At 42, John Mulaney Is Still Coming of Age
In a May 12 set at Largo at the Coronet, the comic, blindfolded, ramped up for a major tour
John Mulaney walked onstage wearing a dark black blindfold.
The lanky, reliably smiling Chicagoan typically strides onstage well primed, limbs jangling, moving with a slight lateral sashay that he has attributed to not entirely successful hip surgeries. The veteran stand-up exudes a child-like eagerness to see us all. Sans eye covering, as he would be for the latter part of the evening, he still does look like a kid, his moptop of thick black hair parted in mid brow, and a grin fringed with irony at the ready. Handsome? Yeah, from most angles…but is he Benicio Del Toro’s studly, lost brother, you wonder, or that geeky kid who toyed with the Bunsen burners in your tenth-grade chemistry class?
The latter vibe seemed to be at play on May 12 as he emerged for his set at L.A.’s storied salt lick for star comics, the vintage 300-seat former movie house known as Largo at the Coronet. You couldn’t say he strode onstage; rather, he wandered tentatively out of the wings from stage left, guided by a gent he introduced as Blake, whom he proceeded to torture with nervous instructions, lest “I walk clean off the stage.” After a shaky forward foot plant needed Blake’s spotting more quickly: “Really fast, man...I'm gonna lunge on some jokes, and you gotta really be there.”
The black strip of cloth seemed to be double-wrapped around his head, and matched with a bespoke black suit and crisp white shirt, gave him the air of a kidnapped millionaire seen in a hostage video. Somewhere deep in this chipper child of privilege is a darkness—he’d close the night, after a well-received intervening set from his pal Robby Hoffman, with an extended appreciation of The Devil. Death, disaster and (his former life on) drugs are not uncommon topics for the man.
He may have picked up on the sight-deprived notion while making a not-so-deep-fake promo snippet of himself both blindfolded and hand-cuffed between two seeming abductors (with filtered goon voices) in an SUV’s back seat: “I’m going on tour; my new tour “Mister Whatever” is coming to a city near you.” (Pre-sales began April 23rd for the multi-city sweep kicking off in Newark June 27th and ending December 21 in Washington, D.C.)
It's a victory lap of sorts for the sometime “Saturday Night Live” writer/performer, who over the past decade-plus established his persona as an offbeat chronicler of American mores and of his own slightly hair-raising saga. Mulaney all but sank his own rise with a druggie run—overusing mostly benzos and coke--that screeched to a halt in December of 2020 when friends interceded. (He was late for his own intervention, at first disguised as a dinner invite, though he’s since advised they could have gotten him there a lot faster with a simple, “John, we have cocaine.”) When he entered the silent room, he saw 12 of his closest pals, some via Zoom screen and others arrayed on seats, including the man who had employed him both on SNL and on a late-night writer’s room: “Seth Meyer…oh, f*ck!”
Nothing could be more Mulaney than his complaints that since that night he’s had to pick up all their dinner tabs, but his second thought was, “This is a good lineup.” He was in due course bundled off to a rehab stint in Pennsylvania, as he’s detailed both in his entrancing 2023 Netflix special, “Baby J,” and also in a deep dive for David Letterman’s “My Next Guest.” (When Letterman was being honored by the Kennedy Center—remember the Kennedy Center before oaf-dom reigned? ?—Dave’s response to the younger man’s toast was, "John Mulaney—this is the future of comedy, ladies and gentlemen.”)
Letterman probably intended no slight to current comedy’s clear front runner, Nate Bergatze, who’s been a host on SNL (though not as often as Mulaney) and is probably uncatchable in the near term as the most popular comic—per both concert sales and various forms of social media—the business has seen in some time. Bergatze’s whimsical and clever stand-up steers away from swearing, sex, drugs and politics, and no doubt his upcoming movie, which he co-wrote and will feature him as lead actor, will no doubt match that template. (For Mulaney’s thespian side, watch him as the frenetically wrong-doing FBI agent in Season 2 of pal Natasha Lyonne’s “Poker Face”.)
Something Bergatze shares with Mulaney is sobriety—“I would go too hard with [alcohol],” The Southerner told Esquire—but after some years of comic narratives involving wife Laura (they met two decades ago working at Applebee’s) and also featuring now almost-teenage daughter Harper, he’s “backed off a lot” on family bits.
Into this moment streams “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney,” a sort of sequel to “John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A.,” which ran for six weeks last year as part of the Netflix Is a Joke Festival, and is now deep into its 12-week run. Episodes premiere Wednesdays, airing live at 10 p.m. on the East Coast and 7 p.m. on the West. In fact, though certainly a practice session for the upcoming tour, the Largo session also partook of the kitchen-sink ethos of the live broadcasts, with Mulaney noting, “The topic tonight is sleep… our topic on Wednesday's show.” Mulaney paused to assert one of his characteristic untrue facts: “Sleep was invented by God as a way to try dying for a little bit." Then, "I feel like the topic should be `blindfold’…it’s really taking focus away from whatever I'm about to talk about.” True enough, but as Mulaney encouraged the crowd to supplement Blake’s efforts by calling out cues of “warmer…colder”, the laughs kept rolling across the room. By contrast, the sometimes dawdling live broadcasts, found the L.A. Times reviewer, “can come off a little unfocused; the weekly themes rarely develop into anything significant…there is something sort of … public access cable about it all.”
The Largo gig perhaps lent some hints as to where Mister Whatever will find himself—and indeed, the Mulaney narrative is largely about finding, losing and re-finding oneself. (In public, no less.) As the origin story of the latter-day John who almost curb -stomped his own path from the SNL writers’ room to the Big Time, the terrors and shaky days of “Baby J” seem part of the past now that the career’s fully revived. In the category of might-have-gone-dire life changing moments, he has ceded a discreet spotlight to second wife Olivia Munn, who underwent a double mastectomy, and further surgical procedures, in fighting off a breast cancer onset diagnosed in April 2023.
As an ecstatic father Mulaney will still work the family angle, especially regarding son Malcolm, now three, but the health threat wife Olivia survived, and the subsequent arduous road to become parents to baby girl Mei June in September of last year, are sooner the subject of fond, amiable homilies. Still, a certain sardonic aspect of witty spouse Munn emerges, as when he cites how she calls him out for a mis-managed Elvis birthday party— a guy in an all-wrong-for-him leather jacket handing kids 20-dollar bills—but for the best of reasons he mostly parks their story offstage, and in interviews leans thoughtfully into her courage through it all.
For the Letterman mini-bio, the older star recounts how “Baby J” gave him hope for this era’s entire range of stand-up comics, and in a filmed road trip to visit to Mulaney’s dad Chip, old wounds get a dignified change of dressings. That said, various new Mulaney riffs that emerged onstage at Largo tend, as before, to look back in some anger to his raising.
Part of Mulaney’s reliably daring approach—“Everything that shouldn’t work always does,” is the showbiz credo he recently postulated to Rolling Stone– is to engage with his audience, and in the no harm, no foul vibe of this warm-up gig he chose from the audience one eager beaver who turned out to be a substitute teacher. Disarmed for a moment, the fervently pro-teacher citizen Mulaney nonetheless drilled down and discovered the gent, so satisfied to be engaged with his likable pupils, subbed at “a little hippie school.”
Silence .
"I'm blindfolded,” rejoined Mulaney, "and I could feel that--everyone being less interested. [I’d been] picturing this public school where the teachers are pulling together to make the kids better people, and this guy coming in, substituting hard.” A pause. “Now we're picturing some place up in Topanga [a beardy enclave above Malibu] where we can’t go.”
The theme of inept or even inapt parenting seemed to reassert itself, and soon came the almost-hollered promise (or warning?) of payback for sale: “I will self-fund a new business where I, John Mulaney, drive around in a rented Scion punching your dad as hard as I can in the face.” [A guilty wave of laughter.] “Don't cheer. It's gonna be gnarly. Here at John Mulaney Punches Your Dad So, So Hard in the Face, we offer a couple of packages. First is our Emerald Package, $72… you give me your dad's address and his name and a photo…”
Here he purported to be tripped by the thought of sneaky misidentification—“A current [photo] and--I guess I take your word for it. Why would someone in a group of alcoholics lie about something?”
A quick upsell about the Sapphire and yes, Diamond punch packages brought almost spittle-flecked manic energy, and a big demo punch leading to a rebuke for the quietly suffering Blake: “I'm one foot from the lip of the stage. How did you let me get this far?
If the Largo show is a preview of the tour, there will be scant political humor from the man who launched a sort of Trump meme with his “horse in the hospital” bit. But in this world of national despair, he true to form sought out the merely aggravating: “I'm good on hearing from the Pope's brother… so tired of this guy giving interviews. Imagine the most boring person in the world who prays all day, but has never had any sex of any kind, has no fun forever--want to meet his brother?”
The crowd was all in, leaning into the Mulaney-ian tempo: “Stop texting me that the Pope is from Chicago. I don't give a shit. None of us in the city give a shit.”
Then randomly, again true to form: “Susan Boyle could be Pope.”
Finally came the trademark philosophical sigh: “It is a shame to no longer be the weirdest Catholic from Chicago.”
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