Steve Martin and Martin Short talk standup, politics and their live show

The two friends are back on stage together. Has their style of comedy changed?

Steve Martin and Martin Short are totally relaxed. Sitting in a New York hotel suite for what must be the ten-thousandth interview of their half-century careers in comedy, they come across as mellower versions of their screen personas: Martin, even-toned with an undercurrent of the bizarre; Short, alert and mischievous.

They are talking about the latest in their string of two-man live shows — this one called The Funniest Show in Town at the Moment — and they insist that being themselves is precisely the point.

The show is “an extension of who we are and what makes us laugh”, Short says. They are past the point of reinvention — Martin is 74, Short turns 70 this year — and on to perfecting their best selves.

Anyone who has seen one of their dual appearances on late-night TV, or the Netflix special they made of an earlier tandem show (An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life), can attest that they are very different types of comic.

I suggest that Short acts as a stimulant, while Martin’s effect is more hallucinogenic. Do they try to bring out that contrast? Short takes a moment to think. “I don’t think we’ve overly analysed it, but I do think you’re on to something.”

He looks earnestly at Martin: “If I came out like you, with no energy or blood flowing, would that be a conflict?” It appears to take Martin a moment to realise that Short is having him on.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Short adds with a giggle.

Martin follows up, deadpan: “I tell you what you did hit on — I sell LSD, and he sells cocaine.”

This sort of back-and-forth has been part of the two men’s friendship and work together since they met on the set of The Three Amigos in 1986 (they had not yet overlapped on Saturday Night Live). That movie, co-starring Chevy Chase, will probably be remembered for the chemistry between the stars rather than any other virtues.

Martin, having made his name as a star in the late 1970s with The Jerk, went on to a big movie career, heading up classics such as Roxanne and LA Story. Short has carved out a unique place in Hollywood, both as a comic foil and a surprisingly effective actor.

He was simultaneously creepy and fun as the demented dentist Dr Rudy Blatnoyd in the Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice and, on the flip side, moving as a desperate lawyer in Damages.

Oddly, it is the lower-key Martin who takes up more airtime in our conversation. Martin has an instant view on everything, while Short seems content to listen and fill in with a quick anecdote or impersonation.

At one point, when Short has strung together a few sentences, Martin starts to wiggle in his chair and raises his hand like an eager pupil: “Ooh, ooh, ooh!” Short nods tolerantly: “Yes, Steve?”

Short and Martin became “great friends” after Amigos. The recent shows grew out of a comedy festival where they were asked to interview each other about comedic technique. They found that the audience were indifferent to their technique but loved their banter, so they added some gags and took their repartee on the road.

The reciprocal put-downs they fell into on the movie set 35 years ago persist as a key motif. “Steve — you look fantastic — but I guess that’s the charm of looking 70 since you were 30 . . .”; “Marty, I think of you as a renaissance man, and not just because you carry smallpox…”

As the hamminess of the jibes suggests, the shows feels something like a throwback to vaudeville or the Borscht Belt.

There are comic songs, accompanied by a pianist who doubles as a straight man. There are various bits about the vanity of Hollywood. A series of the stars’ childhood photos are displayed, and they crack more jokes at each other’s expense.

Martin brings out his banjo and bluegrass band for a musical number. Then the two sit down and swap career anecdotes — the time Martin Met Elvis, and so on.

At a moment when comedy is often political and politicised, the show has instead a kind of gentleness, and its biggest satisfactions come not from its punchlines but in faultless comic timing and a carefully calibrated tone: strange but warm, wicked but essentially good-natured.

That the show is built around gags is a big departure for Martin, whose early stand-up was basically absurd, driven by personality and tone. “When I first started doing comedy, I didn’t do jokes. And now we do almost all jokes. We love jokes!”

Nor is the show two old pros recycling old material or riffing on the past. It is carefully constructed and follows a tight script.

“When you have a great line, or a great bit, and the audience has never seen it, why would you change it?” Short asks. “Because you’re tired of it? If you are, then you should — but we are also actors, not just comics.”

Martin enjoys the chance to repeat a joke to the point of perfection. “Most comedians go, ‘I can’t wait to get to so-and-so line, I love that line so much.’”

The two-man format is another nod to an earlier time. “Comedy teams — you just don’t see them any more,” Martin says.

Both cite Laurel and Hardy as a childhood delight and ongoing influence, and they refer admiringly to Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Nichols and May and the Smothers Brothers (for whom Martin began his career as a writer).

But, Martin notes, there is one other tandem act like theirs: Amy Poehler and Tina Fey — who both men clearly admire. Martin tells Short that he has seen Fey recently and suggested they join them for some performances. “It would be like a big summer tour . . . she was interested!” he beams.

I think a lot of comedians today — and this is not a criticism at all — they’re didactic, they’re either socially critical or, you know, something. We’re notSteve Martin

He points out that the great comic teams were apolitical too.

“I think a lot of comedians today — and this is not a criticism — they’re didactic, they’re either socially critical or, you know, something. We’re not, we’re just doing comedy.”

I ask if they feel hemmed in by the political climate — if they worry that, having come up in the free-for-all of 1970s comedy, they will land themselves in trouble for saying something insensitive or perceived as such.

Short says he doesn’t think about it; Martin says he thinks about it “all the time”: “It’s not so much getting in trouble. I also understand why people don’t want to hear that word or this thing. Mother-in-law jokes went away with [the arrival of] feminism in the Sixties.”

Is there anything that was truly funny once but would be impossible to do today? They have a think and come up with an old Saturday Night Live bit, “News for the Hard of Hearing”, in which Chase, as a newscaster, would present the news while Garrett Morris, on a screen-within-the-screen, would simply scream the same words Chase was reading. Just watching Martin act the skit out has the three of us laughing hard.

“Now, you wouldn’t do that today,” says Short, “and I don’t know the answer, but I wonder if you can’t do that because people who are deaf would be offended, or people would think that people who are deaf would be offended?”

For all their professions of “just doing comedy”, and a shared aim to be funny without taking cheap shots, I point out there were some sharp personal digs in the Netflix show, several of them directed towards Trump’s White House.

Former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “looks like the before person in an Imodium ad”; vice-president Mike Pence “won’t have sex because it might lead to dancing”; adviser Kellyanne Conway looks like “somebody dehydrated Ann Coulter”.

But Short insists upon a distinction. He delivers all of those zingers in his persona as Jiminy Glick, a sweating, overweight, incoherent Hollywood reporter, in glasses too large for his head.

The key is that Glick is too moronic to be taken seriously: “You create a character who can say all the mean things you can’t say.”

Whether or not Glick is a successful cut-out for the comics’ mean side, it is clear, when they talk about the comedians they admire, that they are attracted to a tradition that has an underlying element of poignancy.

Short (who describes his own comic persona as “sad clown”), says he found Laurel, in particular, “heartbreakingly funny . . . it’s that thing of not trying to be funny but being funny. Stan Laurel is just sincere. It was great acting.”

Martin leaps in: “That’s perfect! Because they really were funny but, you know, when you are a kid you don’t care about touching and affecting, but it is — it affects you.”

There is nothing heartbreaking about Martin and Short’s act, but there is an underlying sense of goodwill that, today, feels almost unfamiliar. Both men reject the idea that the show is corny or old- fashioned.

They cite younger comics, such as John Mulaney and Sebastian Maniscalco who, like them, are doing old-fashioned but very funny straight comedy.

But it is hard, admittedly, to think of other acts with the classical elements — musical interludes, ornate introductions and act-closing bits, schmaltzy insults — that Martin and Short are having such fun reintroducing.

Then again, given their genre-bending early material, working in a golden-age-of-Hollywood style is an innovation as well as a return home.

I ask if they are different sorts of comedians, fundamentally, than when they started out.

“I feel I am,” Martin says, “I don’t want to go back to what I did, the crazy dancing thing. The whole thing I did was a persona, a persona that I had worked on and worked on then. I just don’t do that persona any more. I’m, like, a little bit dignified now. There is something new working, but I can’t put my finger on it . . . I know how to do it, but I don’t know how to name it.”

Short is more to the point: “I have not grown at all. No. I do the same cheap stuff that I ever did.”

“The Funniest Show in Town at the Moment” opens in the UK on March 9. Robert Armstrong is the FT’s US finance editor

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