical changeling's ability to morph into any being her fertile, freaky mind could conjure—while Andrea was the most instinctively funny of us as a performer.)

The unsung heroes of
SCTV
were its hair, makeup, and costume people. Our head of makeup was Beverley Schechtman, whose constant refrain to me was “Give me the look”—meaning, show her the signature facial expression(s) of whichever character I was trying to formulate. So, for Jerry Lewis, I'd do a series of Jerry faces, and I'd have a robe on, to which Bev would tape photographs of the real Jerry while trying to achieve the ideal synthesis of what he looked like and what I was doing with my face.
For Jackie Rogers Jr. I did my palsied, cockeyed Sammy Davis Jr. face, and Bev did her magic with makeup to bring out Jackie's full albino grotesquerie. Our hair and wig designer, though that title barely covers the full extent of her gifts, was Judi Cooper-Sealy. She would not just hand me a wig but present me with five albino-white versions of Jackie's hair—among them a Veronica Lake swoop, a Farrah Fawcett shag, and a pageboy—and I'd try them all on before deciding, “Judi, let's go with the pageboy.”

Our costume designer was a man named Juul Haalmayer, who was almost like another comedy writer. I could say to him, “Jackie should be Vegas-y, but
low
Vegas-y, bordering on Reno,” and he'd intuitively get it, without any rigmarole. I'd show up the next day, and there on the costume rack would be the shimmery silver tunic and leggings: the Jackie look as horrified viewers would come to know it.

S
CTV
deliberately veered away from any comedy concept that seemed too obvious, e.g., a note-for-note parody of some current show like
Three's Company
. Eugene and I, for example, did this routine in which we donned tuxedos and painted our teeth white to play Sandler and Young, a real-life nightclub singing duo (I was the Belgian-born Tony Sandler, and Eugene the American-born Ralph Young) who were a constant presence on TV specials in the 1960s and '70s. Sandler and Young specialized in performing hopelessly dull, hopelessly square duets. Surely no human being in North America was clamoring for a parodic rendering of Sandler and Young, yet we plowed ahead, and it worked, regardless of whether the viewers had ever even heard of the act. (Sandler and Young were occasional guests on
The Sammy Maudlin Show
—Eugene singing “Feelin' Groovy” in counterpoint to me singing “Alouette,” that sort of thing.)

Ed Grimley, my old Second City stage character, was some
one I'd initially resisted bringing to television, because I thought he was just too weird even for
SCTV
. Well, that, and because he had by that point become a very intimate figure in my personal life—the character Nancy summoned to mediate our arguments, and whose face I sometimes pulled as I walked out of the shower, dripping wet and naked, just to get a laugh out of her. You know, you put together the concepts of “naked” and “marital aide” and “Ed” and you start to think, this is way too personal for anyone besides Marty and Nancy Short to see.

But there was a call at the end of the 1981–'82 season, before Rick and Dave left, for one-off low-budget pieces that could be shot quickly, against a wall, and I came up with the idea of Ed being a guest lecturer on “Sunrise Semester,” a recurring
SCTV
bit that parodied dull early-morning educational television. It was pretty simple: Ed talking about snakes—“The snake is a hypnotic thing, I must say . . .”—and then falling under the sway of a cobra with whom he comes face-to-face: “Yes, master . . .” No one was particularly taken with the piece in the writers' room, but I filmed it anyway, barely having any idea what I was doing.

SCTV
was filmed at Magder Studios in Toronto. The way it was laid out, the writing offices were upstairs, and you had to walk down the stairs and across the actual studio floor to get to the dressing rooms and hair-and-makeup area, as well as to the Italian restaurant on the ground floor that we all frequented. Dave Thomas was passing through the studio while I was filming Ed's
Sunrise Semester
, and I showed him the playback, asking him how I could make the piece better. Dave regarded the screen for a moment and answered, “Just do it. Keep going. I have no idea what you're doing, but I think you do.”

The lead producer of
SCTV
that season, Don Novello, best known as Father Guido Sarducci on
Saturday Night Live
, didn't
know what to make of the “Sunrise Semester” bit and didn't slate it for an episode. That might have been the end of Ed right there. But the following season, a new producer, Pat Whitley, found the snake piece sitting on the shelf and thought it was hysterical. So Ed finally made it to network television on Friday, November 19, 1982, and, for reasons no one on this planet can fully explain, connected with viewers. Dave was right: I just had to keep going and trust that someone would find these dispatches from my odd little mind appealing.

From there, Ed became a regular, an actor who worked at the Second City Television Network, appearing with John in
What Ever Happened to Baby Ed?
, as a lovelorn dweeb in the Jerry Lewis–movie takeoff
The Nutty Lab Assistant
, and as the star of the after-school special
The Fella Who Couldn't Wait for Christmas
: “This waiting is, like, making me mental, I must say. What time is it now? Aw, two oh four, this is a
joke
!”

G
oing home from work late one night, I picked up a copy of
New York
magazine to read on the subway. Leafing through its pages, I was flabbergasted to find an article by James Wolcott, the future
Vanity Fair
columnist, that was basically a two-page paean to me. “Short has brought to
SCTV
the elfin twinkle he had on
The Associates
,” Wolcott wrote, “but he's also chipped in something novel and unanticipated—a brash, cavorting, crazy-legged kickiness.”

I'd learned long ago not to put much stock in reviews, but this was something different: an unsolicited love letter to what I personally had brought to
SCTV
. I can't tell you how good it felt, how validating. Of my Jerry Lewis impression, Wolcott said that it played as “a pitilessly detailed piece of caricature,” but “when Short vamped with the orchestra, braving whiplash as he flung back his head in
mad abandon, he reminded us of how much fun Jerry Lewis was in his bounding prime, when his anarchistic exuberance threatened to burst his seams.” Yes, exactly. I wasn't above poking fun at Lewis, but I brought affection and a sense of tribute to my Lewis bits too. I considered them the performance equivalent of Al Hirschfeld's pen-and-ink caricatures. Yes, you had to show the warts, but you also had to prove why the subject was worthy of your attention.

What
SCTV
was for me, I came to realize, was the culmination of all those routines I did as a child in the attic on Whitton Road—right down to the idea of an imaginary television network stocked with imaginary programming. The way I see it, you spend the first fifteen years of your life as a sponge, soaking up influences and experiences, and the remainder of your life recycling, regurgitating, and reprocessing those first fifteen years.