Ed Grimley

Concept and creation

Martin Short originated the character on Toronto's Second City stage as an unnamed school parent in a sketch. Originally, his hair was simply very greasy and unkempt, but another cast member joked offstage that the height of the hair seemed to increase with each performance. In an interview, Short said that he was inspired by a scene from the John Wayne movie McLintock and started greasing it straight up. Short noticed an incidental baring of his teeth raised laughs; that too became a character trait. Over numerous appearances, the character of Ed Grimley began to take shape.

Ed Grimley is an excessively cowlicked, hyperactive manchild who is obsessed with banal popular culture, particularly Wheel of Fortune and its host, Pat Sajak. He also loves to play the triangle, which for him consists of playing a recorded musical piece, striking the triangle once, and then wildly dancing to the recording. His catchphrases include "I must say", "totally decent", "makes me completely mental," and "give me a break".

Appearances

Short was added to the cast of Second City's television offshoot SCTV in 1982, debuting the Ed Grimley character in the skit "SCTV Movie of the Week: The Nutty Lab Assistant". Grimley became a SCTV fixture, appearing in the various shows, commercials, promos, and "behind-the-scenes" dramas that made up the fictional channel's programming. After the show's end in 1984, Short moved to the more prominent Saturday Night Live, bringing his breakout character with him.

With Grimley, his best-known original character, Martin Short's popularity on SNL proved to be the springboard to a long career in film and TV. He appeared as Ed Grimley in his 1985 Showtime special Martin Short: Concert For the North Americas, at Comic Relief 1986, and in 1989's I, Martin Short, Goes Hollywood. Grimley became a cartoon character in Hanna-Barbera's 1988 animated series The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, featuring Second City colleagues Joe Flaherty (also reprising his SCTV character, Count Floyd), Catherine O'Hara and Andrea Martin as series regulars.

Short briefly revived the Ed Grimley role in his 1995 series The Show Formerly Known As the Martin Short Show, for a spoof of the comedy film Dave, and appeared again in a 1996 episode of Muppets Tonight, in which Grimley marries Miss Piggy to obtain an $85 inheritance from his deceased great-uncle. The character seemingly died later that year on Saturday Night Live, in the skit "Ed Grimley in Heaven" (though Grimley is brought back to life by his guardian angel [played by guest star Chevy Chase] after showing a video of Ed Grimley's life and commenting that he needs to do more with it before he can come back to Heaven). Grimley would however make a number of appearances in 1999's The Martin Short (Talk) Show.

Ed Grimley made a brief onstage appearance, triangle in hand, in the 2006 Broadway show Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me. He appeared again in 2009's Let Freedom Hum: An Evening of Comedy Hosted By Martin Short. Short reprised his role as Ed Grimley in a Saturday Night Live parody music video of Drake's Hotline Bling in November 2015.

The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley

The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley is a 1988 animated series produced by Hanna-Barbera starring Martin Short's Ed Grimley as well as other characters and actors from Second City's SCTV. Only one season of 13 episodes was produced. Despite the short run, the show is the only Saturday morning animated adaptation of both an SCTV character and a Saturday Night Live character. Episodes featured Ed Grimley in adventures, which start out as mundane, but turn very surreal and cartoonish, interspersed with science lessons from The Amazing Gustav Brothers, Roger and Emil, and a live-action segment with a "scary story" presented as a show-within-a-show by Grimley's favorite television host, SCTV's Count Floyd (played by SCTV cast member Joe Flaherty). Grimley's fellow cartoon characters included Grimley's landlord Leo Freebus (voiced by Jonathan Winters), Leo's wife Deidre (voiced by Andrea Martin), his ditzy, amateur actress neighbor Ms. Malone (voiced by Catherine O'Hara; a female character by the name of Ms. Malone did appear on an SNL version of an Ed Grimley sketch on the season ten episode hosted by Alex Karras, but Ms. Malone was played by that episode's musical guest Tina Turner), and her little brother, Wendell (voiced by Danny Cooksey).

Guest stars on the show included Christopher Guest and SCTV alumni Eugene Levy and Dave Thomas. The show also featured the voices of René Auberjonois, Kenneth Mars, and Arte Johnson from Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. While not renewed for a second season, the show was seen in reruns in 1996 on Cartoon Network's unnamed pre-Adult Swim-era late-night programming block, which consisted of such shows as Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, reruns of Looney Tunes cartoon shorts, and repeats of old Hanna-Barbera shows from the 1960s and '70s. Hanna-Barbera sponsored an Ed Grimley look-alike contest midway through the first season, which was won by 10-year-old Matt Mitchell from Des Moines, Iowa.

Additional voices

Home media releases

On January 29, 2013, Warner Archive released The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley: The Complete Series on DVD in region 1 as part of their Hanna–Barbera Classics Collection. This is a Manufacture-on-Demand (MOD) release, available exclusively through Warner's online store, MoviesUnlimited.com, and Amazon.com.