It has been, as he concedes near the beginning of his new stand-up special Baby J, a “weird couple of years” for John Mulaney. In December 2020, the beloved comedian checked into rehab to treat his addiction to cocaine and various prescription drugs; not long after leaving rehab, he separated from his then-wife, Annamarie Tendler, and days later was seen dating Olivia Munn, with whom he now has a child. Some of his fans, mostly younger folk who saw Mulaney as a wholesome “wife guy,” felt shocked and betrayed, which Mulaney nods to in Baby J during a bit of sing-song patter. “And now your reputation is different!/Nobody knows what to think!” he sings, before poking fun at Gen Z’s embrace of Bo Burnham and concluding, with a tip of an invisible hat, “Likability is a jaaaaail!”
Because it deals frankly with Mulaney’s drug addiction, Baby J has been billed as his most “personal” stand-up special yet, which is not entirely untrue. Mulaney has always woven his personal life into his stand-up, but mostly as a vehicle for observational humor or colorful stories. New In Town and Kid Gorgeous have the feel of picaresques, with Mulaney as a charismatic observer pinballing from mustachioed detectives preoccupied with “street smarts” to guerilla mariachi bands on the subway. In Baby J, however, the focus is squarely on himself (give or take an anecdote about a quack doctor with a thing for shirtless men): the special revolves around Mulaney’s erratic behavior on drugs, his wounded ego in rehab, and his gradual journey towards recovery.
Has John Mulaney Really Changed Much?
And yet, despite Mulaney’s assertion that he has “kind of a different vibe now,” it’s striking how little his stand-up has actually changed. He looks as spiffy as ever in a crisp maroon suit, and his persona remains endearingly vaudevillian. He still gets laughs from barking out a punchline like a furious child (compare Baby J’s “my grandmother died in the summer!” to his impression of Georgetown demanding more donation money in Kid Gorgeous), he still shimmies up and down the stage while doing bits, and he’s still preoccupied with New York minutia (it was inevitable that he would one day reference Uncut Gems). Baby J’s subtitle promises “A Wide-Ranging Conversation”, referencing a bit concerning a GQ interview Mulaney gave days before he entered rehab, but anyone expecting a confessional will walk away disappointed. John Mulaney is honest, but he does not strip himself bare — at one point, he outright says there are stories he refuses to tell the audience — and the audience never forgets that he’s performing.
Some critics, writing for Esquire and Vulture, thought Mulaney didn’t dig deep enough. It’s true that there were some things it would have been nice to see him address: he only briefly touches upon his divorce and his new baby, and doesn’t acknowledge the incident where he invited known transphobe Dave Chappelle onstage at all. But on the whole, his guardedness is a feature rather than a bug, a rejection of cheap pathos and a challenge to the sort of parasocial narrative that’s caused him so much trouble.
Audiences, generally speaking, like vulnerability. When they see an artist rip their guts out for the whole world to see, it reassures them that the artist is showing their truest self; by extension, it flatters them with the belief that the artist trusts the audience with the gnarled bramble patch of their psyche. This is particularly true in the music world, where practically every album is billed as the artist’s "most personal yet," but it’s also true of comedy, stand-up or otherwise. Consider the rapturous praise Hannah Gadsby received when the final third of their special, Nanette, did away with comedy almost entirely in favor of personal trauma and righteous fury. Or consider, well, Bo Burnham, who captured the zeitgeist by inviting audiences inside his lockdown-fueled nervous breakdown. By expressing his anxiety and despair with such intensity, Burnham reached millions of people who felt the same way he did; Inside stopped being a comedy special and became a worldwide, Midsommar-style communal scream of anguish.
John Mulaney Doesn't Need to Be Bo Burnham
There is, of course, nothing wrong with being so vulnerable, but it’s easy to see why John Mulaney might want to avoid it. After all, even when he scrupulously avoided a confessional approach to comedy, he still attracted plenty of fans who thought they knew “the real John Mulaney” well enough to feel betrayed by his divorce. If he were to spend the entire special digging into his deepest fears like Bo Burnham, he would only invite another kind of parasocial relationship, just as illusory and insubstantial as the last. If, from Mulaney’s position as a world-famous stand-up comedian, “likability is a jail,” then vulnerability is a jail with glass walls: one can be seen, but never truly reached.
Mulaney has always prided himself as a careful craftsman and a consummate performer. In a 2019 interview with Esquire, he described the work that goes into every joke, laboring over specific phrasing and word choices to make sure they land with maximum impact: “it’s not ‘I was so tired that blah blah blah.’ You want ‘I collapsed.’” Later in the same interview, he said “I’m an entertainer, not an artist…there’s a [poet Rainer Maria] Rilke thing about how a true poet would write every day in a jail cell, poems no one would ever see. I’m not in tune with that. I want people to have a good time.”
In that light, Baby J becomes even more poignant. When Mulaney playfully riffs on his star-studded intervention and has an imaginary conversation with Al Pacino (who’s actually Pete Davidson — it makes sense in context), he’s not trying to put a happy face on deep emotional turmoil: he’s just expressing his story the best way he knows how, in a way that’s much more authentic than if he were to self-flagellate in a flannel shirt for 80 minutes. And if somebody might walk away from the special not knowing who the “real John Mulaney” is (as if they could tell if they saw it), there’s something admirable about a performer determined to be engaged with on his own terms. His audience is not his therapist: you get this much of John Mulaney in every performance, no more and certainly no less.
John Mulaney: Baby J is now available to stream on Netflix.