Friday, Oct. 11, 2002 | 9:50 a.m.
Who: Martin Short.
When: 8 p.m. Sunday.
Where: Caesars Palaces Under the Stars.
Tickets: $37.50, $45.
Information: 731-7333.
The eccentric Ed Grimley. The talentless Jackie Rogers Jr. The musical Irving Cohn. The shifty Nathan Thurm. And now the obnoxious Jiminy Glick.
Over the years Martin Short has created some of the more memorable characters on both "SCTV" and "Saturday Night Live," as well as on his own TV shows.
Probably his most popular creation, Grimley, was even spawned into a Saturday morning cartoon series, "The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley," which aired one season on NBC in 1998.
Does Short ever get sick of playing these parts?
"If you don't have a new comic idea for them, you know it's time to put them on the shelf," Short said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles. "It's not about I'll never do this guy again or I must do this guy again. It's whether you enjoy doing it."
And Short loves doing the characters. Which is a large reason behind his appearance Sunday at Caesars Palace's Under the Stars.
The act, which Short called a variety show, features Grimley and Glick, Martin singing with a band, various videos and "a lot of improv."
"It's just kind of a bunch of things that seemed like fun to do, and when I did them they turned out to be fun," Short said. "It's all very loose and improvised and yet structured at the same time."
Short came up with the idea for the show earlier this year as a way of getting back to his first love: performing live in front of audiences.
"I'm always writing television or doing movies and stuff, so I never have that block of time that 'makes a tour,' " he said. "But my favorite thing to do is the stage. I did that this last spring, booked a couple of dates back East.
"It was like ... I always call it the 'Saturday Night Live' approach to show business. No matter what happens, you've got a show Saturday night. And I had a great time, so I booked some more. I've been doing this for the last couple of months, here and there."
Short's biggest character success since Grimley has been Glick, a self-absorbed and clueless obese interviewer with his own show, "Primetime Glick," which airs at 8 p.m. Mondays on Comedy Central (Cox cable channel 74).
"He evolved in the last couple of years," Short said. "It started out as an attempt to disguise myself, because I would find that I wanted to do stuff out on the street and get into character, or I'd put on an odd hat or strange wig or a putty nose, and people would still know me. "I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to be literally anonymous, so you walk down the street and no one would know.
"And I made a film called 'Pure Luck' about 10 years ago where, at one point, I was stung by a bee and I swell up. I remembered that when I did that, no one could see me, I was unrecognizable. So, that's why."
As for making the character an interviewer, Short said Jiminy was not motivated by revenge on the media.
"Jiminy actually could have been a teacher, a principal at school. He could be a local mayor," he said. "He really is a moron with power. He just happens to be in show business."
As successful as "Glick" has been for Short -- beloved by critics, the show recently returned for its second season -- the comic-actor's film career has been strangely less than fortuitous.
"It always goes back to prime time. A lot of people achieve success on HBO and late-night television, but it's a very different audience that will make a film successful," he said. "David Letterman can be a genius at 'Late Night,' but whether that translates into the 'Dave Letterman Sitcom' or the 'Dave Letterman Movie' that makes $120 million, it's very different.
"The reality is with the movies, you do a couple of movies and they're not successful, then you don't get to star in movies anymore. It's as simple as that. It's only about box office; it's not personal. They don't look at you and say, 'We don't deem you worthy.' They say, 'What did your last movie do?' "
For his next movie, though, Short plans to merge his TV success on "Primetime Glick" into a film format called "La La Wood," which he co-wrote with his brother Michael and former "SCTV" scribe Paul Flaherty.
The three put together a 50-page treatment outlining the storyline of the movie. The rest of the film will be improvised, just like the "Glick" TV show.
"You want to know the structure of a scene ... but if you start scripting Jiminy, he's not scripted in the interviews, you lose the spontaneity," Short said. "If you can figure out how a character speaks without writing those words, it's often better."
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