Maybe he wore us down.

The decades of often indifferent movies, the endless wacky guest-spots on sitcoms, chat show appearances that fatigued the host and viewer long before the commercial break, all of that took its toll on the public image of the Canadian comic actor Martin Short.

Mister “Over the Top” in a world where Robin Williams shouldn’t have had to share that title, years before Jim Carrey hinted at being his first real maple-leafed rival, Short has never been easy to take. Viewers either love or hate this “always on” showbiz tyro, a singing, quipping, impersonating and mugging machine who is the closest thing the world ever got to a goy Jerry Lewis.

I distinctly remember reviewing “Clifford” and “Three Fugitives,” which paired short Short up with Charles Grodin and Nick Nolte, respectively, and noting in print that his co-stars looked like they genuinely loathed the experience of having to work with him. Maybe Grodin (who appears here in an archival interview) was just acting.

I’ve interviewed almost every Short contemporary I could get when they had a movie coming out, but never Short. He comes off as just exhausting.

But then Short aged and we aged. He paired-up with Steve Martin for stage shows and the popular whodunit “Only Murders in the Building,” also starring Selena Gomez. And suddenly, the insults and endless upstaging was hilarious and the collaboration of the then-septugenerains couldn’t help but come off as adorable. Because it is.

The biggest revelation in the latest “the funny person behind the facade” documentary, “Marty: Life is Short” may be how beloved Short is within show business. Short’s decades of home movies show parties and summer gatherings at his Hollywood home and his Canadian lake house reveal not just his oldest friend, “Second City” alumnus Eugene Levy, and lifelong ties to everybody else in that rep company (Andrea Martin, the late Catherine O’Hara, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas and the late Joe Flaherty), but also his and his ex-showbiz wife Nancy’s closeness to Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, Paul Shaffer, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson and Steve Martin.

“Nobody is as wired” into Hollywood and show business as Marty, Short’s writer/producer older brother Michael (“Schitt’s Creek”) marvels. And then you catch home movie footage of Chevy Chase at that lake house and you get it. Short gets a laugh and gets along with everybody, even Chase, whom NOBODY likes. Hell, there’s the late Eagles King Jerk Glenn Frey, playing and singing at a Short family Christmas party.

Old comrade Steve notes that among his friends, “You plan a dinner party, and you invite Marty. And then it turns out Marty can’t come. You cancel the party.”

A great filmmaker friend, Lawrence Kasdan of “The Big Chill,” “The Accidental Tourist” and “French Kiss,” questions short and directed “Life is Short,” gently probing the childhood trauma — losing a beloved older brother, then his mother and then father before he was 21 — that gave Short his ethos and his documentary its title — “Life is Short.”

Hanks marvels that any time you see Short on stage, big screen or small screen, it’s not about “money” or “career move” or ego. “Marty’s doing it to have a blast.”

All those antics, the mannerisms, the shtick and mugging?

“You don’t realize how much energy it takes to do what he does,” Levy declares.

The master improviser never has more fun than in his guise of clueless/tactless entertainment journalist Jiminy Glick, a creation who became the best application of Short’s Irish father’s advice about bringing “a distinctive voice” to any character, the bigger the screwball the better. Lifelong pal Levy breaks down the politically-incorrect and “fat-suited” Glick’s “DEEP” vocal flourishes, another case of a funny person zeroing in on what makes this or that bit work, a real hallmark of this documentary.

We even see Short and Martin working over new bits of verbal business for their act.

As we watch outtakes of Short’s outrageous, indecipherable-accented and fey wedding planner in “Father of the Bride,” a comical backstage lecture from Steve Martin about not “upstaging” him in “The Three Amigos,” but to save his “scene stealing” for Short’s scenes with Chevy Chase, the endless, effortless and edgy repartee with half a century of TV talk show hosts and hostesses, and with Steve, we can’t help but build a new appreciation of Short’s “weird” riffs and rips on the business he adores above all — show business.

That kind of explains why generations have one bad Short film they simply will not accept as awful — “The Three Amigos” did it for many. I love “Captain Ron,” and was tickled to see how often Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell turn up in those Short home movies, which include a staged Spielberg-shot “Forrest Gump and Ed Grimley do ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'” leaping from the deck of a large motor yacht.

It’s not that Forrest (Hanks) can’t swim, before or after his “box-a chocolates.” “The fall will kill you,” Short’s most famous sketch comedy character blurts, “I must say!”

Those home movies and the legions of testimonials give this film a whiff of what the equally sentimental recent John Candy doc had going for it, even if the revelations fall almost as far short of “the man behind the mask” as last year’s Eddie Murphy documentary. The two-part Steve Martin doc “Steve!” remains the gold standard for this subgenre of film.

Short makes light of the “80 percent failure” rate of his many projects, over the decades, including one bomb Kasdan had a hand in (“Cross My Heart”). That’s almost a little too healthy and self-effacing to believe. While one wouldn’t expect co-star Gomez to have anything bad to say about him, surely somebody who found him irritating to work with could be recruited to say so on camera, amusingly if possible.

His love affair with his singer/actress wife Nancy, whom he met in the legendary cast of the first Toronto production of “Godspell” is explored in depth. Her death became another blow Short worked and kvetched his way through. But their adopted daughter Katherine killed herself in February, which isn’t mentioned.

None of which impacts in any way Short’s late career “moment,” the fun we take from watching him and Martin, whose run of big screen stinkers almost rivaled Short’s, trade insults on tour and on Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” just a couple of veteran funnymen delighting us in their (and our) dotage.

So Short gets to take a victory lap and one more curtain call. Because, as always, he insists on it. And now, we’re just worn down enough to like it.

Cast: Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Steve Martin, Andrea Martin, Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw, John Mulaney, Tom Hanks, Nancy Dolman and Eugene Levy.

Credits: Directed by Lawrence Kasdan. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41