Navigating the Wilds of Pop Culture and Avant-Garde: The Martin Mull Legacy

This might be a bit of a Gen X thing, or an LA/NYC thing, but there's almost no kind of creative journey that resonates more than that of a brilliant, wild artist who somehow has one foot in popular culture and the other foot in the avant-garde, their work a vessel that pours back-and-forth, mixing into a surreal, lightly hallucinogenic punch. This in-between space has always been the sexiest place, the fun zone, a red light zone made of serious jokes and real talk in the guise of the absurd. In this magical, powerful place, all art is political, but there's never, ever any need to say the obvious aloud.

I'm too young to pretend that I know Martin Mull from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman or Fernwood Tonight, and yes, I loved him in Clue, and he and Sandra Bernhard have a kind of gay uncle and aunt place in the canon of my childhood, thanks to Rosanne, but it was his mockumentary/books "The History of White People in America" where I fell in love with his voice. It wasn't a comedy album, but it was the kind of thing that I could not watch when it was on, and I can't not watch it, now.

I think the second book in the series, A Paler Shade of White, was a constant presence in a too-crowded apartment where I spent a fair bit of the late 90s, a place of found family memories of eating fish sticks and Kraft mac & cheese, in a time when television was a performance-thing that happened at a specific time and place. I'm pretty sure that Chris Elliot's book "Daddy's Boy: A Son's Shocking Account of Life with a Famous Father" also occupied a place of honor in near the toilet, along with Bruce Fierstein's "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche." Education, like beauty, is where you find it.

Mull was an incredible singer and guitar player, a funny, clever painter, a comedian whose deadpan riffing skills are not to be underestimated, and just kind of a beautiful vibe. He walked among wild creatures, so that folks like Chris Elliot could amble, and folks like Elliot ambled so that a whole taxonomy of weirdos could slither across the strange global stage that we're now all uncomfortably crowded onto. Sail on, beautiful sailor.