For anyone lucky enough to have lived through the long arc of his career, the death of the funny, dry, deadpan Martin Mull on Thursday at age 80 feels like the end of an era. A writer, songwriter, musician, comedian, comic actor and, away from the spotlight, serious painter, Mull was a comforting and disturbing presence – deceptively normal, even bland, but with a spark of evil. Martin Mull is with us, it was thought, and that at least agrees with the world.
There was a kind of timelessness about him. As a well-dressed, articulate young man, he seemed older than his years; later, with his owlish eyes behind his glasses, he came across as oddly childlike. He leaves behind a long, unbroken string of screen credits, beginning with Norman Lears's small-town soap opera satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and including regular roles on Roseanne and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, recurring roles on Veep and Arrested Development, and guest spots ranging from Taxi to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and in films such as Mr. Mom, Clue, and Mrs. Doubtfire. And so it seemed that he would always be there, working. Yet his appearances were never quite expected, or in the expected place. But he was always welcome, and always perfect for the job.
Like Steve Martin, his friend and a few years younger, he was an accomplished instrumentalist; as a purveyor of witty humorous songs, he was in the tradition of Tom Lehrer and Flanders and Swann and the equal of Dan Hicks, with whom he shared a taste for floral-print shirts. He was a countercultural cabaret performer who stood out from the counterculture, and, like Martin, he dressed well at a time when young comedians grew their hair long and wore street clothes to distinguish themselves from their suit-and-tie elders.
But where Martin was a whirlwind of flailing arms and legs, Mull worked in a still place; indeed, his first appearances found him seated. His on-stage musical number, called Martin Mull & His Fabulous Furniture, found him in his favorite prop, a large armchair, leaning forward on his big hollow-body guitar (have you ever seen one? It's electric. You'll find it will see a lot in the near future). He later leaned back into the role of Barth Gimble, the host of the talk show parodies Fernwood 2Night and America 2Night. Even his solo appearances on The Tonight Show, in which he was a consistently hilarious, blues-voiced guest, usually playing off his show business career, were broadcast seated.
In Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Mull played Garth Gimble, an abusive husband who died impaled on a Christmas tree star; it seems as if Garth had to die so that Barth, his twin brother, could live. In the spinoff Fernwood 2Night, Mull as Barth and Fred Willard, as his trusting sidekick Jerry Hubbard, created a telepathic double act in which they could seem like antithetical expressions of a single character. Together, the talk shows lasted only two summer seasons, but because they appeared weekly — they adopted the form of the thing being parodied — produced 130 episodes, which gave them cultural clout. (You can find excerpts of them all over the Internet.) Mull and Willard would work together again over the years, in Mull’s Cinemax series The History of White People in America and the follow-up feature Portrait of a White Marriage, in commercials for Red Roof. Inn, as a gay couple on Roseanne and as robots on Dexter's Laboratory.
Mull grew up in North Ridgeville, Ohio, not far from Fernwood in his imagination, and white insularity was a theme of his comedy. My first memory of Mull was the 1973 album Martin Mull & His Fabulous Furniture in Your Living Room! , which opened with a tubas-played version of Dueling Banjos and included a Lake Erie Delta blues song he supposedly learned from his real-estate grandfather; it was performed on a ukulele with a baby bottle as a slide: I woke up this afternoon/Both cars were gone/I felt so bad inside/I threw my drink on the lawn.
The history of white people in America, he told David Letterman, would examine what white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have done in this country since World War I. This will need to be examined closely. One memorable Fernwood episode shows a Jew stopped for speeding while driving through town like some sort of exotic animal, for the benefit of Fernwood residents who may have never seen a real living Jew before. I hope that suits you, said Barth, welcoming his guest. I don't know what you're used to.
Like many great comedians—the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields before him, or Martin and Albert Brooks in his day—Mull was a hot-headed outsider who found success as an insider while remaining essentially untamed. It is no small matter that he was, from beginning to end, a serious artist, an undergraduate and graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design—where, not coincidentally, the Talking Heads were later born. He saw show business as a day job that allowed him to devote himself to painting.
We were lucky that he needed this job.
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