Why Is Martin Short So Polarizing? Netflix's New Documentary Suggests an Answer.

"Marty, Life Is Short, the new Netflix documentary about comedian Martin Short, begins with an incongruity: It's Boxing Day in sunny California in the early 1990s. That a holiday celebrated across British Commonwealth countries on the day after Christmas should be marked in the U.S. feels curious, but suddenly a slew of stars arrive-from Tom Hanks and Steve Martin to Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara-the latter pair of whom are, like Martin Short, who's filming this old home-movie footage, famously Canadian."

"For a long time, he seemed to struggle to truly reach leading-man status, always slightly eclipsed by his co-stars, serving as the second banana to Martin's straight man. (Short self-deprecatingly insisted on calling himself "the cheap Amigo" in 1986's Three Amigos, in which he co-starred with Martin and Chevy Chase.) He can't do the understated deadpan that Levy can or play it straight like O'Hara did in Home Alone."

"He has, by his own admission, had a string of commercial failures-80 percent of his work, he estimates. Yet Short hasn't just endured; he's thrived. Now in his mid-70s, he's enjoying arguably his greatest period of success, thanks to the Hulu hit Only Murders in the Buildingand sold-out live comedy shows across the country. He is beloved by fans and the industry."

""Let's say you're going to host a dinner party and you invite Marty," Steve Martin tells viewers, "then it turns out Marty can't come? You cancel the party.""

A Netflix documentary about Martin Short opens with Boxing Day in sunny California in the early 1990s, featuring major celebrities arriving in archival home-movie footage. The holiday setting underscores Short’s Canadian identity and the sense that he does not fully belong in Hollywood. Throughout his career, he has often been treated as too short, too strange, and too much, and he has struggled to become a leading man, frequently overshadowed by co-stars. He has also faced commercial failures, estimating that most of his work did not succeed. Despite this, he has endured and later thrived, reaching a major success period in his mid-70s through Only Murders in the Building and sold-out live performances.

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