Martin Short

Martin Short came out of sketch television, where the reward for being the loudest person in the room is your own recurring character, and he has an Emmy for writing a variety series to show for that period. The rest of the shelf is unusual for a comic actor: two Primetime Emmys, two Screen Actors Guild awards, a Tony, and an officership in the Order of Canada in 2019.

What he actually does is commit, absolutely, to a character pitched about forty per cent louder than the film containing him. Franck Eggelhoffer in Father of the Bride speaks in an accent from no country on earth and Short plays him with total sincerity, which is the entire joke. Innerspace is ninety minutes of physical panic performed by a man who never once winks at the camera. In Inherent Vice he has about five minutes as a coked-up dentist and walks off with the film.

The risk with that register is that it wears out, and for a stretch of the 1990s and 2000s it nearly did, in a run of broad family comedies and a very large voice career: Stefano in Madagascar 3, B.E.N. in Treasure Planet, Huy in The Prince of Egypt, Grandpa Frump in The Addams Family. Only Murders in the Building, from 2021, is the late correction. Oliver Putnam is the same volume Short has always played at, attached at last to a man with real disappointment underneath, and it is the best television work of his career.