Steve Martin and Martin Short’s show is about newness, not nostalgia

When Steve Martin and Martin Short take the stage for their “Now You See Them, Soon You Won’t” show – the latest version of the two-man show they’ve been taking around the country for several years now – don’t expect to see comedy sketches or either performer doing characters they’ve made famous over the past four decades.

Martin won’t roll out King Tut or his Wild and Crazy Guy from “Saturday Night Live,” and Short won’t get into full garb to become Ed Grimley or any of his other numerous characters.

“We really wanted to make it new and not a nostalgia show,” Martin said in a recent phone interview. “The problem is, if you’re doing a nostalgia (where) you do all of your old bits, you never really feel sincere. You feel like the applause is ‘Oh yeah, I remember that’ rather than I’m actually laughing.”

In fact, the show is so new that it has even evolved considerably since last May when Netflix debuted a show filmed in Greenville, South Carolina, earlier in the tour, which was billed as “An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life.” The Netflix special earned nominations for multiple 2018 Emmys, including Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded) and Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special, but Martin and Short have not rested on their laurels, putting in plenty of new content to go with the new name for this year’s tour.

“At first, we changed out everything, and then we realized there were certain bits the audience wanted to see again,” Martin said of the current show. “So we put them back in, and now we’re at about 70% new material and then 30% on demand.”

The Martin and Short show is quite different from standup or sketch comedy. Instead, it works as almost a free-wheeling conversation between the two comedy legends that mixes in good-natured insults, memorable stories from their careers, as well as music – with Short (accompanied by “Jimmy Kimmel Live” pianist Jeff Babko) showcasing his considerable talents as a singer and Martin, joined by a band (at most shows it will be his regular collaborators, the accomplished bluegrass group the Steep Canyon Rangers) to play his signature banjo and perform a song or two.

The chemistry and friendship that Martin, 73, and Short enjoy is obvious onstage, and it’s a friendship that has endured for the more than 30 years since they met while making the 1986 film “Three Amigos.”

At the time of that film, Martin, was already a comedy superstar, having been the go-to guest host in the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live,” performed his standup at some of the largest venues in the country, and released several hit comedy albums (including 1977’s “Let’s Get Small” and 1978’s “A Wild and Crazy Guy”) and had begun what became a fruitful career as a movie actor, including featured roles in such late 1970s and early ’80s films as “The Jerk,” “Pennies From Heaven” and “All of Me.”

Short, by the time of “Three Amigos,” had gained popularity as a featured performer on the weekend late-night comedy sketch show “SCTV” and was coming off of his single season in the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” where his aforementioned characters, including the manic man-child Ed Grimley, the nervous chain-smoking corporate lawyer Nathan Thurm and celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick, provided some of the most memorable moments during the mid-’80s era of the long-running show. Short, 69, has since acted on Broadway, had roles in numerous films and TV shows and had his own sitcom (“The Martin Short Show”), comedy sketch show and syndicated talk show.

The fast friendship between Martin and Short that began on the set of “Three Amigos,” and has only deepened in the 30-plus years since, was built around a simple foundation – they made each other laugh.

Then there were other things they found that they liked about each other.

“If he just made me laugh and wasn’t a kind or interesting person, then I would see him less,” said Short, who joined Martin for this phone interview. “But the main first thing with people like us is we make each other laugh.”

The current “Now You See Them, Soon You Won’t” show grew out of an invitation the two received to interview each other at the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Chicago in 2011.

Martin and Short enjoyed the experience and realized that they could build a bigger show using interviews as a component. Short also has been doing his own touring show before Just For Laughs, and elements of that production were incorporated into early version of the duo show. Then Martin got further into the act.

“He (Short) had a live show, and I sort of forced my way into it,” Martin said. “But the big thing, when the show started to gel – I didn’t feel I was contributing enough – was when I brought my band in. Now we had music for the show. We had some comedy I did with the band. We had funny songs.

“And it just overshadowed Martin so much,” Martin concluded, giving a preview of the good-humored barbs Short and he bring to their shows.