John Mulaney has never been a particularly self-deprecating comedian. For most of his career, he’s described himself as a generally attractive old-timey entertainer who’s smarter, funnier, and more handsome than anyone else in the room, and he wants you to know it. That was before everything fell apart.
Baby JIt’s Mulaney’s first stand-up show since Mulaney revealed to the world that her relapse to cocaine (and various other pharmaceutical drugs) fueled a turbulent 2020, resulting in the intervention of her famous friends and a lengthy rehabilitation process. .
The 80-minute special features some of his darkest and most compelling material to date. The laughter may sound less and intermittent than in her previous work, but Mulaney’s willingness to lift the veil over her inner turmoil in a way she’s never done before adds new depth; special more funny. It’s not surprising that he wasn’t sure how to track her down.
For Mulaney, this darker tone kicks in even before she lets the elephant into the room. We hear him tell the audience that he’s “done a lot of work” on himself over the past few years, before we see him on stage in a perfectly tailored red suit at Boston’s Symphony Hall. “And I realized that as long as I get constant attention, I’ll be fine,” she jokes.
This line takes you to an opening piece about how she secretly spent her early childhood wishing that one of her “junk grandparents” died so she could get special treatment at school. He explains that he soon started on such a “dark note” because he didn’t want things to feel “too optimistic,” lightly mocking the overly energetic showbiz style that infused previous specials like this one. Kid Gorgeous is at Radio City.
subtitle for Baby J It’s a “broad talk”—which turned out to be a reference in Mulaney’s hilarious closing. GQ He doesn’t remember the interview he gave just days before his intervention. And the comedian spends most of the feature digging deep into the very real struggles he’s still trying to hide from view at the time.
Mulaney has spoken publicly about the December 2020 intervention before, but never in such unbearable detail. And given her new haircut and cocaine habit, she manages to maintain her confident personality as she jokes that she’s easily the best-looking in the room of comedians who’ve been sitting on their couch for nine months during the COVID lockdown.
He continues by expressing how uncomfortable it is to be in a room full of the funniest people on the planet, with none of them doing anything. “Fred Armisen was serious,” Mulaney says. “Do you realize how repulsive that is?”
Like Armisen, Mulaney isn’t known for her candor, but she takes some time to admit that her friends’ actions “completely saved” her life. Seconds later, however, he jokingly silences the applause, saying that he’s still “angry” at them for putting him in debt forever.
Over the next hour, Mulaney offers some clever sets about her time in rehab; these included several missed calls from Pete Davidson, who was recorded on his phone as “Al Pacino”, and an even more frustrating malfunction. distances he traveled to get drug money after asking his business manager to cut his job. This episode, especially about buying an extremely expensive watch and then trying to pawn it, is so vivid that it feels like watching the opening scene of a heist movie.
“Don’t believe the person,” he says, almost as if he’d been cast aside at one point, in response to the intervention leader, who “heard that he was a nice guy.” In many ways, it feels like his project. Baby J It exposes the chasm between what the Mulaney folks thought they knew before the rehab mission and the man who had been hiding beneath the surface the entire time and only popping up in brief flashes, just like when Seth Meyers was told incoherently while wearing a trench coat and sunglasses on the sofa.
Mulaney may look as smooth and cohesive as ever at this new special, but through the stories and details she shares about her worst moments, she reveals a deeper truth about herself that fans have never seen so clearly.
“I cared a lot about what everyone thought of me. That was all I cared about,” Mulaney admits towards the end of the special. “And I don’t anymore.”
This thinking comes from the realization that no one can do to him anything worse than what he is trying to do to himself through his addiction. And it leads to perhaps the best joke ever about the futility of “canceling culture” in an environment where comedians love to complain about how powerful they can be.
“What, you’re canceling John Mulaney?” He asks. “I’m going to kill him. I almost did it.
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