Art & Creativity Quote by Martin Mull

There’s a sly shrug baked into Martin Mull’s line, the kind that doubles as a punchline and a quiet mission statement. “I’ve been doing it all along” plays like a corrective to the myth of reinvention: the entertainment industry loves a clean “before and after,” but Mull insists the throughline was always there. The tag “ever since I got out of art school” sharpens it. Art school is supposed to be the incubator; getting out is when the marketplace starts demanding you sand off the weird edges. Mull’s subtext is that he didn’t. Or, more accurately, he figured out how to smuggle the art-school brain into rooms that don’t call themselves art.

As an actor-comedian-musician with a painter’s instincts, Mull made a career out of hybridizing forms: deadpan performances that feel like conceptual sketches, songs that behave like satire, sitcom characters that read as portraits of American self-delusion. The line hints at a long con against categorization. He’s not confessing to “trying lots of things”; he’s claiming a single practice expressed through different media, a continuity that makes his eclectic resume look less like hustle and more like an aesthetic.

Contextually, it lands as a defense against the patronizing question artists always get: when did you get serious, when did you find your voice? Mull’s answer: you missed it. I was already doing the work. You just didn’t have the right label for it yet.