Martin Short, now a Five-Timer, hosts a celebrity-filled 'SNL' holiday episode

Over a long career, and especially during his recent resurgence on “Only Murders in the Building,” Martin Short has pressured to a perfect diamond the Martin Short Thing, which is: saying very mean and petty things in a way that is both hilarious and somehow endearing.It’s his thing and maybe nobody except Don Rickles got away with it for so long.For “Saturday Night Live,” which Short guest-hosted for the fifth time (cue Five-Timers’ cold open), it’s a perfect fit.

With the comic actor’s manic energy, perfect delivery of cutting lines, and ability to still dance and sing at 74 made his monologue and sketch appearances pretty much flawless, though he was a little light in the show.That was partly because a raft of celebrities (though not his co-stars Selena Gomez and Steve Martin, though they were mentioned, or rumored romantic partner Meryl Streep) filled up parts in lots of sketches and dominated the cold open.They included Tom Hanks, Paul Rudd, Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Emma Stone and Scarlett Johansson, who provided live reaction to jokes about her from a particularly brutal “Weekend Update” joke swap between Michael Che and her husband, Colin Jost.Short scored as an aggressive Delta lounge employee in a sketch about a Christmas parade that takes place at an airport gate, an angry mall parking lot driver, and a demanding director of the “Charlie Brown Christmas” pageant.

But he was absent in the episode’s pre-taped piece, “An Act of Kindness,” about a homeless man (Kenan Thompson) helped by a gullible woman (Heidi Gardner), and a sequel to the Nate Bargatze “Sábado Gigante” sketch — with Marcello Hernández as host Don Francisco — that featured Rudd and an appearance from Dana Carvey.The crowded episode didn’t give Short much opportunity to bring back classic characters or to break new ground, but it didn’t matter much because the show overall had strong sketches and when Short was deployed, he nailed every moment.Musica...