I was about 14 when I discovered that Martin Mull was more than a character actor who turned up playing minor roles in mostly forgettable movies. It might have been this appearance on the Smothers Brothers’ short-lived 1980s CBS variety show that hepped me to his comedy.
It was the perfect age for a nerdy white teen-ager to discover Mull’s particular brand of nerdy white humor.
It was about the same time I first learned that Chris Elliott, the funny, weird, nerdy guy on Letterman’s “Late Night” show, had a dad who had been in radio, but that’s a story for another time.
The genius of Martin Mull’s comedy — much like the genius of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding for that matter, or David Letterman, come to think of it — is that it usually conceals a very, very nasty edge beneath a very, very bland, show-business veneer. In Mull’s case, the edge was often used to attack bigotry, specifically of the kind that he grew up with in suburban Cleveland and Connecticut.
During an era in the 1970s when it was still acceptable for white comedians to tell jokes about Black and Hispanic people, or for male comedians to do jokes about shrewish wives and girlfriends, Mull would come out onto stage with his guitar and also start to tell — with a wide smile and great bonhomie in his voice — what sounded like a racist or sexist joke.
The audience would start to giggle uncomfortably, but then, instead of the expected lame punchline, Mull would veer off into an absurd, over-the-top, almost surreal exaggeration of racism or sexism or antisemitism that made himself — and prejudice itself — the butt of the joke. For a while, Mull cornered the market on exposing the phoniness of bland, homogenized, lowest-common-denominator content that elevated white suburbia as the highest (and only) acceptable form of American culture.
His 1985 mockumentary, “The History of White People in America,” is simultaneously a parody of shallow public-television celebrations of ethnic diversity and a devastating satire of brain-dead American exceptionalism during the Reagan years.
As a disc jockey, Martin Mull’s music has been a staple of my shows from my very week at WRCT. I even occasionally slipped them in during my stints at the commercial AM stations where I worked, much to the aggravation of the program director.
But he had so many great, funny, droll songs: “Licks Off of Records,” “Flexible,” “Jesus Christ, Football Star,” “Normal.” Every time I hear some phony Christian fundamentalist preacher, I start thinking of Martin Mull:
I tried women
Oh how I tried ’em
I took little boys in leather suits
Outside and had ’em tied
I tried a poodle, a collie
Kukla, Fran & Ollie
But Mary in the manger’s got me satisfied
Oh, Jesus is easy
Just get down on your knees
He’s gonna listen to your every prayer
Jesus is easy
Just get down on your knees
He’s everywhere
Jesus Christ! He’s everywhere
Martin Mull died Friday at age 80. I tried, unsuccessfully, several times to get contact information for him over the years, not to interview him, or get an autograph, just to let him know how much I appreciated his work. Maybe I should have tried harder.
Anyway, I guess I know what I’m playing on my show Saturday.