Martin Mull is best remembered by younger people and the less adventurous viewers among us as a comic actor who played authority figures and eccentric second bananas on sitcoms and in movies. Two other sides of Mull were far more interesting: The first was his own preferred guise, as a painter who worked in everything from abstraction to a wonderful “Americana” mode that blended kitsch elements (via photorealist renderings of “happy Americans”) with his own skewed sensibility.
The Martin Mull that I became utterly obsessed by as a kid in the late Seventies was the musical Mull. I was a Doctor Demento listener and was introduced by my dad to the brilliance of Spike Jones. Mull was a different sort of comic musician — a great wordsmith who wrote very funny lyrics and set them over catchy tunes in different musical modes (lounge,Latin, folk, blues, pop). The seven albums he made from 1972 to ’79 were, and are, sublime and nuanced in their weirdness. (This doesn’t include In the Soop, a seeming “jam” recording that is kind of a mess.)
For Mull was at once a modern performer and a throwback to earlier deadpan comics. He started out with long hair and a dapper mustache (the mustache stayed throughout his life, augmented by a beard in his later years) in a laidback, lounge lizard mode. He was fully aware of the modern rock scene in the early Seventies, but his true heroes were blues guitarists like B.B. King (with whom he got to play when he guest-hosted “The Tonight Show”).
His humor thus worked on a more *musical* level than most musical comics (Robert Christgau, in an initial review, compared him to Randy Newman), but he also cut an odd figure, since his particular “niche” made him an opener for major rock acts, where (one assumes) he endured a lot of audience hostility and anger. No matter — there was “Martin Mull and his Fabulous Furniture” starting off the show. He transported with him when on tour an armchair, a lamp, and a table that would comprise his stage “setting,” and he would essentially “play” an extremely white singer-guitarist who just happened to break into light bossa nova and also ultra-funky songs.
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| Mull in the '67 Rhode Island School of Design yearbook. |
Mull played a number of his songs on the show and, in the process, made me into a lifelong fan. The songs were perfectly in the Demento novelty song mode (but more sophisticated), and his hosting and low-key (but razor-sharp) attitude made the hour an utter delight.
Some of the references that Flo and Eddie make on the show depend on a knowledge of Seventies music (most of which is still being played on classic rock stations around the country), but Mull's material is timeless, with brilliant takes on the life of the common American man and musical tropes that needed desperately to be mocked. Here is his Soundstage episode, “60 Minutes to Kill” (1975).
After the PBS special, Mull continued to tour as an opening act but also made a major breakthrough as an actor, as the wife-beating Garth Gimble on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Martin was so oddly charming (and sleazy) that Norman Lear and his fellow producers decided that Mull should host the “summer replacement” show for MH, MH. It was a talk show spoof (one of the best) about a threadbare program broadcasting from the small town in Hartman.
Fernwood 2-Night was clearly testing the boundaries of what could be done in TV comedy (its writers had worked for Mad mag, National Lampoon, and the comedy group the Credibility Gap) and was cranked out five times a week for 13 weeks — the result was a show that acquired a cult when it aired and when it was revived in reruns. It was brilliantly written and had numerous about-to-be-famous performers (including Paul Reubens, Rosanna Arquette, and Gary Coleman) showing up as guests on the fake talk show.
I would argue that the best movie he ever made was the 1980 chronicle of California fads, Serial, but he did continue to work steadily in film, sitcoms, and (the bonanza of bonanza) TV commercials through last year. He is beloved by a younger generation for his turn in Clue (1985), which is a film I like but that doesn’t live up to the wonderful talents of its cast.
So, for the rest of this piece, I will set aside the visions of Mull as Roseanne’s gay boss, Sabrina’s principal, oddball detective Gene Parmesan, and will instead focus almost entirely on his music, which is remembered mostly by “people of a certain age” and those who do have a taste (and an ear) for the finer things in musical humor.
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| Two Funhouse faves on the same bill! |
Martin declares his love for his dummy but demands that she not make him say things in public that he doesn’t want to say. “Ventriloquist love,/It ain’t such a groove/Whenever I kiss you/your lips never move.”
The catchiness continues later in the album when Martin sings about Miami, spelling out the town’s name as an existential quandary: “M-I-A-M-I in heaven or am I in Miami?”
And Mull’s “theme” of sorts appears on this album, an ode to his little-person object of love. Here again, a catchy-as-fuck melody accompanies a ridiculous set of lyrics. (With some very snappy whistling!)
His second album had the unwieldy (and so very early Seventies) title Martin Mull and his Fabulous Furniture in Your Living Room!!. It was the first of two live albums he released; thus the record has an ample amount of Martin talking to the crowd. (Each one of his better-known songs had a sizable preamble he’d do in concerts.)
Here, there are two novelty instrumentals. This piece of rare video (shot for a PBS show) shows him performing one of them, “Dueling Tubas.”
Martin played around with the notion of club dance culture on his albums. He meditated on disco etiquette in later years, but at this point (’73), he felt a new dance was needed for those who didn’t want to get up and make fools of themselves. Thus, “Do the Nothing.”
He changed the lyrics for this tune from performance to performance; the verse about Helen Keller is probably the best of the bunch — this was, again, the Seventies of National Lampoon and Norman Lear TV shows.
Mull was, among other things, a killer guitarist, a talent that got hidden in his “Fabulous Furniture” lounge lizard incarnation. The best example of this is a song that he wrote that actually says he *isn’t * a good guitarist — he plays famous rock refrains as he confesses, “It’s just licks off of records I’ve learned.” Here he duets with a master guitarist, the Wrecking Crew’s own Glen Campbell.
Here is an example of Martin entertaining a receptive crowd during a Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert episode devoted to Southern rock bands (signed to Capricorn records) in 1973. He plays a song from the second LP, “Ukulele Blues,” that has him utilizing an unusual tool to play bottleneck guitar.
Although I’m saddened to write this piece, I was delighted to find that various collectors have shared their rare pieces of Mull-iana. Here is a radio interview he did in 1975 on a Maryland radio station, to promote a gig in D.C.
In this interview he describes a movie he was supposed to write with Steve Martin, Carl Gottlieb, Pat McCormick, and Jonathan Winters about American history (for the Bicentennial), to be produced by Francis Ford Coppola (!). Suffice it to say, the film never got made. (Instead, The Jerk appeared.)
The third album, Normal, contains another group of memorable tunes, including the title song, in which Martin tells his main squeeze they should give up their hippie ways and turn “normal for a change.”
Now, onto a clever set of lyrics that are of that same National Lampoon era. Mull did humor about many races, including his sharp mocking of midwestern white people (in The History of White People in America). He did one song that reflected on his inability to be truly funky (unless he wanted to be compared to Randy Newman); this depresses him to the point where “All I’ve got that’s Black is the Blues.”
A precious artifact to find, a live set done on Sausalito radio station KSAN in 1973. This is primo stuff, with Mull performing solo and doing a few songs he never put on any album.
Another one of those ballad-y songs that Mull wrote that had the most bizarre and brilliantly playful lyrics. Here he meditates on the schnozz and its many uses (plus makes many bad puns and rhymes on the word “nose”).
As someone who fled the Catholic church as fast as I could (after attending way too much Catholic school), I have a major fondness for Martin’s songs about God. There are four of them, with “Jesus Christ, Football Star,” being the first (done in a country mode).
Perhaps the best of his sacrilegious tunes is this one, which has some blessedly irreverent rhymes about how he tried many other things and finally arrived at Jesus. Again I remind you this was the National Lampoon era where every topic was up for grabs, comedy-wise: “I tried women/oh, how I tried/I took little boys in leather suits outside/and had them tied/I tried a poodle, a collie/Kukla, Fran, and Ollie/but Mary in her manger got me satisfied!”
Jumping ahead to the album that I believe was his best seller (mostly because it appeared after he had started hosting “Fernwood 2-Night”), I’m Everyone I've Ever Loved, we move on to an even greater package of laidback absurdity and some great genre parodies. Here is a sea shanty that he wrote with Steve Martin, as performed on Fernwood 2-Night.
My favorite genre-parody by Mull is this one, which finds him perfectly spoofing Philadelphia Soul with a song that isn’t funny but is just a damned good parody of pretty much everything the Stylistics and other vocal groups released in the early to mid-Seventies.
Mull’s best story song, “They Never Met,” was acted out for Michael Nesmith’s Television Parts TV series. At this point Martin had put on some weight and had a beard. The odd thing here is that I believe the woman performing the sketch with him is his wife, but Melissa Manchester actually performed the female vocal on the song they are lip-synching to.
Another song written by “Steve Martin Mull” (the name under which Steve and Martin toured at one point). This time it’s a parody of an old Western song, again with great gag lyrics.
Martin’s seventh and last album, Near Perfect/Perfect (1979) contained this, the last of his religious songs. In this one he lets us know who he wants to be — and it’s nothing less than the Deity himself. Witty lyrics again placed over a catchy-as-hell melody.
And it makes sense to end the part of this survey pertaining to his Seventies music career with this one, in which he sums up his reaction to the clubs he had played over the years, having found the single worst one of the bunch.
I’ll include two short clips from his first two films as an actor (both of which he starred in). The first one, FM (1978), was refashioned into WKRP in Cincinnati and tries to make a group of DJs into heroes. It’s one of those films where the soundtrack was more solidly worked on than the script. (And some of the musical acts who were on the soundtrack were also seen performing live in the film.)
His second film, Serial (1980), is definitely the best movie he ever starred in. A parody of the health, psychological, and spiritual trends of the Seventies (famously called “The Me Decade” by Tom Wolfe), the film has some great nasty dialogue and a wonderful cast of TV sitcom vets. Mull’s wife was played by the superb Tuesday Weld (good in everything she did), who had a mostly unused knack for comedy, which she displays in Serial.
The quote the boy says to Mull in this scene is not from “Star Trek” as he says, but from Kurt Vonnegut’s book of short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House.
Mull began his History of White People series on Cinemax in 1985; it concluded with a film called Portrait of a White Marriage in 1988. The series was done in mockumentary style and followed, among others, a family headed by Fred Willard and Mary Kay Place.
Willard performed in the style of his “Jerry Hubbard” character from Fernwood 2-Night — dull-witted and delightfully deadpan. The show was a celebration of “white culture,” which was depicted as mainstream, no-frills nothing, really. It was, again, a by-product of the National Lampoon sensibility, which mocked societal norms and introduced caustic humor into staid, all-American situations.
I had never heard of Mull being presented in a foreign context. Thus my happy surprise at the posting of a clip from a 1985 episode of The Bob Monkhouse Show on which Martin guested. Monkhouse gives him quite a nice showcase — he comes out and does his “humor test” for audiences and then sings “The Humming Song,” a bossa nova in which all the “dirty lyrics” have been removed and he hums in between the stray phrases that remain.
He then chats with Monkhouse, who sets up an a cappella (with audience response) version of his sea shanty “Men.”
While he was in the midst of the White People project, Mull had a full-hour comedy special on HBO. Called Martin Mull: Live From North Ridgeville it was exactly that — Martin hosting a special from his former hometown in Ohio. Because he didn’t want to openly mock the town and its people, some of the humor here is kinder than his usual fare from the Seventies and Eighties, but there are some great segments in the mix.
The first is an ad for North Ridgeville, narrated by Harry Shearer doing the voice of Robin Leach (then-host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous). One standout piece finds Mull doing his bit on white blues music (and “Ukulele Blues” with his baby-bottleneck).
His old friend Fred Willard then joins him, and the two have a Fernwood-esque discussion about Ohio (which was also Fred’s native state). The final comic segment is a radio play about Martin leaving North Ridgeville as a teen, acted out by Mull, Willard, Teri Garr, and Jack Riley. (Aside from Prairie Home Companion, one can’t imagine a comedy special that includes a radio play in the current era.)
The special, written by Martin and Allen Rucker, is for those already acquainted with Mull’s humor.
One of the most fascinating Mull videos on YT is the All-Star Toast to the Improv. The show was recorded in 1988 and features only six comedians, four of whom — Robert Klein (who hosted), Paul Rodriguez, a very wired Richard Lewis, and Billy Crystal — are very verbal guys. To my knowledge, Mull had never done standup (he, of course, sat down during his musical sets), and the sixth person was Robin Williams, who is clearly very buzzed on something (cocaine?).
Thus, Mull is the odd man out, but he also assumes an interesting role, as a non-standup who doesn’t take Robin’s *constant* mugging, physical gestures (including much dick-touching), and yelling out odd exclamations for granted and instead addresses him at various points (by this point in the show Williams has drawn attention to himself during the sets of Klein, Rodriguez, Lewis, and Crystal).
And then there’s Robin. Martin seems to know Williams is going to ruin his set as well, so he notes at the outset, “That’s where your March of Dimes money goes, ladies and gentlemen.” As Williams continues to disrupt and draw attention to himself, he says, “I don’t blame you, Robin. I blame the one who gave you the shot.”
It’s incredible stuff because it does remind one of *how* intense-to-the-point-of-annoying Robin could be at his drug-taking worst. (I’m a fan of Williams, but his acting became a focus for me, as his comedy, even when later sober just was… tiring. This is most likely why Jerry Lewis would constantly cite him as his fave “younger” comic.)
The show also establishes that Mull could indeed handle standup, as he does come up with other ad-libs directed toward Williams as he keeps on disrupting. It’s clear that Mull’s absurdist view of the world could’ve extended to standup, but the interruptions would’ve been worse than the ones he experienced as a rock opening act.
One YT poster put together a montage of Mull’s paintings. Since this was his true vocation and the one he valued the most, I wanted to include this in the line-up.
Two final clips from more recent years. The longest single interview Martin did was on the Kevin Pollak Chat Show in 2015. Previously, the hosts most receptive to Mull were Johnny Carson, Letterman, and particularly Tom Snyder (whom I saw inquire about the state of Mull’s music late in his career; Martin replied there was a “mandate” not to do it anymore, courtesy of the American public).
Pollak’s show was very easy-going and he got a lot out of his guests, especially the comedians. This is definitely the friendliest and most revealing chat Mull ever had with an interviewer.
And this was a very pleasant surprise. Mull played the “older” version of National Lampoon writer Doug Kenney (a version that never existed in real life, since Kenney died at 33) in the made-for-platform (Netflix) movie A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018). In the film Mull appears at various points, commenting on the action. It’s a “meta” device that doesn’t really work, but then again, the film as a whole doesn’t really work.
The film ends, though, with Mull singing, something he hadn’t done in public much since the ’80s. (He broke out a guitar on an episode of the flop sitcom “Dads,” but nothing memorable came of the moment.) The song he sings is his own composition, and it’s a pleasant (dare I say, sweet) summing-up by a man in his later life, “The Time of My Life.”
The song, of course, takes on added resonance when one views it as the “last thing” Mull did. (He actually did a lot of acting in the five years that followed that movie, but this was his final song.) Unlike Doug Kenney, Mull did have a full career that found him singing, acting, writing, and most importantly, painting until the age of 80. He lived a full life and forged a type of humor that was wholly his own, which is something very, very few performers ever do.
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