Don't Just Show Up, Bring It!

I was watching TV the other night in one of those nose-bleed channels and I came across an old episode of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Johnny’s guest that January 7, 1988 included Bette Davis and Martin Short.

Short came out, and on a dare from director/actor Rob Reiner, did a quick impression of the aged Bette Davis, who was sitting immediately to his right. Johnny and Ed McMahon broke up, although Davis was entirely unmoved. (Later she would ask Short if he did her)! In quick succession Short did impressions of Jerry Lewis, Robin Williams, Katherine Hepburn, Richard Burton, and David Steinberg, a director and comedian who was a frequent guest on Carson. Short even did Canadian magician Doug Henning. After that impression Carson asked, “is there a big call for that?”

Three minutes in, Short had Carson in tears. Martin Short killed it that night, his first appearance on the Tonight Show.

Martin Short is a personal favorite and I’ve watched him kill it on Carson, Letterman, Leno, Conan, Fallon, Cobert and Kimmel. And why wouldn’t he? He’s a funny guy with boyish charm who can also sing and act and even dance a little. Short hasn’t had the career of other Saturday Night Live alumni like Bill Murray or Eddie Murphy, but he has had a long and fruitful career that has included both Tony and Emmy awards.

So surely, at this stage in his life and career all Short, age 67, has to do is show up in the Woody Allen way. Allen famously said that 80 percent of success is just showing up. (Although, as usual, there’s more to the quip than meets the eye).

I submit that the reason Short has had a 40-plus year career in an especially evanescent business is because he brings that extra 20%. In his funny and insightful memoir called “I Must Say,” Short writes about what he does before he appears on a late night talk show or, in this case, Saturday Night Live.

“That experience, of me submitting tons of material beforehand, only some of which got used on the show is not atypical. I’ve become known as a performer who obsessively over-prepares, even for a talk-show appearance. The guest spots I do unfold loosely, but not without careful preparation--I always send ahead pages upon pages of material, their gist being, ‘What if the host asked me this? Might that be a rich, fruitful area where the two of us will find common ground and have a good TV moment?’”

All kinds of rising stars and starlets from the latest shows and the hottest movies come on Cobert and Fallon and Kimmel and do little more for their segment than show up. But enduring stars like Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Martin Short do more than show up, they bring it.

How do you do that?

Well, Short, as he wrote in his book, prepares a lot of ideas in advance. He doesn’t delve into the range of his suggestions. Does it include circus elephants, original musical arrangements, the USC marching band, the Rockettes on skates? He doesn’t say.

The point is, he prepares beyond what the segment producer expects from anyone else.

But does all the extra preparation really pay off?

During Peyton Manning’s 18-year career, the NFL’s all-time leader in both passing yards and passing touchdowns, says it helped him sleep at night, including the night before his first Super Bowl.

“I went to bed about 11 o’clock that night before and actually woke up at 11 a.m., Manning remembers. “We had nothing really organized in the morning as far as meetings. The hay was in the barn by that point.” 

It seems often to be this way for people with long and productive careers. Early in his time as an MP, while speaking to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill forgot the next line in a speech. For three agonizing and dramatic minutes he searched his memory for the line but came up dry, every eye in Parliament upon him. Churchill finally resigned himself to the moment, returned to his seat and buried his head in his hands in defeat.

From then on, whenever he gave a speech he read from prepared remarks. But you wouldn’t know it to watch him. That’s because Churchill brought all his natural brio to every speech. That and he rehearsed his speeches until they seemed spontaneous. His biographer William Manchester writes:

“A consummate performer, he would rise, when recognized by the Speaker, with two pairs of glasses in his waistcoat. Perching the long-range pair on the end of his nose at such an angle that he could read his notes while giving the impression that he was looking directly at the House, he gave every appearance of speaking extemporaneously. If the occasion called for quoting a document, he produced his second pair and altered his voice and manner so effectively that even those who knew better believed that everything he said when not quoting was spontaneous.”

Mark Twain, who started his career as a newspaperman and became a great writer only after becoming a great speaker, had the worst sort of stage fright during his first major appearance before the lectern in San Francisco in 1866. In his book ‘Roughing It’ he says the last line on the posters advertising the speech was, “Doors open at 71/2. The trouble will begin at 8.” Twain prepared by seeding the audience with friendly plants, including the governor’s wife, who was there to laugh whenever he gave her the high sign. Other friends were there with clubs to pound the floor at Twain’s joke lines.

For subsequent speeches Twain says he memorized and rehearsed everything in the speech until it seemed extemporaneous, even his asides.

We ordinarily say that people like Short, Twain, Churchill, and Manning are masterful professionals. But what does that mean?

The first four definitions for the noun ‘professional’ at Dictionary.com are:

1. "A person who belongs to one of the professions, especially one of the learned professions.
2. "A person who earns a living in a sport or other occupation frequently engaged in by amateurs.
3. "An expert player.
4. "A person who is expert at his or her work."

I think of a professional as someone who works on their craft even when they don’t have to. Professionals work on elements of their game, even when they might be the GOAT. 

Payton Manning and his center… Jeff Saturday... took thousands of practice snaps together, including using wet balls. The wet ball drills turned out to be a godsend in Super Bowl XLI in Miami when Manning and the Indianapolis Colts played the Chicago Bears in a hard rain. 

“It sure paid off in that Super Bowl,” Manning told a reporter, “because he and I had zero exchange problems. We were under center quite a bit in that game, certainly in the shotgun as well. But had zero exchange problems. If I recall, Chicago had one or two exchange problems as far as quarterback-to-center. I know there a decent amount of fumbles in the game (a total of six), but there were no problems for me and Jeff quarterback-to-center.”

Jerry Rice left the NFL as the all-time leader in receptions after 20 years. While Peyton Manning was fairly well protected during his career, Jerry Rice was out in the field mixing it up with safeties and corners and linebackers on every single play. How did he pull that off? 

He did it by preparing when a lot of his peers were taking the Summer off. “I was always surprised,” he said, “because there were a lot of professional players that would wait until training camp to work themselves into shape” (emphasis mine). 

Football is such a violent sport that you risk career-ending injury even in simulating game-like conditions. (Imagine how good your Java or Excel skills would be if after every time you pressed CTRL-S you got tackled). Rice’s innovation was to be the fittest guy on the field, which he pursued with a vigor that left lesser mortals actually vomiting up their breakfast when they tried to pace him.

Ben Franklin, who was the very definition of an autodidact, had a finely-honed writing style developed over years of programmatic practice:

“ When he wanted to learn to write eloquently and persuasively, he began to study his favorite articles from a popular British publication, the Spectator. Days after he’d read an article he particularly enjoyed, he would try to reconstruct it from memory in his own words. Then he would compare it with the original, so he could discover and correct his faults. He also worked to improve his sense of language by translating the articles into rhyming verse and then from verse back into prose.”

Samuel Morse went to Paris for the first time in 1830 with a reputation as one of America’s best portraitists (a rather modest brag at that time) and he did what a lot of painters did, he set up an easel in the Louvre and started copying the masters. (In fact, on the boat ride back home from Europe in 1832 with his unfinished painting “Gallery of the Louvre” in the ship’s hold, is when Morse had his telegraph eureka! moment).

Martin Short ended his Tonight Show appearance saying that he was trying to create a comedy dynasty by instructing his daughter, then age 5, that when she fell down she must wait a beat or two before standing up, thereby milking all the laughs out of the situation. Short told Carson he was also teaching her to practice her Academy Award win reaction. He said he was coaching her to clutch a Barbie as though it were an Oscar and then to look at the doll and say with all the enthusiasm she could muster, “Oh, Baby!”