20 Questions: Martin Mull

Onstage or oncamera, Martin Mull perhaps best epitomizes that smug, smarmy, self-righteous know-it-all you'd most like to punch in the mouth. Unless he's on your side. Mull's current incarnation of Mr. Sincerity can be seen in the CBS midseason-replacement sitcom "Domestic Life." When Contributing Editor David Rensin knocked on the front door of Mull's Hollywood Hills home, the suave actor/comedian/painter was surprised that he had made it that far despite the attack dog. The pair talked in Mull's Metropolitan Home living room. The dog lurked outside.

[Q] 1. Playboy: Several years ago, a magazine article described you as "almost famous." Are you famous yet?

[A] Mull: My mailman is a guy named Rayfield Dupree. He was a finalist in the triple jump at the Montreal Olympics. To me, he's famous; but to the guy down the street, he's just the mailman. So it's relative. Being famous has about as much to do with my well-being as do my nipples. I take that back. My nipples are handy for helping me find my cigarettes when I'm drunk.

[Q] 2. Playboy: What about you should impress people the most when they meet you?

[A] Mull: That I get away with all this. No. It's a good question that pretty much goes to the deepest, realest part of me. So I'd have to say--my clothes. Actually, if I could change anything in my life, it would be my clothes. I cannot wear them. If you're not 40 inches in the chest and 26 in the waist, you can't wear today's clothes. I always feel that if I bent over, even if I were in a tux, the crack of my ass would be showing.

[Q] 3. Playboy: Your stage persona is thought of as, well, smug. Who is your smug ideal?

[A] Mull: Moi? It's hard to say, since my stage persona is based on various parts of people's personalities that I have observed for many years. I picked up a lot of it when I lived in a singles apartment complex, one of those word-of-mouth immediate-occupancy places. It was half filled with stewardesses and half with weight lifters. I used to hear a lot of things around the pool, like, "I don't believe that asshole said that!" But I'll tell you one guy who really bothers me on that level: Fred Rogers. He has that holier-than-thou attitude about how his neighborhood is so friendly. And you just know it isn't.

[Q] 4. Playboy: Some critics have suggested that your character is, in fact, a forerunner of David Letterman's. Even of Steve Martin's. If that's true, where did you steal your chops?

[A] Mull: From Bob and Ray. But your statement isn't true. There is a collective unconscious, as per Carl Jung. Steve and I are both Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who have that incredible rootlessness. It's your typical Rexall-drugstore upbringing. We can't fall back on being Italian or Jewish. We're also roughly the same age and grew up in the same income bracket. Letterman is from pretty much the same cloth. So why wouldn't we have the same inputs? Maybe the bottom line is just that I'm older.

[Q] 5. Playboy: If you were to teach a college class in pop sociology 20 years from now, how would you explain your success?

[A] Mull: Would the word fluke still be in our vocabulary? Let's hope so. It's simple. A lot of what is put out there for mass consumption is so homogenized that it comes out as safe as milk. But I believe there's an intrinsic irreverence in the American psyche, and when something comes along that offers even an echo of that irreverence, people respond to it.

[Q] 6. Playboy: Where are you when you think of your most outrageous lines, song titles and ideas?

[A] Mull: Often, it happens when I'm driving--which is why my wife, Wendy, does most of the driving. I tend to ramble inside myself. Because of my training as a painter, I'm much more interested in the kind of green the light is than that it means to go or that the guy behind me is leaning on his horn. Another "place" is my favorite time in life: that little twilight zone between dreaming and waking up, before you realize, Jesus, it's 9:30 and I've got to take a shower, because I've got an appointment at ten. There are about ten minutes there that make very little sense. The other morning, I thought of a whole film where a guy marries the wrong girl.He's really in love with one of the attendants. It's called Bridesmaid Revisited.

[Q] 7. Playboy: How long have you loved yourself? And how well?

[A] Mull: Loving myself doesn't usually take that long. 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. For example, I tolerate my lack of interest in lots of things because of what I do. Given a choice between speaking out about some social issue and doing the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, I'd do the latter. It's part of my training as a painter. I learned in art school that one has to put himself in a state of imbalance. If you're painting for eight to ten hours a day, there's got to be nothing more important than the goddamn apple and the bowl. The distance between the edge of the bowl and the edge of the canvas is every bit as important as the Gaza strip. So it's in those moments when I'm either so out of touch with myself or so in touch with myself that other things just float through me that I like myself best. When I get on the bathroom scale, I hate myself.

[Q] 8. Playboy: Describe a recurrent dream.

[A] Mull: It's a strange one. It's as if I'm looking into a shoe box set on edge with the open portion facing me. There are holes punched in both narrow ends and a string running between them. The string seems to be moving, as if it's being pulled through, but I can't be sure, because my field of vision is restricted to the shoe box, almost like a TV screen. And it goes and goes and goes, until all of a sudden, it backlashes, like a fishing line. Then it unties and keeps going. I don't know what it means, though it probably has something to do with the concept of continuity versus chaos, with the idea of ebb and flow. There are no shoe salesmen in my family.

[Q] 9. Playboy: Are you often grateful that your parents didn't name you Norman?

[A] Mull: Yes. But it would have been worse if they'd named me Abner.

[Q] 10. Playboy: You hosted both Fernwood 2-Night and (concluded on page 144)Martin Mull(continued from page 125) America 2-Night. Name your ideal talk-show panel.

[A] Mull: Steve and Eydie. That is, Steve Allen and Idi Amin. Or Steve Garvey and Edy Williams. Edie Sedgwick and Steve Martin? A whole evening of Steve and Edies.

[A] I might also have Bob and Ray. And Fred Willard. I once had Fred for a guest when I hosted The Tonight Show. That's pre--Joan Rivers--yes, I know many think I should have gotten the permanent slot, but I think they went through college transcripts and I just hadn't taken the right courses. Boy, that college degree is important. Anyway, there was some nervousness in the NBC offices about Fred and me. They thought we'd just be doing Fernwood. But I said, "Absolutely not," so they let us do it. Now, I was really trying to be aboveboard with Fred. I introduced him, said what a pleasure it had been working with him. When he sat down, I asked what he'd been doing. A nice, open question; no joke, no twinkle in the eye, no segue into something we had planned. He said, "Well, I've been very busy. I've been working on a novel." And I thought, Thank God, we're out of hot water. He's actually going to talk and be real. So I said, "Really, Fred?" And he said, "Yeah. Those things take forever to read." That's when it got silly. For the next five minutes, it was Fernwood 2-Night.

[Q] 11. Playboy: What are your favorite gag items?

[A] Mull: There were times in my life that would have been highly punctuated had the person across from me been offered his martini in a dribble glass. I would have been thrilled. Another gag item I am very fond of is the small rug you sometimes see in abandoned gas stations that depicts Washington crossing the Delaware, the moon landing, Elvis, J.F.K. No one should be without one.

[Q] 12. Playboy: What does everyone expect from you that you hate giving?

[A] Mull: Something my wife gets all the time when she's with somebody who knows me only through the media is "Is he constantly funny?" Most people who know my work wouldn't ask that. But some people just expect me to always give a clever retort off the top of my head, as if there were a button one could push and out would come hilarity. That's unfair. To expect me to be funny instantly is the same as saying, if I go to a party with a friend who happens to be a plumber, "OK, you tell us this joke, and meanwhile, Roy, why don't you go into the kitchen and get that fucking sink unstopped? OK?" Another thing I hate giving is spare change. To me, it's a contradiction in terms.

[Q] 13. Playboy: What scares you?

[A] Mull: Every once in a while, I'll take a look at the world. I'll read the entire newspaper or watch hours of TV news, and I'll feel as if the whole planet may well be getting a little dumber and feeding its own dumbness, as if life is getting cheaper. I like what Lily Tomlin says: Why does history repeat itself? Because nobody listens the first time. Realizing you can be blown out of the sky or find the neighbors' kid in the garbage can, wrapped in newspaper--that scares me. My own driving also scares me. But what really looms over everyone's head is what it would be like if California had blue laws and you couldn't buy booze on Sunday.

[Q] 14. Playboy: You're sitting in a Mexican restaurant. You're on your second double margarita. The woman with you apparently believes most of what you're saying. What do you do when the mariachis come over?

[A] Mull: I'd very heatedly start talking in German, to the point where they'd realize there was going to be no communication and no tip and it was time to move on. Actually, with my Ohio stomach, I wouldn't be in a Mexican restaurant unless I were also in a sitz bath of Maalox.

[Q] 15. Playboy: Defend dentistry.

[A] Mull: You know that dentists have the highest suicide rate of anyone. No? Then you heard it here first--and possibly last. We even deal with that simple premise in an episode of Domestic Life. My wife, who is played by Judith Marie Bergan, reads in the paper about dentists' suicide rate. And, quite frankly, that settles it. We have our dentist over for dinner. Of course, when the man comes by, he already has one foot off the Golden Gate. We keep the table knives away from him.

[A] I've looked into the phenomenon and I've found that, number one, dentists usually work in very small spaces. Dentists' offices are not palatial; certainly not the room with the chair. Number two, most of dentists' conversations are one-way. They get answers like "Hranglenlydoplk." Number three, people usually feel worse when they leave than when they arrive. The list is endless. I guess I haven't actually defended dentists. I simply justify. However, I do defend their right to kill themselves. The right to life and the right to dentistry are very similar. Defending the right to dentistry is one of the few things that would take me away from my painting and the Sunday crossword.

[Q] 16. Playboy: What can we learn from looking at paintings?

[A] Mull: After leaving an exhibition, I'll find that my perception of the outside world has been changed. Instantly. My experience has been altered by the artist's vision, and I will see things that I haven't seen before. Most visual art is, to some extent, distillation. You've drawn perimeters; the canvas gives you a top, bottom and sides. But those edges aren't there when you walk down the street. So if the real world is orange juice, then art is like orange-juice concentrate. Like a guide dog, paintings help you see.

[Q] 17. Playboy: Your artwork has appeared in national magazines. You've had exhibitions. Why aren't you painting for a living?

[A] Mull: Needless to say, it's very difficult to buy that Bel Air mansion going door to door with your drawings, saying, "This one or the dog? What do you think?" Or "I'll draw your dog. You don't have one? I'll get you one." Most of us in the fine arts have what are known as day gigs. Instead of driving a cab to get enough money for my oils, I was able to host a talk show and be in films. The remuneration for cab driving was not even comparable.

[Q] 18. Playboy: Describe ultimate sex.

[A] Mull: Ultimate sex would probably be dying right when you came. Wouldn't you say? Anything else is penultimate. Of course, I hope this doesn't set off another rash of dead dentists.

[Q] 19. Playboy: What does a man of culture never do?

[A] Mull: I think licking the sink in a public rest room is out. Have we reached the 20th question yet?

[Q] 20. Playboy: This is it. You've been called a master of timing. Name three instances in life where timing is crucial.

[A] Mull: Can I get back to you on that tomorrow? Or perhaps the day after?

"Most of dentists' conversations are one-way. They get answers like 'Hranglenlydoplk.' "