Martin Short, the comedian who treats joy as a discipline

At 76, his face still scrambles into the comic creature it was on SCTV. The Lawrence Kasdan documentary arriving on Netflix this week argues that the joy was never automatic — it was decided.

Tom Hanks once said Martin Short operates at the speed of joy. It is the line everyone reaches for when they try to describe what he does on a stage, and what nobody can quite explain is how a man who has buried this many people still moves at that speed. A brother, when he was twelve. A mother, when he was seventeen. A father, when he was twenty. His wife, Nancy Dolman, after thirty years of marriage. His eldest daughter Katherine, this February. His SCTV partner Catherine O’Hara, two weeks before her. The new Kasdan documentary, Marty, Life Is Short, is built around the gap — between what the man’s face does on camera and what the man’s life has done off it.

He grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, the youngest of five in a Catholic family with an Irish stowaway father who had built a career inside the Stelco steelworks and a mother who played concertmistress for the Hamilton Philharmonic. The losses started inside that house. His eldest brother David was killed in a car accident in 1962. Five years later, cancer took his mother. Two years after that, his father had a stroke. By the time he finished a social-work degree at McMaster, he had already worked out a private mathematics: when you are met with fire early, he has said, you develop a Teflon quality. The decision to make joy the load-bearing wall of a life was made then, not later.

He took the McMaster degree, worked a year in mental health, and then a 1972 Toronto production of Godspell rerouted the trajectory — Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Paul Shaffer, Victor Garber, and a young actress named Nancy Dolman in the same cast. He married Dolman in 1980. In 1977 he replaced John Candy at Toronto’s Second City, and the SCTV writers’ room invented a vocabulary for him that nobody else has been able to use since. Ed Grimley, the cowlicked manchild who genuflects before Wheel of Fortune. Jiminy Glick, the celebrity interviewer who eats his guests. Nathan Thurm, the defense lawyer too defensive to make eye contact. Irving Cohen, the alter-kocker songwriter. Those characters were the dossier he brought to Saturday Night Live in 1984, the season after Eddie Murphy left, and they are why that single SNL year is still listed in every best-of-cast retrospective.

The films followed. ¡Three Amigos! in 1986 with Steve Martin and Chevy Chase began the friendship and the working partnership that would outlast everything else. Innerspace in 1987 gave him his first leading-man role in a Joe Dante film opposite Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. Father of the Bride in 1991 reunited him with Steve Martin and turned the wedding planner Franck Eggelhoffer into one of the most quoted side characters of the decade. Clifford in 1994 was the misfire that became a cult object. Mars Attacks! arrived in 1996, then the voice work — The Prince of Egypt, Madagascar 3 — and the stage, where he won the Tony in 1999 for Little Me. The records he sets store by are the ones he kept making with Steve Martin: the two-man theatrical revue that has been touring since 2015, the 2018 Netflix special An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life, and the late-career engine nobody saw coming.

That engine is Only Murders in the Building, which arrived on Hulu in 2021 with him, Martin, and Selena Gomez as three unlikely tenants of an Upper West Side apartment building investigating the deaths inside it. The show became Hulu’s most-watched original comedy. Five seasons in, with a stack of Emmy nominations and a 2024 win for Original Music and Lyrics, the trio has been ordered to London for a sixth, ten-episode season, filming exclusively in the British capital from spring 2026 and aiming at a fall release. Short’s Oliver Putnam — the Broadway director who has never met a setback he could not perform his way out of — is the role that has done what comic roles rarely do in their actor’s seventies: it has made him bigger than he was at fifty.

The thing the canonized version of Martin Short tends to skip is how hard the second half of his life has been. Nancy died of ovarian cancer in August 2010, after thirty years of marriage. He has talked, since, about reading his own reviews aloud in the morning, about a Marty Award ceremony he hosts in his own home, about the way grief and laughter share a room. In February 2026, his eldest adopted daughter Katherine — a social worker who had spent her career as a mental-health advocate, working with the charity Bring Change 2 Mind — died by suicide at forty-two after a long battle with borderline personality disorder. Two weeks earlier, Catherine O’Hara had died of a pulmonary embolism with rectal cancer as the underlying cause, taking with her the last person who could finish a 1979 Toronto sentence the way Short started it. The Kasdan documentary, which premieres on Netflix on 12 May 2026, is dedicated to O’Hara. The grief is in the film. So is the part where Short, talking to CBS Sunday Morning about driving in his car after Katherine’s death, asks himself why he is continuing — and answers: a five-year-old and a four-year-old grandson at the end of the drive shouting “Papa! Let’s play giant.”

There is the cleaner version of all this, and there is the version the documentary refuses. The cleaner version says he is a comedian who, by some miracle of disposition, was given resilience as a gift. The version the documentary tells, which is closer to the one Short himself describes, is that joy in his case is a daily decision, and that the discipline of choosing it again every morning — at thirty, at sixty, at seventy-six — is the actual craft. He has been back on stages with Steve Martin since the spring tour resumed after Katherine’s funeral. He has been in conversations about a possible Broadway collaboration with Meryl Streep — his Only Murders co-star, with whom the tabloids have been logging a romantic situationship since 2024 that both their representatives keep denying. Whether the Broadway show comes together, he has said, depends on the math of whether the box office holds.

What is on the schedule is the London shoot for Only Murders, the Netflix release of the Kasdan documentary, and a stand-up tour with Steve Martin that has not slowed in a decade. What is on the dedication card of the film, in capital letters, are the names of two women who shaped him: Catherine O’Hara, the friend who could make any sketch better just by sitting behind the camera; and Katherine Hartley Short, the daughter who fought for as long as she could. The film argues that everything Martin Short has done in front of an audience for fifty years has been one extended way of refusing to surrender the wall.