John Mulaney appeared to be just another of those identical, slick, clean-cut, young comedians in suits until Covid. But all was not well. In December 2020, a bunch of his showbiz pals staged an intervention and sent him to rehab for his addictions to cocaine and various prescription drugs. Out of rehab, he promptly parted from his wife, the artist Annamarie Tendler, and met the actress Olivia Munn. As he noted in Mister Whatever, his latest show, when their son was born, he and Munn had known each other for ‘nine months and 45 minutes’. They are now married.
There was a woman in the front row wearing pyjamas emblazoned with his face
Mulaney’s crash provided both the substance, so to speak, and the context for his 2023 Netflix special, Baby J, a hilarious account of his addiction and recovery that managed to keep to self-mockery rather than self-pity, despite its darkness. (If you want illegal prescription pills, he noted, always find the doctor with the lowest internet rating from patients.) It was also an acknowledgment that Mulaney knew he had lost a lot of trust from the millennials who expected their cultural heroes to live blameless lives.
Mister Whatever does not have that sharpness. All of Mulaney’s TV specials have been tightly scripted hours, riddled with callbacks and laser-focused on the big laughs. (To see that at its best, look up his routine ‘There’s a horse in the hospital’ on YouTube; it remains the most concise description of the first Trump administration in the culture.) This show is shaggy. Mulaney was on stage for the best part of two hours – he noted that one fan had complained his sets were getting longer and longer – and some of its material felt stretched.
A long routine about his son seemed as if he’d fallen into the common belief of creative people that they’re the first people to have had children. Parents are well aware children say peculiar things, and that birthday parties are a shitshow. We don’t need to be told again, even when formulated in an interesting way. Ditto a long closing bit about how much he hates his new clothes dryer compared with the one from his childhood.
It’s not a show without risks, however. The centrepiece of it pondered his relationship with Munn’s family. Her mother was a Vietnamese refugee, and Mulaney had to build up to the routine about being financially responsible for 13 Vietnamese Americans: any time a comedian has to preface a routine by saying he is not being racist is likely to be uncomfortable. ‘I’m going to be doing voices,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’m going there.’ It couldn’t be racist, he insisted, because it was true.
Parts of it were very funny, but parts of it were odd. Finding a Vietnamese woman in the audience, he asked if all Vietnamese people stole, or just his in-laws. They don’t all steal, came the response, which might have served as a note of caution. And repeating Vietnamese racism against Cambodians doesn’t stop it being racist. It was unsettling, even as the laughs came.
Mulaney’s earlier specials often dwelt on the darkness of childhood, albeit presented with a broad grin. Underage drinking and youthful drug use came up again and again. Sexual abuse, or the fear of it, was a staple. His father’s weird emotional distance was a fixture. In retrospect, the content of Baby J shouldn’t have been a surprise, given how strange Mulaney could be beneath the surface sheen.
But in Mister Whatever, it felt as though he didn’t quite know what his subject actually was. This was a jam-band kind of a set, in which the core elements were there, but seemed less important and exciting than the bits where he went off into extemporisation. A long detour into the mind of RFK Jr. – ‘For 2028 we’re going to give everybody … mumps!’ – was hysterical.
Mulaney is a charming comedian. For all his slickness, he is no oleaginous Jimmy Carr, nor a confronter like Dave Chappelle. He wants to be liked, and he is very likeable. Clearly a lot of people love him: there was a woman in the front row of this massive theatre wearing pyjamas emblazoned with his face, which must have been unnerving. I think he’s wonderful, too, and I shall be seeing this show when it comes to London. Mulaney at his best is unstoppable. This wasn’t his best, but I still laughed more in two hours than I had in years.
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