John Mulaney performing in 2023. Photo: Netflix
There's something uncanny about coming face to face with someone you only know as a comedic character. : Like if you actually met Bill Cosby's childhood friend Fat Albert, or David Sedaris' sister Gretchen, or the neighbor Larry David based Cosmo Kramer on.
This week, as part of a mini-festival curated by comedian John Mulaney, Netflix released a documentary interview between him and talk show god David Letterman from the latter's episodic series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.
Halfway through, Letterman has dinner with Mulaney and his father Chip, who is already known to fans as «The Man Who Ordered Black Coffee at McDonald's.» In his 2014 special, The Kid Comes Back, John told the story of how Mulaney's four children were on a long drive through the Midwest when they spotted a sign for a distant McDonald's.
“We started chanting: “McDonald's!” McDonald's! McDonald's! — he said. “And my dad pulled up to the bus station and we started clapping and then he ordered one black coffee and kept driving.”
Now he's here in the flesh: old, rugged, dapper, but increasingly anguished as David Letterman explores how hard it must have been to have a son fall into addiction — as John spectacularly did. At one point, John puts his hand warmly on his father's back and tells him, «I'm sorry you were so scared.»
Reality is the Font of Comedy: As Chip confirms, the McDonald's Moment actually happened. But sometimes the comedy can crash back into reality—like when you realize that Chip is not just a character but a real person, a slightly disheveled old man who mutters back, “Well, that's a normal loving reaction, son.”
This tension between comedy and reality is something John Mulaney has been struggling with for a couple of years now, ever since his previously clean persona suddenly turned into rehab and divorce over the course of an astonishing 12 months during 2020 .
< p>Letterman's interview is the middle of what could be called a trilogy of re-examinations of Mulaney's career, which began with his 2023 Netflix stand-up special «Baby J.»
This weekend, Netflix will stream the third act of Mulaney's «comeback»: a six-part series called All in L.A. starring John Mulaney. An ensemble special featuring Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Halloween director John Carpenter, Weezer, Red Hot Chill Peppers bassist Flea, rapper Warren G, stand-up Patton Oswalt, podcast star Stavros Halkias, Sarah Silverman, Cedric the Entertainer and Beck. . The series premiere will take place on May 3, with further episodes airing from May 6 to 10.
John Mulaney with his ex-wife Annamarie Tendler in 2018. Photo: Getty
There hasn't been much pre-promotion for All in L.A. Nobody knows what exactly. Apparently it's «a show that's hard to describe» and features both guest segments and «field footage filmed in Los Angeles.» One wag described it as «Comedians in cars getting coffee without coffee,» referring to the 11-season Jerry Seinfeld show on Netflix.
There are also rumors that Netflix is testing the waters with a Mulaney-led chat show, seven years after the failed Chelsea chat experiment with comedian Chelsea Handler.
It would be a comeback worthy of talent. Everyone in comedy has always had high hopes for John Mulaney.
Over 15 years and five comedy specials, he has developed a slightly old-fashioned vision of comedy. One that features skill rather than art: condensed jokes plus carefully calibrated intuition about the audience's reaction, probing their minds and creating various Rube Goldberg contraptions that unwind over the course of an hour. Unlike his old SNL pals, he studiously avoids politics, except for one sly metaphor about a horse in a hospital. His fan base grew slowly. He was never cool. He was never the next big thing. But he always delivered.
Even chat room grandmaster Letterman thinks he raised the bar: “Honestly, stand-up started going downhill—then you look at this man’s work and oh my God.” ! In my opinion, there is no one better.”
It's not that Mulaney's jokes are more innovative; they're just better. Perhaps this skill is due to the fact that Mulaney is primarily a comedy writer. He honed his talent in the big network writers' rooms, landing a job as an intern at NBC before spending five years on the Saturday Night Live staff, where he became a dominant figure in the show's final golden era. Longtime SNL host Lorne Michaels still refers to him as a resident genius, one of the most unstoppably sharp minds he has encountered.
This talent was destined to find its mark. . In an interview with Letterman, Mulaney Jr. returns to his high school in Chicago, the theater where he first developed stage sickness. Have you ever dreamed that you would play at the Hollywood Bowl? Letterman asks.
“Yes,” Mulaney replies. “I had high self-esteem because of how funny I was… I thought, I should be on stage at the damn Hollywood Bowl.” He's not really joking.
He was the classic, always cheerful kid who lived for crack cocaine to make the adults around him laugh. He remembers wandering around the house at age five with a can of Schweppes, quoting something he heard TV sexologist Dr Ruth say: “Sex makes the body feel good.”
John Mulaney and his wife Olivia Munn at the Vanity Fair Oscar 2024 party. Photo: Getty
And how one day he impressed his mother that his staid father was calling into a sex chat: (“What am I wearing? Um, Rockford pants.”). was sealed.
But by the time he turned 17, Mulaney also began having problems with alcohol and drugs. As he was getting over it, the psychologist told him, “Half of you are really good guys who want to do the right thing. And the other half of you is a gorilla whose only goal in life is to destroy the first half.”
On stage, Mulaney had sparkling eyes and a twinkle. He has a perpetually boyish Irish appearance. For years he was extremely persistent: making a story about how much he loved his wife; talking about the pug they owned together and pushed around New York in a stroller.
It was a picture of a kind of domestic bliss on New York's Upper East Side. That's why The Bad Thing was such a shock.
On December 18, 2020, John Mulaney became the target of an intervention that he describes as «we are the world of alternative comedians over 40.» Nick Kroll was there. And Seth Meyers, Natasha Lyonne and Fred Armisen. They came to tell him that he was going to commit suicide. A fact that he was aware of, but until then he was generally comfortable with.
Mulaney used cocaine, Adderall and various sleeping pills and sedatives, such as Klonopin and Xanax. What started as a way to increase his productivity turned into an addictive game of «swallow the cat to catch the rat» as his depressives softened his tops and his tops shook off his depressives. “If someone had asked me what I was doing during that period, I would have answered, ‘Standing on street corners and texting furiously.’”
It was at this time that he gave a crazy interview to GQ magazine, which he doesn’t remember. . With admirable tact, GQ titled his ramblings about Fruit Loops and ghosts as “big talk.”
Weeks of rehab followed (where he broke a molar due to teeth grinding), then months in a sober living facility. In January 2022, he also divorced his wife, artist Anne Marie Tendler, and began dating actress Olivia Munn, with whom they had a child almost immediately, despite the fact that he had been the «childless and loving» poster boy for many years children.» it's a crowd.
So when their chip is gone, what does a professional at the top of their game do? How to get past: “So, here's a little about me: everything I said about me before was kind of a lie”?
In his 2023 film Baby J, he tried to address this drug-addicted elephant. The hour and twenty minute comedy special follows his time in rehab through a series of dazzling set pieces. But it's also a tricky series of exceptions. We see him in the throes of his intervention, haggling over his sexual favors with doctors picking up prescriptions and arguing legally with orderlies at a rehab center—but we never hear what brought him there in the first place.
Some have compared it to Richard Pryor's famous account of him «setting himself on fire and shooting his wife» live on the Sunset Strip. But Pryor was an artist, not a craftsman. His life was his art—Sunset Strip was the Lennon-like splash of pain that we were invited to witness. Baby J was more McCartney: carefully crafted compositions that give nothing away even when they tell everything.
Should Mulaney be his art? Probably no. Can he go back to who he was? Absolutely not. So where to go next? After Baby J's laxative and the unusual intimacy of Letterman's show, Everyone In L.A. will have to check a box on who he wants to be from now on. There are also rumors that he may be in line to host the next Oscars after his bravura performance at the Governor's Awards (the younger brother of the Oscars for various lifetime achievement awards). It would fit well. Loved by Hollywood shoots, but edgy enough to break up the sentimentality for the home's residents.
However, the reckoning with his personal life already seems to be changing him. He seems to have visibly relaxed. Today, at 41, some of that raspy masculine energy is finally dissipating. It filled out a little. His hair is longer, shaggier, and his stubble is more even. Of course, there may be a bit of boredom involved. Sometimes he seems a little impatient and upset. As a person whose gratitude for being alive and well must always be tempered by the many days he will have to endure in the future without taking cocaine.
It may take a long time to restore his career. The treadmill of stand-up specials may be reaching its natural end. But Mulaney also understands how long the arc can be. After all, it was he who, as a lowly intern at NBC, answered the phone and said that Dave Chappelle had one of the greatest flops in comedy history. Chappelle had just left the set of his highest-rated show of the same name, at the height of his fame, and was hiding in South Africa. It was he who had to show up in the middle of a board meeting to tell NBC executives that their veteran star would not be returning.
Looking at Chappelle's three hugely popular and culturally significant comedy series over the past few years, perhaps he also realizes that there is a lot of life beyond the celebrity blast radius.
All in Los Angeles is on Netflix from May 3 to May 12
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