By Mark Bazer
Here’s something you may not know but ought to: Martin Mull is both a comedic genius and, as the Web’s only tribute site to him puts it, an artistic “renaissance man.”
Yes, that Martin Mull – the one too many only know, if they know him at all, from his part on Roseanne or, more likely, those old Red Roof Inn commercials.
But when he’s not taking sitcom supporting roles or shilling, Mull is unearthing the dark side of the oft-idealized mid-20th century American heartland in surreal, lush paintings. And he’s been known to finger-pick his way through his own dry, sarcastic brand of the blues.
His greatest comedic achievement, however, remains Fernwood 2Night, a parody of regional talk shows set at Channel 6 in the fictional town of Fernwood, Ohio. Perhaps more than anything else the Chicago native has done, Fernwood 2Night, which debuted in syndication on July 4, 1977, best showcased his spin on white-bread American life. It’s a spin as sardonic as it is silly.
As smarmy, condescending and, above all, vain talk-show host Barth Gimble, Mull introduced us to one rube after another – starting with his sidekick, Jerry Hubbard (Fred Willard, before he brought a similar persona to Christopher Guest’s films) and continuing on through an endless series of fake guests. If you were anyone in Fernwood – a man in an iron lung who played piano, a small-time crook wearing a bunny-rabbit mask to protect his identity, a Jew who just happened to be passing through town, or any small child who ever tried to sing – you were invited onto Fernwood 2Night.
Fernwood 2Night was created, as seemingly all sitcoms in the 1970s were, by Norman Lear. It aired weeknights in the summer of 1977 as a spin-off to Lear’s soap-opera satire, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. In MHMH, Mull had played Garth Gimble, who died tragically when he was impaled on a fake Christmas tree in his closet.
In Fernwood 2Night, Mull is Garth’s identical twin, Barth, a self-regarded showbiz bigwig from Miami who comes to Fernwood to resurrect his career after he “had a little problem” in Florida. Always dressed in Hawaiian shirts, the first couple of buttons undone, and filled with a barely concealed disdain for his new town, Barth lords over a set that resembles just about the tackiest, multi-patterned ’70s living room you can imagine.
Each episode begins with Willard’s Jerry Hubbard shouting “Tonight from Fernwood, Fernwood 2Night!” Then, as he announces the evening’s guests, the camera zooms across a studio audience full of expressionless Midwestern-looking folks, a sizable portion senior citizens, most of whom look on the verge of being comatose. Once introduced, Barth, in an easy chair to which he’s almost permanently affixed, launches into a monologue/prepared statement that’s always obsessed with himself or his show. Talking about how he plans to have an upbeat show one night, Barth, with a twinkle in his eye and a self-satisfied air, addresses his audience watching at home: “I figure who wants a downer? If you folks wanted a downer, you could just turn off the TV and spend the night with each other.”
At the same time, Barth isn’t above admitting how bad his show can be at times, particularly when he’s interrupted, which he is every night, by Jerry, a Fernwood local who got the job as sidekick because his brother is the TV station’s general manager. Many of the show’s highlights come when Barth tries to regain control of a show hijacked by an oblivious Jerry. Jerry, more than a little slow, and always with a smile on his face, has a way, just as Willard’s dog-show color analyst in Best in Show, of being illogically logical, or maybe logically illogical. He means well but can’t help saying the inappropriate thing, like when he tells the Jew who’s on Fernwood 2Night’s first episode just for being a Jew: “I think it’s a service to let people know you’re actually harmless, just like everyone else.”
Then there’s the show’s bandleader, Happy Kyne, of Happy Kyne and the Mirthmakers. Played by real-life movie and TV composer Frank De Vol (he co-wrote the theme for The Brady Bunch), Happy has a balding, cue-ball head and wears an eternally dour expression. But he’s also oddly confident; he has no shame in performing wretched songs and dancing even worse, and whenever Barth invites him over to chat, he somehow manages to promote the fast-food restaurant he owns in town, Bun ‘n’ Run. After Happy one night describes a charitable campaign the Bun ‘n’ Run is sponsoring to help shut-ins, Jerry says, “Now when people get sick, they’ll think of you and your hamburgers.” To which, Happy’s face somehow gets even more dour.
Nothing is sacred on Fernwood 2Night, as nearly every guest – whether a completely average mother who just wants her daughter to stay out of teenaged-boys’ vans or a Native American woman who doesn’t care so much about the overall plight of her people but rather the lack of Native American movie and TV roles she’s able to land – comes across as delusional, stupid, pathetic or a mix of all three. And Barth, a master of the underhanded putdown, does little to help them. One guest, a retiring longtime men’s room attendant in Fernwood. ends up being particularly dull. So, Barth tells him, “After all those years of service, we thought it might be interesting to have you here, but, hey, we all make mistakes.”
Whenever an amateur entertainment act performs, the camera cuts away to Barth, his head in his hands, beside himself in despair. Of course, Barth is ultimately as desperate and deluded as any of his guests. At the end of the first season, thanks to his legal troubles in Florida, Barth has to sell the set’s furniture. (The show, both in the fictional and real worlds, returned for a second season as America 2Night, in which Barth took the show national, filming “nearly from Hollywood.”)
Part of the fun of Fernwood 2Night is that its cheap production values and thrown-together nature are both a parody of small-town TV and probably an accurate reflection of the actual budget Norman Lear had for the show. It was summer, nobody was watching much TV, and, for all I know, Lear just hired a few young writers and performers, gave them the keys to a studio and let them do whatever they wanted.
Among the show’s writers, creative consultants and producers were Harry Shearer; Pat Proft, who would go on to help write the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Naked Gun movies; and Alan Thicke. The show’s creators have a real skill for pinpointing the way “regular” but eccentric people talk, writing dialogue that, to sound like Jerry Hubbard for a second, is full of cliches you don’t hear much. Guest Virgil Simms (played by Jim Varney, in one of the few recognizable guest spots), a greasy auto mechanic with a screw loose, describes the effect of one of his half-baked techniques thusly: “It will do things to that engine that you can’t talk about in front of women.”
Some have said the show’s ironic down-home sensibility and overall parody of the talk-show genre were an influence on David Letterman, especially in his early, looser days. And after watching Fernwood 2Night, it’s hard not to connect the dots between Barth Gimble telling his fake audience that he’ll give out $10 to help people achieve their dreams to Letterman handing out hams to his real audience. Not to exaggerate the influence of Fernwood 2Night, but you have to think the show’s mocking nature had an influence on This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman and other works in the same vein. (While Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries are all very funny, they’ve always seemed, to me, a tad off-putting in their condescension; what’s great about Fernwood 2Night is that condescension, through the character of Barth Gimble, is part of the joke. And who knows if Mike Myers took a page out of Fernwood 2Night and its basement feel for Wayne’s World. Probably out of the question is that Ricky Gervais had Barth somewhere in the back of his mind when he conceived of the arrogant, in-love-with-himself David Brent for The Office. Still, I have to think if Gervais were to watch the show, he’d see some kinship, and get a good laugh.
There were more than 60 episodes in the first season. (And yet, the show remains officially unavailable on DVD, though it can be purchased on lawless corners of the Internet from disc-burning renegades willing to risk everything to right a wrong. We don’t want to spoil it for everyone, so you’ll have to find the renegades yourself.)
Certainly, not everything is funny, there’s a lot of repetition in the humor, and there are times – like during awful musical numbers – when you feel like Mull, Willard & Co. are just wasting your time because they can. But that’s somehow all part of the charm. Watching the show today, sometimes you laugh hysterically, and then, other times, you feel like it’s 1977, you’re actually a resident of Fernwood, Ohio, and for lack of anything else to do, you’re home watching the tube.
Posted on April 21, 2006