Martin Ponder, whose comical, exclusive parody and acting made him a hip sensation during the 1970s and later a cherished visitor star on sitcoms including “Roseanne” and “Captured Improvement,” has passed on, his girl said Friday. Ponder’s little girl, television essayist and comic craftsman Maggie Reflect, said her dad kicked the bucket at home on Thursday later “a bold battle against a long sickness.” Ponder, who was likewise a guitarist and painter, came to public notoriety with a common job on the Norman Lear-made humorous drama “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and the featuring job in its side project, “Fernwood This Evening.”
“He was known for succeeding at every imaginative discipline under the sun and furthermore for doing Red Rooftop Motel ads,” Maggie Reflect said “He would track down that joke amusing. He was rarely not interesting. My father will be profoundly missed by his significant other and girl, by his companions and collaborators, by individual specialists and jokesters and performers, and — the indication of a really uncommon individual — by a lot of people, many canines.” His initial introduction to Broadway was as a musician, writing the 1970 semi-hit “A Young lady Named Johnny Money” for vocalist Jane Morgan. He would join music and parody in a demonstration that he brought to hip Hollywood clubs during the 1970s. “In 1976 I was a guitar player and plunk down comic showing up at the Roxy on the Nightfall Strip when Norman Lear strolled in and heard me,” Reflect told The Related Press in 1980.
