Jiminy Glick

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Jiminy Glick is a fictional character portrayed by Martin Short in the Emmy-nominated TV series Primetime Glick (2001-2003), the subsequent film Jiminy Glick in Lalawood and Short’s Broadway show Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me. He began as a recurring character on The Martin Short Show but when that show was cancelled he was spun off into his own series, Primetime Glick.

In the show, Glick is a famous television interviewer who has been around Hollywood for a long time. Despite this, he remains laughably ignorant about pop culture and most entertainment news, though he considers himself just the opposite. His interviews with stars are characterized by his patronizing attitude, often bizarre questions about obscure matters, and awkward body language. He is extremely forgetful, and takes ginkgo biloba as a memory aid (although, as he often points out, the only problem is he doesn’t remember to take it). Glick is also very overweight, and during interviews he will sometimes aggressively stuff his face with junk food (which is always present on the table) at a moment’s notice. Glick would occasionally offer food to his guests, but if they reached for it without being offered, he would snatch it away, growling, “No! All for me!” On top of his many other eccentricities, Glick has an unforgettably peculiar voice, shifting within a single sentence from a high, effeminate whine to a deep growl.

On the series, Glick is joined by long-suffering, heavily made-up announcer and band leader, Adrian Van Voorhees (Michael McKean). Adrian plays the harp, leading a band of scraggly-looking immigrants (they do a very poor job of synching up their “performance” with the music that is playing), and while he generally attempts to conduct himself in a professional manner, he occasionally loses his patience with Jiminy’s idiocy and constant, usually unintentional put-downs. He can sometimes be heard muttering disgustedly about Jiminy (“You are fat...sloppy fat”) but Jiminy remains blissfully unaware of Adrian’s hostility. Glick is also often assailed by Short’s long-running, Bette Davis-esque drag character, Miss Gathercole, a bitter, ancient woman who is a regular in Glick’s studio audience (alongside her increasingly short-tempered nurse) and freely offers commentary on Glick’s various failings and her own latest adventures.

In addition to the interviews, the show also featured many Second City TV-like parody commercials and Glick reading storybook tales to a group of unhappy children. These stories were usually Hollywood Babylon-like tales of tinseltown degradation, acted out by puppets. The show sometimes had a more fanciful side, as when the puppets would apparently come to life, or one occasion when Jiminy and Jason Alexander spent too long in a steamroom and emerged dwarf-sized.

Jiminy is married to a medicated, alcoholic Southern woman named Dixie portrayed by Saturday Night Live and Designing Women veteran Jan Hooks. Together they have four strapping young boys: Morgan, Mason, Matthew and Modine. Morgan and Mason are twins; in one episode Jiminy casually commented that they were actually triplets, but he sent the third one away because “two was so much already.” Jiminy is originally from Butte, Montana (although he has also claimed to be from Baton Rouge, Louisiana). Jiminy has stated on several occasions that he is a member of the Whig Party.

In Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me, Glick interviews (through complete improvisation) an audience volunteer tasked to become the show’s “new star” after Martin Short is struck by lightning (a ploy to allow Short enough time to don the Jiminy Glick make-up).

According to the IMDB, Glick is partly based on Los Angeles public access TV personality Skip E. Lowe.

When Short hosted Saturday Night Live in the 1996 season, he played a character named Pinky Nye who seems to have been a proto-Glick: similar physique, voice, and attention span, and forever forgetting to take “ginko bilobo” (as both Nye and Glick pronounce it).