Jiminy Glick may be the perfect celebrity interviewer. He comes armed with an armada of questions that he’ll either ask with scorn or miscomprehension of their meaning or ignore to follow the inclinations of his own pea brain.
Despite landing some of the biggest stars on his half-hour talk show, he’s absurdly self-important and blissfully unaware of his own absurdity. He feigns great knowledge about most things Hollywood but will forget something as basic as the name of Liza Minnelli’s mother.
Most people should know – but probably don’t – that Glick is the creation of Martin Short. Nor do most know that his TV series, “Primetime Glick,” which returns for a third season Wednesday (10:30 p.m. EDT, Comedy Central) is one of the funniest programs on television.
What Short has crafted, with an almost manic glee that makes this fringe Hollywood hanger-on his richest creation, is a consistently hilarious send-up of the very idea of the celebrity interview, an acknowledgment of how contrived and artificial such chats usually are.
In Wednesday’s show, he berates guest Brendan Fraser for trying to answer Glick’s ridiculous questions, then informs Ice Cube (“Vanilla Ice” to Glick) that Rex Harrison was “one of the first rappers.”
Later this season will come a memorable exchange with Steven Spielberg. Glick: “And you’ve made so many films. When are you gonna do the big one?”
Spielberg: “What do you mean, “the big one’?”
Glick: “Something that clicks with the public.”
As entertaining as the character’s cluelessness is how much the celebrities seem to enjoy questions that are not rote, similar to the effect Howard Stern sometimes has, but with more genuine wit in play and less adolescent obsession with sex.
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