He was born in Chicago on August 18, 1943, the son of an actress and an engineer, and moved from there to Ohio with them when he was two. After relocating with his family to New Canaan, Connecticut, at 15, he studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. It’s a field in which he would eventually earn an MFA in 1967 and continue to pursue throughout his life. He even had several solo exhibitions and published a collection of some of his works, “Paintings Drawings and Words,” in 1995.
His first entry into show business came as a songwriter, writing “A Girl Named Johnny Cash,” a spoof of Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue,” for singer Jane Morgan that made it to #61 on the Billboard country charts in 1970. From there, he recorded a series of albums throughout the 1970s, including “Martin Mull and His Fabulous Furniture in Your Living Room!” (1973), “Days of Wine and Neuroses” (1975), and “Sex & Violins” (1978), and would find himself opening for such musical acts as Randy Newman, Bruce Springsteen, and Frank Zappa.
The tunes featured on those albums may have been comedic, but he presented them in a relatively straightforward manner (his 1972 debut album featured musical contributions from the likes of Levon Helm and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott). He so fully committed to the forms the songs were spoofing that it took new listeners a while to recognize that what they were listening to were inspired jokes.
Mull would eventually shift from music to television as a vehicle for his comedy, first getting noticed for his recurring role as slimy wife-beater Garth Gimble on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” Norman Lear’s absurdist soap opera spoof that became a cult sensation during its 1976-77 run. Although his character met a grisly fate—impaled by the star atop an aluminum Christmas tree—that wasn’t the end for Mull, who was then tapped by Lear to star as Garth’s twin brother, Barth, on “Fernwood 2 Night,” a summer replacement spin-off that would take the form of a local talk show hosted by him and his dim-bulb announcer/sidekick Jerry Hubbard (Fred Willard). Of course, spoofing the form and content of the typical talk show may not seem particularly radical in the wake of “The Larry Sanders Show,” “Between Two Ferns” and seemingly every third sketch on “Saturday Night Live,” but “Fernwood 2 Night” did it early and did it better than pretty much anyone else.
Much of the reason it hit as well as it did was due to Mull’s work as Gimble, effectively channeling the smug slickness that could be found in those hosting such local access shows, glad-handing local administrators as though they were members of the Rat Pack. At the same time, Mull also conveyed a certain affection for Gimble and his aspirations that kept the humor from curdling into mean-spiritedness, and the by-play that developed between him and Willard was as flat-out hilarious as anything else that was on television at the time.