Martin Short

Martin Short, the gifted comic actor and former star of SCTV and Saturday Night Live, is celebrating his 57th birthday this week.





By Rick Kaempfer


I’ve only had one contact with Martin Short in my entire career, and it went so badly I can’t even watch him anymore.

Let me explain. It’s really not his fault.

In 2003 our radio station WJMK moved into brand new studios. This was a process that took months and was fraught with peril at every step. The engineer designing our studios was actually quite talented. Unfortunately, he was a one-man staff. He had to try to keep our old rotting studios on the air, while at the same time designing and building new studios.

Oh, and he was also our IT guy at the time. If someone’s computer malfunctioned, and this happened every second of the day, he was the one who had to fix it.

I was the executive producer of the John Landecker show at the time, and we were struggling to maintain the quality of the program under incredible technical restraints. Our production studio was dismantled piece by piece and moved to the new location. The parts that remained broke down constantly. Truth be told, if our technical producer wasn’t also working on the show—fixing things as they broke, we would have turned into a computerized music jukebox. As it was, we were putting in three times the effort to produce a show that was only half as good as it once was.

We didn’t know it at the time, but it was only going to get worse. The show didn’t reach a breaking point until we moved into the brand new studios.

This is where Martin Short comes into the picture.

We were so excited to be moving to the new studio after working in the broken down studio for several months, that we planned a big celebration. We thought we would be able to go back to doing a real radio show…with celebrity guests, listener phone calls, and fully produced bits. I was so excited, that I booked one of my all-time favorite comic actors, Martin Short, to call into the show. I wanted that first guest in the new studio to be great.

The morning started off badly. The first thing we discovered was that the production studio was not done. Therefore we couldn’t do any produced bits, or play any new audio. Secondly we discovered that they had forgotten to set up the choke lines for listener calls…so that wasn’t going to be ready either (listener phone calls were a crucial ingredient of the show). After seeing that everything else wasn’t working right, I decided to double check the hotline.

When I called the hotline from my cell phone, it lit up. Good first step. Next, I asked our technical producer to see if it would come up through console.

Nothing.

We had no way of broadcasting anything through the phone lines, and Martin Short—who we had been promoting all morning—was about to call.

And call he did—right on time. I asked Martin if he would mind calling twenty minutes later, but he told me he had another interview scheduled—if we wanted to talk to him, it was now or never.

“Give him my cell number,” John said.

When the commercial ended, John conducted the entire interview on his cell-phone. He asked the questions into a combination of the microphone and the cellular phone, so Short and the listeners could hear, then he held the cellular phone up to the microphone for Short’s answers.

I don’t remember what they talked about in the interview except for the first few seconds, when John explained the situation to him. Short thought it was a bit because the concept of a major radio station in Chicago holding a cell-phone to the microphone was so ridiculous.

“Are you serious?” Martin finally asked.

“Totally serious.”

“Who owns you guys?” Martin asked.

“CBS, the second biggest radio company in America.”

“And you guys are in Chicago?” he asked.

“Yup. Third biggest media market in America.”

“And I thought I had seen it all,” he replied.

It was actually a pretty funny interview, considering. I gained even more respect for John Landecker that day. He took a potential disaster and turned into a memorable radio moment. I bet Martin Short remembers that very bizarre interview to this day.

I actually think those new studios were the perfect symbol of the company. On the surface they were shiny and impressive. Any sales client or stockholder would have been impressed. Beneath the surface, however, there wasn’t anything there at all, and nobody cared.

How little did they care?

Shortly after this disastrous debut, the engineer was fired. Not for his incompetence, mind you, but because the corporation consolidated the engineering department. That’s right. They decided to cut back the engineering department even more-- to one man covering three radio stations.

You can imagine how bad it got then—one morning we even went off the air for more than hour. Those were the conditions we faced for the final year of our contract. That’s why there were no tears when they decided not to renew us, opting for a cheaper morning show. In fact, we’re all in a much better place now.

Unfortunately for Martin Short, however, every time I see him on television, I think of those last few miserable months in those shiny new studios at WJMK.

It’s nothing personal. I just have to change the channel.