The Forgotten Comedian Who Inspired Jiminy Glick
The past several years haven’t been too great for Martin Short’s celebrity-interviewing alter-ego Jiminy Glick. After popping up in the canceled variety series Maya & Marty, Jiminy arguably hit an all-time low when he interviewed “Donald Trump,” as played by Jimmy Fallon, on The Tonight Show.
But the Glick character rebounded in a big way this week, first with a lukewarm roast of Bill Maher, followed 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.
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According to Short, he didn’t originally create Glick to parody bad journalists, but rather, to satirize “morons with power.” And to further immerse himself in the character, he donned an understandably controversial fat suit, inspired by a scene in the 1991 comedy Pure Luck, in which his character gets stung by a bee and swells up. Recalling that co-star Danny Glover remarked “I can't see you in there” during filming, Short opted to take a similar, prosthetic-heavy approach to Glick.
But Short also owes a big debt to comedian Sammy Labella, aka Skip E. Lowe.
Labella, who passed away in 2014, had a minor Hollywood career in the 1940s, even appearing briefly in a Lucille Ball comedy, before eventually becoming a regular nightclub comic and a USO performer. In 1978, he created the pseudonym “Skip E. Lowe” for the Los Angeles-based public access talk show Skip E. Lowe Looks at Hollywood, which ran for 35 years. Labella/Lowe, interviewed more than 6,000 people, including Hollywood legends like 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 pretty proud of.
Short credited Lowe with having partly inspired 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 gets confused with tremendous enthusiasm.” It’s not hard to see why; Glick’s mannerisms, bluntness and occasional non-sequiturs certainly seem draw on Lowe.
Short wasn’t the only comedic performer to take notice of Lowe, either. In 1998, just a year before Glick first appeared on The Martin Short Show, Harry Shearer penned a lengthy piece about Lowe, singling out the interviewer’s captivating ineptness, and odd interviewing style. “Skip E. Lowe Looks at Hollywood doesn’t so much re-invent television as de-invent it,” Shearer wrote, “returning it 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 to be, playing a character named “Skip E. High” on SCTV.
Per Lowe, he knew Short prior to his fame, back 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, used to send tapes of his show to the “very talented” Short, which led to the comedian “putting this character, Jiminy Glick, together with my style.”
In other interviews, Lowe was less charitable on this subject. “He’s making me look like a clumsy interviewer!” Lowe told The Village Voice in 2001. “Martin Short thinks nobody remembers that on SCTV, he had a character named Skip E. High with a blond wig and a 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 show.”
“I walk down Sunset, and people say, ‘Jiminy Glick!’ It’s awful!” Lowe complained.
And, to be fair, nobody would want to be confused with a character who asked Mel Brooks, “What’s your big beef with the Nazis?”
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