Martin Mull’s overlooked layers of subversive genius

We throw around the term “Renaissance man” like it’s a Nerf football at a Memorial Day picnic, yet it’s hard to describe the actor and comedian Martin Mull, who died Thursday at 80, in any other way.

Later, Mull stole scenes on “Veep” and “Arrested Development.” But for me, his best acting came as smarmy TV host Barth Gimble on “Fernwood 2 Night,” a satirical late-night talk show created by Norman Lear that aired in the summer of 1977. Gimble, emerging during the Johnny Carson era, served as a precursor to both Garry Shandling’s Larry Sanders and Zach Galifianakis’s “Two Ferns” persona. And again, he had Willard, also sadly gone, as his foil in crime.

What Mull understood is that to poke fun at a form, you had to commit to the form. So on “Do the Nothing,” he gets the audience clapping as he’s ostensibly launching into what promises to be a catchy song about a popular new dance move except that the dance is, as the title hints at, absolutely nothing.

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