MULL STIRS A WASPS’ NEST

It seems only natural that with the burgeoning of civil rights issues and the subsequent attention given not only to blacks but to Jews, Latinos, Asians, women, gays, prisoners (and their victims) and the handicapped (there was even a brief debate in The Times’ letters to the editor about special dispensations for fat people), someone should come up with the question of just what is the central sociological power group or cultural core to which people in these categories have made their appeal.

The answer, of course, is white people. More specifically, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, heirs and exponents of Western industrial tradition and its pre- and supra-historic myths. If that answer is somewhat simplistic, still no one has considered putting it forth in our sociologically delicate times.

Comedy is where you get a chance to air out the unsayable, however, and Martin Mull has had a great deal of fun over the past year or so turning the documentary film lens around on just who might be watching cinematic examinations in the lives of “others.”

Mull’s “History of White People in America,” in which a fictional family of American Midwesterners is viewed with mock-anthropological bemusement, first played on Cinemax cable last year. The joke then was the Harrison family’s taste in tuna casseroles and chenille toilet seats. The idea was promising, its execution shallow and a little crude. Now Mull is back again with a new series on separate topics of white politics, crime and religion (the politics segment, where Hal Harrison runs for water commissioner of Hawkins Falls, concluded Nov. 4).

Once again the episodes, written by Mull and Allen Rucker, are on the perfunctory side. There’s very little character development and the scenes slam into each other like boxcars at a railroad siding. But Mull is a superior ironist; the frames of his characters and situations may be ramshackle or trite, but his peripheral observations are very subtle and his deadpan commentary has a cutting edge (the Harrisons’ minister in the religion segment got his start in the Peace Corps, where, Mull tells us, he taught “Bible studies, table manners and Ping-Pong to the natives of Uganda”).

Mull’s genius for plumping up the Rotarian cliche is in full evidence here. In the crime episode, Mull is arrested at the Hawkins Falls airport for picking up someone else’s luggage and protests, “I’m innocent and this is America,” in the mock assumption that both are synonymous with justice and vindication. After Hal (played by Fred Willard) takes his family to church on Sunday, he tells us, “I feel like I’ve rubbed elbows with the guy upstairs.” Mournfully drunk over the assumption that his teen-age daughter is pregnant, Hal toasts “To God, he’s one of the greatest, the finest.” (Hal’s bitter and sarcastic renunciation of his daughter exposes a buried rage common to people who can’t handle sexual complications.)

Like many of the comedians who came up during the mid-to-late ‘70s, Mull’s delivery is centered in attitude more than direct address. With Mull, as with David Letterman, the line between the real thing and the put-on is very slight--if it exists at all. It’s either that or a mistrust of sincerity’s aims--and audience acceptance--for what falsehood they might expose (you’ll never hear these guys sign off like Red Skelton with a “God bless”). The comedian’s instinct is to go for the truth, but we live in an age of such ubiquitous phoniness and inverted values that the most intuitive of them sense there’s nowhere to turn. They use irony and indirection in much the same way writers use these devices in the Eastern Bloc. Only here, it isn’t the government that’s totalitarian, it’s the culture, with its relentless newspeak, its psychobabble, its commercial anarchy and trashy media hard-sell.

Mull’s treatment of white America could never be mentioned in the same breath as, say, Gibbons’ “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” It’s not that ambitious or sophisticated, being more basically a minor spoof with a number of sly-puss asides (and filmed on a relatively low budget as well). But the idea has the germ of being first-rate, and no one right now is more adroit at throwing back on an audience the responsibility for discerning content, or the lack of it.

At 43, Mull remains a peculiar combination of the innocent and the knowing. In conversation, he’ll occasionally come up with the trenchant phrase (“It’s a cold day in July when talk shows are not extended commercials. Disparaging the format is all you can do and be honest”), but occasionally his eyebrows join in a broad circumflex of wondrous concern. For example, at dinner recently in a Hollywood restaurant, he watched a couple in early middle age get up and fox-trot to a jazz ballad piped in through a speaker.

“Here we are,” he said, “a block from Spago’s in a place no one would think anything of. But look at those two. Aren’t they beautiful? It gets you right here.” He tapped his heart. For a second you didn’t know if he was kidding or not.

“I was born in North Ridgewater, Ohio,” he said. “It had a thousand people, tops. Dad was an acoustical research scientist. I have a younger brother who’s a construction contractor, and a sister in Berkeley who’s a writer and a muralist--if you live in Berkeley you have to be a writer or a muralist. I never thought I’d be verbal. I thought I’d be a painter” (Mull has kept on with his oils and acrylics--some of which decorate his home--and he’s enjoyed professional gallery and museum showings).

“I got my master’s degree at the Rhode Island School of Design. I got into show business because there was so much b.s. in the art world. I didn’t think anything could be as bad. I learned to play guitar in school and joined some local bands--with apologies to the audiences. After a while my intros got better than my songs. I discovered I was a natural stand-up. I wrote and sang silly songs as a backlash to the awful sincerity of the Bob Dylans, whose every song had to end war or at least free the slaves. Pretty soon, I had a sort of act on my hands.

“By 1980, though, I’d seen enough Holiday Inns. I stopped enjoying what I was doing. I hate to see anyone in that situation, like so many producers I see. When you hate your job, boy does that come across. I’d been a fan of the ‘Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman’ show and thought I might finagle my way in as a writer or a gofer of some sort. One thing led to another, and I got one of the parts. I’d never memorized anything before. I’d never even been bar mitzvah’d.”

“Mary Hartman’s” demise led to his “America 2-Night” and “Fernwood 2-Night” spoofs (in “Fernwood” he tied in with Fred Willard. Mary Kay Place, who plays Mrs. Harrison in Mull’s white America series, was also in the cast of “Mary Hartman”). He went on to appear in 15 movies before he dusted off an old idea for Universal’s head of pay-TV services, Charles Engel.

“Al Rucker is from Bartlesville, Okla. We blended our backgrounds for this idea, which no one wanted to do (we first presented it to NBC). Engel championed our cause. We did the first shows on a shoestring, borrowing money from Steve Martin and Bob Eubanks. We wanted to satirize the form of the David Attenborough documentary. Harry Shearer, our director, is a media buff, in addition to his other skills. He helped us get just the right tone, as opposed to playing for jokes.”

At first Mull was hard-put to account for what it is that makes attitude comedy the current vogue. “I have one notion,” he said, later in the evening. “Most comedy, if boiled down, is ethnic. You had the Jewish theater-Borscht Belt. You have Pryor and Cosby. Now we have the WASPs, which we can see now as really being another ethnic group. If you pick up a cut-crystal glass and you’re Jewish or black, you just might have a reaction to that glass based on your history with it, or its place in relation to you and your memory.

“But for me or a Letterman to pick it up--it’s just a glass. It’s something that’s been manufactured. We don’t have any ethnic roots to tap into that go beyond 1952. I think it’s our sense of rootlessness that pervades everything we do.”