The guy on Rosanne. Played Leon Carp.
Good actor
RIP
Saw him live in ‘74, I think, with Steve Martin. It was billed as the “Steve Martin Mull Show.” I never laughed so hard in my life!
He was also an accomplished artist - some of his work was for sale in the lobby of the club where he performed, but the prices ($200-$300) were far more than my budget at age 23 would allow. Wish I’d been able to buy one!
An anecdote I heard from my best friend in college: Martin Mull was also involved in visual arts, and at one point in his career, was having trouble finding a gallery that would mount a show of his work. So one day he snuck into the men’s room of a gallery, and hung a selection of his paintings there. He called his show “Art in a Minute.”
Ooh, this was always at the video store. My friends and I finally rented it to see what the heck it was. Very funny! I think for us, we hadn’t seen a lot of general mocking of us whites aside from Blazing Saddles.
Wow, the precursor to Steve Martin Short.
One of my most cherished childhood memories is of watching Fernwood 2-Night with my dad. And as a kid, I had most of Martin Mull’s comedy records, starting with his best-of compilation No Hits, Four Errors.
There’s a relatively recent interview with Mull on YouTube that is incredibly comprehensive about his career – except for addressing whether Mull was indeed the person who came up with the line “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
R.I.P. Martin Mull!
Noodling around I found one of my favorite Mull fake commercials. A sugar enriched, etc., protein shaped cereal.
It’s part of a Soundstage Martin Mull episode from 1975. A lot of his music. Special guests Flo and Eddie (who used to be Mothers and before that Turtles).
Me, too. My memory–which may be wrong–is that his acting stint on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, came before Fernwood. Anyway, I always tended to think of him as an actor first, and comic second.
He always had an undercurrent of menace. Not very many artists have managed to combine that with being as hilariously funny as he was.
When I was a teenager I thought Barth Gimble and Jerry Hubbard were the funniest people on TV and that was the same year I discovered Python reruns on PBS.
My favorite from Fernnwood Tonight. Leisure suits case cancer.
A young Craig Richard Nelson!
The ability of any and all of them to keep straight faces is wonderful.
Seeing him do this song on PBS Soundstage with a full band, every time he said “Do the Nothing”, the band would stop and he would just stand there, looking bored, and then they’d start up again.
Fernwood Tonight is just simply one of my alltime favourite TV shows.
Liked his Get a Life appearance.
A Jessica Walter shock-scream fo him - RIP.
I remember him in a surreal pizza commercial very seriously explaining that pizza etiquette doesn’t allow you to eat starting from the outside edge of the pizza; you must start from the point.
Hilarious because it was so random. RIP.