I Must Say (5 page)

All of these facts make us Shorts sound traditional. Believe me, we weren't. I grew up thinking that our household was the strangest on the street, bordering on insanity. I later learned that many of the other families on Whitton Road—and it was the kind of street where every family had lived there for twenty, thirty, forty years—had their own brand of lunacy, with drunken dads, sedated moms, and so on. By comparison, ours was a happy home, but it was still nuts. My father would come home from the steel company wearing that
Mad Men
fedora that all executives wore back then, and he would immediately pour himself his usual drink: gin and ginger ale, no ice. Dad didn't eat dinner with us. As we Short children convened with Mom around the dinner table in the kitchen nook, he would sit off to the side, about six feet away, sipping his gin and ginger at the little table with the radio on it, his face buried in the newspaper.

Still, his remove from the family table didn't prevent Dad from peering over his paper on occasion to insult our manners. “Marty, don't shovel the food in like an animal, dear,” he'd say. Or he might jump from his chair with feigned urgency, arms wide open in a protective stance, and pretend to guard the table, saying, “Good boy, Michael. Eat even faster. I'll make sure the dogs don't get at your plate.”

Later on, around 9:30 p.m., Dad would go into the kitchen and pan-fry a steak for himself, heavily seasoned with Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. Occasionally he'd fry an extra one for us, sliding a piece of bread under the steak as it finished cooking so
that the bread absorbed the juices. He'd bring his plate into the den, where we were watching TV, and we kids would pretend to be dogs, panting around his chair, paws out, begging for scraps. He'd say, “Here ya go, dear,” and give us bites. Maybe it's sentimentality, but, to this day, I have never tasted anything more delicious.

Dad was smart, funny, and, as you might have surmised, witheringly sarcastic. His bluntness and condescending wit were hysterical as long as you yourself weren't bearing the brunt. Years later, when I was playing the celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick on TV, I'd watch the playback of my totally improvised scenes—things like Jiminy telling Conan O'Brien, “Look at how wonderful you look; whatever cosmetic surgery you've had done, I'd say twenty percent more and then stop,” or asking Mel Brooks, “What's your big beef with the Nazis?”—and think, where on earth did that instinct come from? Oh, right: Dad. (Mel's response, by the way, was, “Oh, I don't know. I find them rude.”)

My father—Chuck, as we kids called him behind his back—really loved his gin and gingers, though he was careful to drink them only under our roof. Monday through Friday, he'd sip from the moment he arrived home till the moment he went to bed. Saturdays and Sundays, he sipped all day. It sounds traumatic, but it was just the normal state of things in our house. My siblings and I had a running joke: “Oh, Dad's in his drunk shirt!” He had a specific plaid shirt that he wore only on weekends, and it meant, to us kids, that Dad had had a few—and therefore it might be wise to keep a wide berth.

The five little Shorts were born, as I've said, over a fourteen-year span. David, my oldest brother, was born in 1936, followed by Nora, my only sister, in 1937. Then, a while later, came my brothers Michael and Brian, born in '44 and '45, respectively,
followed, on the momentous date of March 26, 1950 (I think we all remember where we were that day), by me. We all adored our mother, Olive, who was as kind and radiant as Dad was bespectacled, plump-cheeked, and ornery. Mom was a stylish, striking woman, with blond hair and wide-set eyes; the actress Martha Plimpton reminds me a little of her. We kids considered her one of us, our ally in the ongoing battle against the benevolent household tyrant that was our father.

Make no mistake, we loved Dad, and we knew he loved us. His drinking never made him physically violent, and he was never overturning tables like Richard Burton in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
But his words were often barbed and full of provocation. I remember that David at some point in the 1950s invited over a friend, Kent Follis, a gentle, harmless kid who happened to have an Elvis-style pompadour. My father opened the door, sized up Kent, and said, “Can I take your hat for ya, dear?” Another time a friend of mine who was half Irish and half Jewish was visiting me. My father, upon hearing of my friend's heritage, approached him and declared, “You know, dear, back in county Armagh, where my people are from, we have a name for someone who is half Irish and half Jewish. We call that person . . . a Jew.”

D
ad spoke with a faint Irish brogue because he was from Northern Ireland—born in 1909 in the town of Crossmaglen, one of eleven siblings. (Mom, four years younger, was born in Hamilton and was of English and Irish descent.) Dad was a self-made man, which, given the Depression era in which he navigated his new life, was quite remarkable. He first crossed the Atlantic as a seventeen-year-old stowaway, making his way to Texas before he was bounced back home for being in the United States
illegally. He successfully put down roots on his second try, four years later, living first in Buffalo before finally settling in Hamilton and working his way up from traveling sales rep to third-in-command at Stelco.

Only two other siblings sought a life outside Northern Ireland. Dad's brother Tom moved to New York, and his brother Frank to Birmingham, England. One of Frank's children, my first cousin Clare Short, grew up to represent Birmingham as a member of Parliament and a tough, outspoken Labour Party firebrand who was later tapped to be Great Britain's secretary of state for international development. In other words, England got the second-generation Short who stood on principle and resigned from Tony Blair's cabinet over her nation going to war with Iraq under false pretenses, while Canada got the second-generation Short who falls over on talk shows and humps celebrities in his Jiminy Glick fat suit to get laughs.

Anyway: the other eight Shorts of my father's generation stayed in Crossmaglen, where since 1885 the family has owned and lived above a pub, Short's Bar. It's still there, and still operated by my aunt Rosaleen. When I went over and met the Irish Shorts, I began to understand how Dad's background in a big, rowdy Irish family endowed him with a quick, jousting wit, which he passed on to us. In 1997, when I was in England doing the miniseries
Merlin
for NBC, I spent two weekends over in Crossmaglen, sleeping in my father's old bedroom above the bar. My uncle Paddy, my father's youngest sibling and Rosaleen's husband, was still alive then, running the bar. One night I stayed up into the wee hours with my cousins Oliver and Patrick, Paddy's sons, talking loudly and uninhibitedly about the Shorts on both sides of the ocean. We started with beer and quickly moved on to whiskey, followed by . . . still more
whiskey. I finally got about four hours of bed-spinning sleep before the sun rose and woke me up. I walked down the stairs to the pub, bleary-eyed, to find Uncle Paddy cleaning out all the empty glasses we'd left at the bar. “Soooo,” he said, a glint in his eye, his voice not unlike Dad's, “how did the character assassination go last night?”

So my own family's dynamic had an ancestral context. The mealtime conversation in our house on Whitton Road, even when Dad wasn't engaged in it, was a sustained, survival-of-the-fittest verbal sparring match. The talk often became heated, but the key to it is that there was always laughter within thirty seconds of the heat. I think of this as a very Irish trait; Bill Murray and Conan O'Brien, who also developed their comedic reflexes in large, argumentative Irish Catholic families, know what I'm talking about.

I actually used my beloved tape recorder to capture some of my family's squabbling. Among my favorites is a recording of our Christmas dinner in 1966, when I was sixteen years old, and Dad was with us at the table for a change. As it opens, my brother Michael is upset at my brother Brian for wanting more dark meat from the turkey, but not a turkey leg:

MICHAEL:
The dark meat is
on
the leg! You don't want a leg! Honest to God, I haven't got—I haven't got the mind to handle that problem.

MOM:
Nora's, uh—

MICHAEL
(
interrupting
): You'd have to take a Goddamned
file
and file it off and shred it!

NORA:
Just calm down.

MICHAEL:
It's the only way you could do it!

DAD:
He wanted dark meat, did he?

MICHAEL:
Yeah.

DAD
(
angrily
): Well, dark meat's all on
that Goddamned leg
!

NORA
(
to Brian
): It's not worth it.

BRIAN:
Now he's, now he's starting to—

DAD
(
to Brian
): Pick up the leg and
chomp the dark meat
!

NORA
(
to Brian
): Just close your mouth.

BRIAN:
Okay. Okay, Nora.

MICHAEL:
The only thing we could do is cut it up!

BRIAN
(
now exasperated
): All right! All right!

MICHAEL
(
surprised
): What happened?

BRIAN:
Shut your mouth, Michael! Just shut your mouth and everything will be—

DAD
(
to Brian
): Shut
yours
, now!

BRIAN
(
defensively
): Okay! Okay. I'll shut mine, too, Dad.

DAD
(
trudging off to the kitchen, speaking in a “mentally challenged” voice
): “I waaants da dark meat . . . Darrrk!” (
Returning to regular voice
) Three-fourths of the world don't have a choice between—

BRIAN
(
to Dad, feeling picked-on
): Shhhh!
Shhhh!

DAD:
—dark meat or white meat.

NORA:
Would you shut your
mouth
, Brian!

MICHAEL:
Well, which do they eat, then?

DAD
(
nattering on
): Blue meat or green meat.

MICHAEL:
Well, which do they eat, then?

(Brian and Marty start to laugh.)

DAD:
They don't have any choice of meat
at all
!

(Dad re-enters the dining room from the kitchen with the exact slices of turkey Brian wanted.)

DAD:
Do you want more potatoes, dear?

BRIAN:
No thank you, Dad.

MICHAEL:
Are you not going to have any turkey, Dad?

DAD
(
raising his voice, irritated
): My stomach is so sore right now, dear, if you mention turkey to me, I'll vomit right on the middle of the table.

(Everyone starts laughing.)

DAD:
Now, if I wanted turkey, craved turkey, ate turkey,
desired
turkey—

MICHAEL:
I think the question required a yes or no answer.

DAD:
But I don't need a kid asking me. I don't need an immature person asking me things.

Some years ago, in the 1990s, I had this tape fully transcribed—it goes on for thirty pages—and presented a bound copy to each of my siblings. I also used to make my kids, when they were little, read all the parts every Christmas Eve. I'd always cast my youngest child, Henry, in the Dad role, just so I could hear this sweet little boy saying “Dark meat's all on
that Goddamned leg
!”

P
eople are often surprised to learn I'm of Irish descent and was raised Catholic; there's a widespread misperception that I am Jewish. And I don't think it's just because I'm thrifty.

No, this misperception actually makes some sense, because I was pretty much immersed in Jewishness from an early age. Westdale, the neighborhood we lived in, in Hamilton's west end, had a large Jewish population. My parents' best friends, the Paikins, were Jewish. The best nursery school in the area was the one at Temple Anshe Sholom, so that's where I went to nursery school. And the friendships that I made there carried over into the rest of my childhood.

I've always been a top-feeder, drawn to the smartest people in the room, and the simple truth was that the smartest kids in the schools I attended were the Jewish ones. We had a teacher in Grade 7, as we Canadians call the seventh grade, Miss Critchmore, who seated her pupils in order of intelligence, a cruel stroke that would never be allowed now: the smartest kids (in her estimation) in the front row, the dumbest in the back. I always strove to be in that first row, where my row-mates were reliably Mitchell Rosenblatt, Shelley Lipton, Rick Levy, Debbie Zack, Alex Stiglick, and Marvin Barnett. My people: the chosen.

I dated my share of Jewish girls, too. One of these romances had to be carried out in secret, because the girl's parents were deeply observant and didn't approve of their daughter's dating a goy. After a couple of furtive petting sessions in Hamilton's Churchill Park, we tearfully went our separate ways. A sort of
West Side Story
, with blue balls.

Then there's the fact that I work in comedy, and so many of the comedic greats have been Jewish. Some of them—Jerry Lewis, Harpo Marx, and Mike Nichols—were childhood idols of mine, while others, among them Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, and Larry David, became dear friends. So I understand why I'm often mistaken as Jewish, and I find it flattering. By osmosis, I've absorbed
a lot of Jewish-comic rhythms into my performances, and when I'm doing a Jewish character, it's an easy fit. The foremost of these is Irving Cohen, the ancient, prolific Tin Pan Alley songsmith I introduced on
SCTV
, carried over to
Saturday Night Live
, and still do in my live act: