Comedians Steve Martin (left) and Martin Short have launched a new Netflix special and have chosen to keep President Trump out of it. (Reuters)
Martin Short and Steve Martin have deliberately kept politics — and President Donald Trump — largely out of their comedy, but in Short’s case, it’s not because he’s short on opinions.
“Steve and I have great respect for the fact that we don’t just want a liberal audience. So you want the audience to feel that this is, in a way, a safe zone. A zone where they’re not going to be made to feel like a jerk because they voted one way,” Short, 68, told The Daily Beast in an interview released Sunday.
“So that’s why we deliberately do not mention Donald Trump,” he continued. “But as far as the Trump presidency, I wouldn’t even call it a presidency. It’s an asterisk. It’s a typo. I mean, every day it’s worse and 10 years from now the history books will be having a field day with it and the shame of the people who supported him, if they’re still around, in the sense of being in the public eye, will be like the people who supported McCarthy.”
Short’s biggest issue isn’t necessarily Trump himself, he says, but rather those around him, citing Fran Lebowitz’s quote that New Yorkers didn’t vote for Trump because “we know who he is.”
He added, “Trump is Trump. Some people find him hilarious. I don’t find it hilarious, but you can’t say it’s dull. There’s nothing credible about Donald Trump. But the people around him, who one would have thought had credibility, whether it’s Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan, have lost all credibility with their support.”
Ultimately, Short explained, his and Martin’s job with their new Netflix special, “An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life,” in which they spent the majority of the running time mocking one another instead of talking about politics, is simply to make an entire audience laugh and forget about the real world for an hour and 13 minutes.
Still, there are at least a few aristocrats whom Short is happy to defend, if only because they offered a brief reprieve from the doom and gloom clogging airwaves.
“I was talking to my son Oliver and he was saying he was amazed at how some of his friends were ragging on the Prince Harry wedding. ‘What a waste of money, it’s so stupid,'” he recalled. “Can we not have one afternoon of frivolous joy? Does it all have to all be about impeachment and the Mueller probe? So I’d like to say the same thing about people coming to see our show. It’s a safe zone from 24 hours a day of politics.”
This story originally appeared on Page Six.
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