Martin Short’s humor may be saving lives.
According to Pearl Jam lead vocalist Eddie Vedder, a crack Short made about his smoking habit made him feel so dumb that he never smoked another cigarette again.
Vedder told David Spade and Dana Carvey on their Fly on the Wall podcast on Thursday that Short called him up a few years ago. “Marty calls up about 4 months into COVID, just out of the blue, and he says, ‘Well, hello, Eddie. I was just checking in to see how my young friend is doing.’”
“And I said, you know, I’m actually a little frustrated with myself,” Vedder continued, explaining how he’d successfully quit smoking just a few months prior but relapsed. “When COVID hit, and I’d smoke and drink, and I thought, oh, Jesus Christ, you know, this is it. It’s a lung thing. It’s a respiratory thing. Like, I got to drop this quick. I’m going to die,” he said.
Vedder briefly “totally quit,” and then, “About four or five months in, something started happening. I stressed out. Now I’m having a couple smokes.” Vedder recalled that Short knew just what to say when he explained what happened on the phone.
“I said, ‘Well, I’m frustrated with myself. I’m smoking again,’” Vedder recalled telling Short. “He said, ‘Oh, what are you smoking? Are you talking pot, or cigarettes?’ I said, ‘Cigarettes.’ He said, ‘Oh. Are you still waiting for more literature on that?” prompting laughs from Carvey and Spade.
“And that was the last time I ever had a cigarette,” Vedder revealed. “Just like that.”
He added, after waiting a beat, “I mean, maybe not really, but it makes for a better story.”
Spade concluded, “You should never talk to him again because he ended on such a hit.”
Replied Vedder, “Oh, no. He’s full of them.”
