Life & Mortality Quote by Martin Short

Martin Short’s line lands because it treats mortality like an industry note: if you exit the show abruptly, the reviews finally turn generous. It’s classic performer’s gallows humor, but with a distinctly showbiz subtext - praise is plentiful only when it can’t cost anyone anything. The “probably” does a lot of work: he’s not fishing for reassurance so much as admitting the anxiety that even beloved comedians carry, the fear that your real reputation is perpetually pending.

Short is also poking at the obituary as a weird cultural genre, half journalism and half absolution. Obits flatten a complicated career into a clean arc - early promise, big break, “cherished by fans,” survived by a list. They are PR without the publicist, sentimentality with the hard edges sanded down. By naming that machine out loud, he undercuts it, reminding us how selective our kindness can be. We don’t just honor people; we curate them.

There’s another sly intention here: Short frames himself as both subject and spectator, already reading the write-up. That perspective is deeply comedian-coded - standing slightly outside your own life, mining it for timing. The joke isn’t that he wants to die; it’s that he wants to hear the nice part while he’s still around to enjoy it. In a culture that loves retroactive appreciation, he’s asking, with a wink and a wince, why we ration our admiration until the curtain call.