John Mulaney at the Boston Symphony Hall for his Netflix special “John Mulaney: Baby J.” Marcus Russell Price/Netflix
John Mulaney is the kind of comedian I want to see crack open. I say that as a fan.
I’m not alone here. I think often about his 2014 appearance on “WTF with Marc Maron” because you can hear Maron’s frustration at Mulaney’s composure build while he prattles charmingly on. “Just, you know, who’s in there, John?” Maron finally asks. “I can hear your laugh is a little up here, not as deep as it should be.” He sounds nitpicky and just wildly unreasonable. But I get it, I do. The thing about Mulaney is that he comes off as hermetically sealed even when it seems like he’s being perfectly forthcoming.
This is the guy who turned a pretty heartbreaking story about his father suspecting him of being gay and urging him to hide it – via a lecture on Leonard Bernstein – into an unforgettably funny bit.
It’s not fair and it’s not pretty, but Mulaney’s ability to step outside his own pain to make it legible but hilarious to others sparks far more curiosity about the sufferer than a memoir ever could.
So I was excited by the announcement that Mulaney was filming a show about his recent struggles with addiction as a Netflix special. Would he finally lean a little into the darkness his comedy has always hinted at? The comedian – known for stand-up specials including 2012’s “New in Town,” 2015’s “The Comeback Kid” and 2018’s “Kid Gorgeous at Radio City” – has always seemed so sprightly, so poised but energetic. Winsome. But critics and fans who’d seen his newest show live said this new act was different. The word “raw” got tossed around a fair bit.
That turns out to have been only partly true. Or (and this is more likely), somewhere along the way, Mulaney’s raw new show got cooked.
The comedian might disagree. He narrates his new special, “John Mulaney: Baby J,” as an inflection point. A pivot. “We all went to rehab and we all got divorced, and now our reputation is diiiiifferent,” he sings with vaudevillian flair a few minutes into the show, which was filmed in February at Boston’s Symphony Hall and premiered on Netflix April 25.
It’s a smart move. Mulaney, whose stand-up used to emphasize that he was now sober and happily married, is wisely addressing the pachyderms in the room – not just that he checked into rehab twice in 2020, but also that he divorced wife Anna Marie Tendler in 2021 and fathered a child with actor Olivia Munn that same year.
That whirlwind has indeed muddled Mulaney’s image. While fans were warmly supportive of his struggle with addiction, the news that he was divorcing his wife – paired with her statement professing shock and sadness, and the news that he was having a child after making a public point of not wanting any – provoked a surprisingly strong backlash. Some of his more passionate fans seemed to feel not just disappointed but betrayed.
He was still selling out shows, however, and word on the street was that this time, Mulaney was different. He’d started touring earlier than was perhaps strictly advisable – a mere three months after getting out of rehab – with the show that would become “Baby J.” Then called “From Scratch,” it sold out repeatedly and was widely hailed as an experimental and less filtered new mode for the comic. He’d scuttled his trademark suit, his hair was different, he wasn’t affecting that amusing and wholesome transatlantic accent and – crucially – he wasn’t always funny.
I’d been looking forward to seeing this warts-and-all version of his comedy. Mulaney in a sweatshirt? Sign me up.
“Baby J” is terrific, but it isn’t that. The suit is back (this time a rich maroon). The hair is back. The accent is back. So, for the most part, is the armor. It’s clear this wasn’t always so. The show in its current iteration is extremely funny, but traces remain of a version that dug a little deeper. One senses that Mulaney retreated to safe (and merely funny) pastures.
I feel ungenerous saying that because funny is enough (funny is great!) and because the show certainly doesn’t lack for self-disclosures. “Baby J” is largely about the intervention – featuring many of the comedian’s famous friends, such as Fred Armisen and Seth Meyers – that got him to check into rehab. Mulaney is open about being two hours late to it because he was high. He’s open about how hostile he became once he realized what was happening. The strategies he came up with to “win” at the intervention. He’s open about what a difficult patient he was once he’d checked into rehab. He’s open about how much he has always needed attention and how much he particularly craved it while he was in treatment.
Some of this was in his “Saturday Night Live” monologue when he hosted in February of 2022. And all of this is made very, very funny. Pitch-perfect, polished to a high shine. Maybe that’s why much of it doesn’t feel – for lack of a better word and despite the obvious sensitivity of the topic – confessional. Or “raw.” There are a couple of exceptions that feel almost vestigial in their sincerity, like clues that the show used to cover more-difficult terrain. “I’m doing great,” Mulaney says at one point, “but when I’m alone, I’m with the person that tried to kill me.” It’s a shocking sentence in “Baby J” because nothing in the special up until this point has narrated his experience in these poignant terms.
As enjoyable as “Baby J” is, I wish there had been more of this.
There is some new edginess. Mulaney’s reflections on the complicated feelings he harbors toward the friends who staged his intervention are notable for how risky they are, coming from a guy who for years narrated himself as a pushover unhealthily obsessed with being liked. It was hilarious – and a sign he was relaxing a little – when Mulaney played himself as an egomaniac on Pete Holmes’ HBO show “Crashing.” He takes that even further in “Baby J,” offering glimpses of his more irritable, petty, and manic side and of the fun he’s having showcasing a less amiable version of himself. “Likability is a jaiiiiil,” he sings. It feels great to see him trying to break free.
But I’m not sure it worked.
Take this comment he makes in “Baby J” after a bit he tells about pawning a watch. “And as you process and digest how obnoxious, wasteful and unlikeable that story is,” he says, pausing, “just remember: that’s one I’m willing to tell you.”
It’s such a good line – such a pleasing twist – that it’s easy to overlook that the story in question doesn’t actually make him very “unlikeable.” As stories about addiction go, it’s quite tame: Mulaney is the only victim of his bad decisions, his losses are purely financial and he’s certainly made back the money he lost by incorporating the story into his act. The creative and increasingly desperate stories he describes himself coming up with over the course of the bit are frankly delightful, and since no one suffers, his recap of the episode as obnoxious, wasteful and unlikeable feels like a stretch, like he’s overselling the risks he’s taking. Something similar happens with “Baby J” as a whole: Mulaney so assertively presents it as a risky departure from his old stuff that it feels like a letdown when it’s (mostly) more of the same good jokes.
For a decade or so now, he’s delivered excellent stand-up from the very particular position of a reformed sinner (and present-day square) looking ruefully back at the excesses of his youth. “Baby J” isn’t much different. This is what makes the new special feel like the latest installment in Mulaney’s consistently funny oeuvre rather than a meatier departure: he presents his very recent struggle as a closed chapter – as the story of a man who’s got it together, looking in bemusement and alarm at his past.
Still, “that’s one I’m willing to tell you” remains a fascinating move in the “likability” wars. It’s certainly self-deprecating (the subtext is clearly that Mulaney has done much, much worse). And it feels remarkably candid because Mulaney, who excels at producing polished, funny surfaces out of the messes he confesses to, seems to be breaking that spell – narrating himself as unlikeable, and telling us he’s puncturing an effect he went to a lot of trouble to produce.
It is actually, of course, a confession of just how much he’s withholding. And nothing could be more Mulaney than that.
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