Martin Mull Took Every Job Except Being Ordinary

I grew up watching Martin Mull appear on television, sometimes for one episode and sometimes in recurring roles, and no matter how long he stayed, he always left his mark. It didn’t seem to matter whether he was playing a neighbor, a boss, a teacher, a detective, or some completely ridiculous character. Mull had a way of making it feel like he had simply taken another job in another universe.

His humor was dry, offbeat and deeply cynical, but there was always something smart underneath it. He could walk into a scene, deliver a perfectly flat line or give a deadpan look and somehow puncture the mood without making a production out of it. Writers didn’t need to make him the loudest person in the room. Give Mull a little space and his timing did the rest.

You might remember him as Colonel Mustard in Clue, Leon Carp on Roseanne, Gene Parmesan on Arrested Development, or from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Two and a Half Men and plenty of other shows. Sometimes he stayed for years. Sometimes he appeared for only a few scenes. Either way, there was usually something about him you remembered.

With his typical dry humility, Mull once suggested that he understood why his peers respected him: he had shown that you could have an incredibly successful comedy career without compromising your dignity or yelling to get a laugh. That was Mull. He trusted the joke enough to let it breathe.

What I didn’t fully appreciate growing up was that acting wasn’t really Mull’s main thing. His career moved through music, comedy, television, film and painting, but painting was the pursuit he considered most important. He studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, earning his BFA in 1965 and MFA in 1967, while music and comedy initially helped him make a living.

Those temporary jobs had a funny habit of becoming careers.

Mull’s breakthrough came with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Fernwood 2 Night, where he played the wonderfully oblivious talk-show host Barth Gimble opposite Fred Willard. From there came Clue, Roseanne, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Arrested Development and all those other roles where he could walk into a scene and immediately make it feel like his territory.

His life and career are explored in Who Is Martin Mull?, a documentary directed by Neil Berkeley from a project originally begun with comedian and friend Bob Saget. Saget started the film before he died in 2022, and Berkeley eventually completed it, bringing together Mull’s own reflections with memories from friends and colleagues including Steve Martin, Tom Waits and David Alan Grier.

Mull also had a pretty good understanding of himself. He once said, “The parts of me that I like best are the parts that surprise me. But in the classical sense of the word, I’m not sure that I do love myself. I tolerate myself.” It is a wonderfully Mull-like observation, funny on the surface but revealing something underneath. He seemed perfectly comfortable being difficult to define, even if he wasn’t particularly interested in defining himself.

That may be why he never felt like a typical television actor. He came from an older entertainment world where a performer could move between music, comedy, television, film and art, but Mull brought something distinctly his own to every stop.

I think that’s what I remember most. Martin Mull didn’t disappear into other characters. He seemed to wander into different universes, take completely different jobs and somehow remain Martin Mull.