Tag Archives: martin short

Breaking News!

Martin Short Alert! Martin Short Alert!

I usually don’t announce impending events on this site, but I had to share this with the Interweb public. Tonight’s Best Show on WFMU will feature as its guest none other than Martin Short, SCTV/SNL alum and all-around funnyman extraordinaire. So tune in at 8 pm this evening. UNLESS YOU HATE HILARITY.

I imagine host Tom Scharpling will ask him many questions about Clifford, the aggressively weird/dark 1994 film starring Short as a crazed man-child and Charles Grodin at his grumpy best. This all-but-forgetten cinematic tour de force has been a running theme on The Best Show for several months now. All of Tom’s recent “guests” somehow manage to mention the same exact scene from it, regardless of whether it has anything to do with what they’re talking about or not.

The Academy must forever live with the shame that Mr. Short was not Oscar-nominated for this role.

However, I hope Tom also makes time to ask non-Clifford-related questions. I for one would love to hear exactly how The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley got made–and when we can finally see this masterpiece on DVD, dammit. Now that The State has been preserved in digital form, Ed Grimley is the only outstanding piece of True Comedy still confined to the vaults.

This is as good a time as any to point back to a post I did a few years back about that brilliant cartoon, which starred the voice talents of other comedic giants like Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, and Jonathan Winters. Thanks to Roger Clemens, the YouTube clips no longer work. But if you never saw the show when it was on (and it would’ve been very easy for you to miss), I hope my humble post gives you a glimpse of its majesty.

Boob Tubery, Pointless Nostalgia

I Must Say

Thanks to The Interweb and roughly eight billion cable channels, even the niche-iest of shows has a chance to find its audience. This was not the case even 10 years ago, when there was very little hope for an offbeat show, unless you expand your definition of “offbeat” to include “Bill Cosby verbally torturing his children”. If a show couldn’t succeed in the strictly middlebrow world of network TV, it had no future.

Every now and then, a show with a cockeyed view of the world and a bold spirit would sneak onto a network lineup. Such a show would inevitably be either retooled or shuttled around the schedule until it suffered death by underexposure. These kinds of shows were, inevitably, the kinds of shows that I loved as a kid. I was attracted to complete lost causes–the television equivalent of a dog at the pound with one eye, half a tail, and the mange.

Some of the shows I’ve loved and lost were later lamented, rediscovered, and given a proper DVD release. Thanks in part to the success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin , Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks has received the belated acclaim it deserves. There was a great series on the now-defunct Trio network, Brilliant But Cancelled, that highlighted awesome shows like EZ Streets (aka The Sopranos Before The Sopranos ).

There is one show I loved as a kid that has yet to get its day in the sun. I mean, I absolutely worshipped this show. This show should never have been made in the first place, because it had every odd stacked against it from day one. But if it had been come out more recently, I’m convinced that it could have run for 15 seasons or more.

The show was a The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley , a Saturday morning cartoon that ran for only one season (1988-89). It starred an animated version of the titular character, voiced by Martin Short. It also featured the voice talents of a few of his fellow SCTV alums Joe Flaherty, Catherine O’Hara, and Andrea Martin. And for an
extra dollop of crazy on top, it also featured Jonathan Winters.

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