Maya and Marty Talk Comedy in SiriusXM Town Hall Event
She is Groundlings, He is Second City….”and together they made a beautiful improvisational baby.”
This week Maya Rudolph and Martin Short brought the Variety Show back to television and the response to the first episode has been strong.
On Tuesday morning, just before the first episode aired, SiriusXM radio host Ron Bennington talked with the two stars of Maya and Marty on SiriusXM’s Town Hall series. Marty is a bonafide comedy legend and Maya is of course a national treasure and both stars know so much about comedy that they could have kept the Town Hall going for hours.
Maya and Marty talked all about their new show, as well as talking about Saturday Night Live, why Canadians are funny, Groundlings vs Second City, their dream guests, their inspirations, and their own comedy philosophies. And it’s one of the funniest hours you’ll hear all week.
Marty explained why choosing a variety show format was a no-brainer. “Why did we pick this form? Because it’s what we do,” Short explained. “You leave shows like SCTV and Saturday Night Live, and your ability is to many different people within 90 minutes and different things, different flavors and that’s kind of your gift, that you’re a jack of all trades. And then you get in the real world and they go… well just do one portion of that. But to be able to do it all, it’s exactly what you hope.”
Maya had her own more personal angle. She told Bennington, “For me when I left [SNL] to have my daughter, I’d watch the show and I missed the people, and so doing something in this way, where you connect with people who make you laugh, and it’s this silly fun environment is really the essence of that magical feeling of variety for me.”
They are planning to bring a lot of familiar faces around- both guests and popular characters- but don’t expect to see gratuitous uses of any characters just for the sake of dragging them out. “You don’t rule out anything. But you don’t also bring back a popular character because it was popular once,” Short said. “You bring it back because there is a good idea for that character. So at this point we haven’t done any of the well known characters yet.”
If you want to understand what makes Maya and Marty so great, you only have to look as far as their influences and their favorite performers. Martin’s early influences were mostly from television- Jerry Lewis, Lucille Ball, Jonathan Winters, Dick Van Dyke, Stan Laurel, Harpo Marx- more than Groucho even.
Maya’s earliest influence was Gilda Radner. “Mainly because before I knew what an impersonation was, I used to impersonate her. I really liked Roseanna Roseannadanna cause my hair kind of looked like that. That original cast was really exciting to me. I always wanted to go where Bill Murray went. Catherine O’Hara, a young man named Martin Short, Andrea Martin……Madeline Kahn, Madeline Kahn Madeline Kahn Madeline Khan….Bette Midler. There was no censoring whatsoever in my hosuehold. I was raised on every Mel Brooks movie there ever was. There were a lot of boobies and jew jokes floating around.”
Maya and Marty also talked about who in comedy has so much talent it’s almost intimidating. They answered in tandem, already comfortable in their co-host roles, even before episode one aired.
Maya: A lot of people intimidate me. I was trying to think so I’d look more like the common man. Now wait a second let me think. What about Sacha Baron Cohen…
Maya: intimidates me
Marty: Yah.
Maya: Louis CK intimidates me.
Marty: Yes….
Maya: Amy Schumer intimidates me.
Marty: Yes….
Maya: Chris Rock, I loooove. And still intimidates me with his immense talent. Any great stand up intimidates me cause I don’t do stand up. I think that is the scariest, most terrifying form of comedy there is.
Marty: And when done correctly, they become our societies’ philosophers.
Maya: I mean, Chris Rock I think of like that. In times of crisis I need a Chris Rock channel.
Marty: You want to know what he has to say.
Marty said he doesn’t consider the shows he has been doing as stand up. His one man show, he says is more like “a paahty with Maaty.” He also does a show with Steve Martin- also not stand up- that he calls “An Evening You’ll Forget For the Rest of Your Life. See Them Before They are Dead.” Marty’s love for Steve Martin couldn’t be more apparent. “Well he’s a real artist,” he said about his friend, talking about why Martin didn’t quit in his early and less successful years doing stand up. “You think of brilliant painters in their little studio and they paint forever and no one buys it. And then they spend the next two years painting and no one buys it. What’s amazing, with Steve, is that usually your reaction to what the audience tells you is — oh okay I’ll change it. He didn’t. He went for a long time, people saying what is he doing with these balloons on his head. But he knew he was on to something.”
You can hear SiriusXM’s Town Hall with Martin Short and Maya Rudolph on Demand on SiriusXM and in replays throughout the week. Check SiriusXM.com for listings. Below watch a clip from the event, where Maya describes being in a Prince cover band, and performing the week that he died.
