Somewhere he and Jerry Hubbard are enjoying the dulcet sounds of Happy Kyne and the Mirthmakers.
Fernwood!
I could imagine Lucille Bluth, bored in the hereafter, approached by some angel to perform some annoying task. Suddenly the angel rips off the halo and wings. It’s Gene Parmesan! Ahhhh!
RIP to Mull, a terrific actor with a long career.
I heard the news and this was almost exactly what I pictured, I was coming here to post something similar!
He was one of those actors whose name I could never remember, but was always fun to watch. Loved his guest appearances on Veep and Arrested Development.
I saw him perform his Fabulous Furniture act at a club in Boston in the '70s. He had a great putdown for a heckler: “Yeah, I remember when I had my first beer.”
Another classic.
Both Martin Mull and Fred Willard now gone. Fuck!
RIP. Mull was from the same era as the first Saturday Night Live crew - he was the same age as Chevy Chase - and hit a level of fame at the same time as them with Mary Hartman/Fernwood. If you were a betting person in mid-1975 you’d probably put as much on Mull as Steve Martin or Chevy Chase to hit the really big time as the Goofy White Guy Of Their Generation.
That never quite happened, probably because Mull preferred his own comedy style to be very, very dry - too dry for the mass audience. (Steve Martin covertly had similar instincts, but kept that part of himself aside for special projects, making his most widely-seen persona quite broad.)
Instead of blowing up, Mull became instead the That Guy of American comedy, popping up in a number of choice guest star or supporting roles where someone had an eye for talent. So there he is in Mrs. Doubtfire, Taxi, Golden Girls, Clue, early Roseanne, Jingle All the Way, The Simpsons, Larry Sanders, Veep, Community, Arrested Development etc. etc. Like anyone with such a long career, there are generations who know his later work but nothing about how he got started - they weren’t born when the comedy albums or Fernwood came out. So to them, Mull was the principal on Sabrina the Teenaged Witch, or a voice on Danny Phantom.
Mull kept getting cast because he was consistently and un-ostentatiously funny - the perfect talents for a That Guy with a career spanning multiple generations, if not for becoming a megastar.