The forgotten comedian who inspired Jiminy Glick

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The last few years haven’t been great for Jiminy Glick, Martin Short’s celebrity-interviewing alter ego. After appearing in the canceled variety series Maya and MartyJiminy arguably hit an all-time high when he interviewed “Donald Trump”, played by Jimmy Fallon, on Tonight’s show.

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The forgotten comedian who inspired Jiminy Glick

But Glick’s character rebounded spectacularly this week, first with a Bill Maher’s Warm Roastfollowed by an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! where the portly character hilariously questioned Bill Hader about the death of Willie Mays and life at Diddy’s pool house.

According to Short, he didn’t initially create Glick to parody bad journalists, but rather to satirize. “morons with power”. And to immerse himself further in the character, he donned a naturally controversial fat suit, inspired by a scene from the 1991 comedy Pure luck, in which his character gets stung by a bee and swells. Recalling that his co-star Danny Glover remarked “I can’t see you in there» During filming, Short chose to take a similar prosthetic-heavy approach to Glick.

But Short also owes a lot to comedian Sammy Labella, aka Skip E. Lowe.

Labella, who died in 2014, had a small Hollywood career in the 1940s, even appearing briefly in a Lucille Ball comedy, before eventually becoming a regular nightclub comic and USO performer. In 1978, he created the pseudonym “Skip E. Lowe” for the Los Angeles-based public talk show. Skip E. Lowe looks at Hollywood, which lasted 35 years. Labella/Lowe interviewed more than 6,000 people, including Hollywood legends such as Orson Welles, Shelley Winters and Milton Berle.

Lowe also made headlines in the ’90s for attacking conservative fraudster Charles Keating with a “powdered blonde wig” that he kept in an “MGM travel bag.” Something Lowe seemed quite proud of.

Short credited Lowe for partly inspiring Glick during an interview with David Letterman, explaining that the character is “a little bit of Skip E. Lowe.” … He talks to people, but he mixes it up with immense enthusiasm. It’s not difficult to understand why; Glick’s mannerisms, frankness, and occasional absurdities certainly seem to take their cues from Lowe.

Short wasn’t the only comic actor to take notice of Lowe. In 1998, just a year before Glick’s first appearance in The short Martin show, Harry Shearer wrote a long article about Lowe, highlighting the interviewer’s captivating ineptitude and odd interview style. “Skip E. Lowe Look at Hollywood doesn’t so much reinvent television as disinvent it,” Shearer wrote, “bringing it back to those glorious days before focus groups, when the tube was safe for eccentricity and obsession. »

But Short also began parodying Lowe more than a decade before Jiminy Glick came along, playing a character named “Skip E. High” in SCTV.

By LoweHe knew Short before his fame, when he was a busboy at Chasen’s, the legendary Hollywood restaurant where, perhaps not coincidentally, Jiminy Glick worked as a busboy for eight years, according to his fictional biography. Lowe also claimed that his friend, Paul Shaffer, sent tapes of his show to the “very talented” Short, which led the comedian to “associate this character, Jiminy Glick, with my style.”

In other interviews, Lowe has been less charitable on the subject. “He makes me look like a clumsy interviewer!” Lowe said The voice of the village in 2001. “Martin Short thinks no one remembers that. SCTVhe had a character named Skip E. High with a blonde wig and black turtleneck. He says (Jiminy Glick was inspired by) Merv Griffin. It’s not Merv Griffin, it’s me! He only admitted it once on the Letterman to show.”

“I walk down Sunset and people say, ‘Jiminy Glick!’ It’s awful!” Lowe complained.

And, to be honest, no one would want to be confused with a character who asks Mel Brooks, “What’s your problem with the Nazis?” »

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