There are actors you recognize and actors you know. Martin Mull belonged to that weird third category: the guy who seemed to have wandered in from another movie, another planet, possibly another century, carrying a guitar, a cigar and an expression suggesting that he had already figured out the punch line to civilization and was too polite to tell you.
Who Is Martin Mull? is a documentary about that guy, although “documentary” almost seems too respectable a word for what is really an affectionate excavation of a human being who spent his life refusing to stay in one box. Mull was a comedian, musician, actor, songwriter and painter, but he was also apparently a man who regarded show business less as a calling than as a particularly lucrative racket for financing the thing he really cared about: painting.
This is the first great joke of the movie. The world remembers Martin Mull for comedy, while Martin Mull himself apparently regarded comedy as the day job. And what a day job. Mull came up through the strange comedy underground of the 1970s, when the distinction between comedian, musician, satirist and lunatic was still pleasantly blurry. His fake talk-show work with Fred Willard on Fernwood 2 Night now looks like some radioactive transmission from the future: deadpan, surreal, aggressively artificial television pretending to be television while quietly dismantling the whole institution. Watching Mull and Willard work together is like discovering that somebody invented The Eric Andre Show decades before anyone had invented the cultural conditions necessary to explain it.
And then there is Mull the actor, that seemingly indestructible character who could show up in Roseanne, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Arrested Development, Clue or almost anywhere else and immediately make the room feel slightly more intelligent and slightly more dangerous. He had mastered the art of looking like a pompous ass while somehow making the pompous ass lovable. The trick was that Mull always seemed to be standing half an inch outside his own performance, watching it with you. The film understands that this was the secret: he could inhabit the joke without ever becoming trapped inside it.
What it also understands—and what makes the picture considerably more interesting than a standard celebrity scrapbook—is that the comedian was never really the destination. The painter was. Mull took his painting seriously. Not celebrity-seriously, not “I have a Malibu studio and some unfortunate friends who tell me I'm a genius” seriously, but actually seriously. His work mattered to him. Entertainment paid the bills; painting was the thing. That inversion gives the whole movie a strange voltage. Here was a man who became famous doing precisely the thing he considered secondary, a performer who spent decades entertaining the masses while quietly insisting that his real identity was somewhere else.
Bob Saget began filming the project in 2018, sitting down with Mull for the kind of relaxed conversations that happen when two comedians recognize that the other guy understands the machinery. Saget died in 2022. Mull died in 2024. Fred Willard is gone. Norman Lear is gone. And suddenly the documentary has become something nobody planned for: a time capsule of people who thought they were making a movie about the past and discovered, too late, that they were making one about absence. That melancholy sneaks up on you because the movie isn't initially interested in mourning Mull. It is too busy enjoying him.
Mull talks about getting old with the same peculiar combination of resignation and mischief that characterized everything else. The film eventually stops being merely a celebration of an underrated comedian and becomes something much stranger: a meditation on what happens when the party has been going on for fifty years and you suddenly realize people are leaving through the back door. There are moments when Who Is Martin Mull? feels almost too nice. It doesn't excavate every dark corner. It isn't interested in manufacturing scandal or pretending that Mull's career was some tortured march toward artistic recognition. It likes the guy. Everybody likes the guy. Steve Martin, Tom Waits, David Alan Grier, Patton Oswalt and the other interviewees essentially form a chorus of people saying, in increasingly elaborate ways, “Yeah, that guy was terrific.”
Normally, that much admiration would make a documentary feel like a funeral-home brochure. Here it works because Mull himself keeps puncturing the sentimentality. He was funny because he was skeptical of everything, including himself. He could turn sincerity into a joke and then, when you weren't looking, turn the joke back into sincerity. That is a harder trick than it looks, and it is probably the quality that makes his work feel less dated than a lot of comedy from his generation. Mull wasn't simply delivering jokes; he was maintaining a running argument with the entire apparatus of American seriousness.
The movie's final movement, especially its reflections on Wendy Haas, art, aging and mortality, gives the whole thing an unexpected emotional punch. Mull doesn't come across as a man demanding that history declare him a genius. He seems more interested in having had a good run, making some things he liked, loving his family and getting a few laughs along the way. Which may be the most radical thing about him. In an entertainment culture increasingly obsessed with personal brands, career optimization and being Very Important, Martin Mull appears as the patron saint of doing whatever the hell interests you next. Paint a picture. Write a song. Make a fake talk show. Play a pompous dentist. Become a sitcom fixture. Make another painting. Make people laugh. Don't pick a lane when you can take the whole damn highway.
Who Is Martin Mull? doesn't quite answer its own question, because Mull spent his life making sure the answer would remain unstable. But by the end, you understand the joke: he wasn't one thing. He was the guy who kept becoming something else, and the remarkable thing is that none of those identities ever seemed like a disguise. They were all pieces of the same restless, curious, deeply funny artist. The movie leaves you with the sense that Mull understood something most people in show business spend their entire lives forgetting: you don't necessarily have to become famous for the thing you love most. Sometimes you just have to stay interested long enough to make the whole strange trip worthwhile.
Who Is Martin Mull? is currently streaming on Netflix.