During the past decade, John Mulaney has become one of the most beloved comics of his generation not because he has moved with the cultural currents but because he has self-assuredly resisted them. An approachable but cosmopolitan Midwesterner who often wears a three-piece suit while performing, Mulaney has long offered—at least at a glance—a clean and wholesome counterweight to vulgarity, vitriol, and ever-intensifying political polarization. His specials, which are sharply written, enthusiastically performed, and impeccably timed, have included bits about gazebos being built during the Civil War, Mick Jagger’s lyric-writing process, childhood high jinks, and the burden of his own mild-mannered disposition. “Some people give off a vibe of . . . ‘Do not fuck with me,’ ” Mulaney explains in “The Comeback Kid,” from 2015. “My vibe is more like, ‘Hey, you could pour soup in my lap and I’ll probably apologize to you.’ ”
It’s the sort of vanishingly rare material that parents might feel comfortable enjoying in the presence of their children. So, when Mulaney filmed his new special, “Baby J,” in Boston this February, he could confidently assume that there would be a kid in the audience available for the crowd work that sets the stage for the performance. Early in the special, after an extended riff on dying grandparents, he discovers a fifth grader named Henry in the balcony of the theatre and grimaces in horror and shame. Henry is in for a rude awakening, because Mulaney is not there to talk about elementary-school assemblies, French fries, French bulldogs, or Frank Sinatra but about his punishing drug addiction. “If you’ve seen me do standup before,” he warns the eleven-year-old, “I have kind of a different vibe now.”
It is unusual, in our current era of media saturation, for a public figure to defy our expectations. With lives that are overdocumented and stage-managed public personas, a reputation-altering headline seldom arrives. And so the news, in December of 2020, that Mulaney was checking into rehab for drug addiction was a genuine bombshell, especially because of how violently it punctured the image his audience held of him. Mulaney, who is now forty, got sober in his early twenties, a subject he joked about in the formative stages of his career but has rarely returned to in recent years. The news that he was secretly harboring a cocaine and prescription-pill addiction might have felt like a betrayal to his audiences if it didn’t bring with it the titillation of wondering how he’d handle the subject in future standup performances.
Now, two years later with “Baby J”—a reference to a nickname Mulaney created for himself because his two childhood best friends were also named John—we have the answer to those curiosities. After Mulaney left rehab, he quickly began workshopping new material about his addiction, homing in on stories about the intervention that prompted his trip to rehab, and his stay at an inpatient facility in Pennsylvania. (He also became an unlikely tabloid sensation after reports of his divorce, and of a new baby with his girlfriend, Olivia Munn, emerged.) Those early performances, which were titled “From Scratch,” took place in the spring and summer of 2021 and had a lightning-in-a-bottle feeling to them. Mulaney took the stage in jeans, looking a bit weathered, and frequently switched course mid-joke. The shows I attended were messy, hilarious but often downbeat, and it was thrilling to watch him process his addiction and the foreign feeling of sobriety in real time. He would go on to refine this material in the course of more than a hundred shows around the world, performed at increasingly bigger venues. Eventually, Mulaney swapped out the jeans for a suit.
“Baby J,” which is now available on Netflix, is the fully formed, mainstage-ready version of Mulaney’s addiction material. Directed by Alex Timbers and soundtracked by David Byrne, the title cards describe the piece as “A Wide-Ranging Conversation,” suggesting that perhaps the show will be shaggy, loose, and confessional. But “Baby J,” while certainly confessional, has nothing unvarnished about it. Mulaney may have a “different vibe” these days simply by virtue of sobriety, but this special has all the formal polish and writerly rigor of his previous releases. There’s also the regal gravitas of the venue, Boston’s Symphony Hall, as well as Mulaney’s fuchsia suit. Many comics may have opted for a more intimate or casual setting for such personal and divulgent material—I’m thinking of the speakeasy-like atmosphere of Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel,” from 2022—but Mulaney resists breaking with his own traditions. In 2023, it’s a level of formalism that amounts to a rebellion.
He also resists any kind of sentimentalizing or sermonizing about the subject of drug abuse. The addiction itself may be dire, but the behavior of addicts—with the benefit of hindsight in sobriety—can be outrageously funny. Not since Richard Pryor regaled his crowd, in 1982, with tales of the conversations that he used to have with his pipe has a nationally headlining comic painted such a loud, evocative picture of cocaine-addict delusions. Much of the first half of the special is dedicated to the intervention staged by Mulaney’s famous comedian friends, and the irreverence he still holds toward the entire process is full of insubordinate delight. Pryor, too, once detailed a scenario in which he was confronted by his friend, the football player Jim Brown, who told him, “You gonna get well, or you gonna end our friendship?” Pryor’s instinctive reaction? “Leave me the fuck alone!”
In the throes of addiction, Mulaney, too, rejected the help of his friends. “I was two hours late for my intervention,” he explains. First, he had to make a stop at his drug dealer’s apartment, in addition to getting an unscheduled haircut from the “S.N.L.” hair department at 30 Rockefeller Center. “Cocaine-skinny” and sporting a fresh haircut, “I was the best-looking person at my intervention by a mile,” Mulaney says, noting that his A-list comedian friends—including Seth Meyers, Nick Kroll, Fred Armisen, and Bill Hader—“looked like Jerry Garcia.” (This was during the height of pandemic lockdowns, when personal grooming for many took a slide.) He later remembers how difficult it was to accept tough love from a group of people who still drank and smoked weed. “It’s like when someone sends you a text, but the text comes from their e-mail address,” he says. “I understand the message, but you need to get your shit together.”
In “Baby J,” Mulaney describes the period in his life when addiction made him chaotic and out of control. But, stylistically, it’s a special that emphasizes just how measured and scrupulous a joke writer he is. At one point, about a third of the way into this uncharacteristically long eighty-minute special, Mulaney grows a touch sombre. He’s still talking about his intervention, and begins to explain how grateful he is to the friends who helped get him sober. It’s a sentimental moment that elicits a wave of cheers, and some of the audience begins to stand up. Mulaney, after two years of touring this material, knew they would. “Don’t stand for them,” he says. “They’re well aware they did a good thing.” He then proceeds to turn what had seemed like an earnest moment of gratitude into another surly joke about the burden of expressing constant gratitude toward the friends who organized the intervention. It’s a joke that reads as more candid than any treacly platitudes about human connection might have.
While Mulaney mostly skirts the much speculated-about topics of his divorce and his relationship with Munn, he is eager to detail the Odyssean lengths he went to in service of sustaining his drug addiction. He describes snorting cocaine off a baby changing table at a rest stop en route to rehab. (“That’s what those are for,” he says.) He talks about visiting a shifty doctor who met patients in his apartment and would prescribe Mulaney the drugs of his choosing with the implicit assumption that Mulaney would then remove his shirt for a Vitamin B12 or flu shot. (“I’m way over it,” he says, scoffing at the scandalized titters of the crowd.) He recalls purchasing a twelve-thousand-dollar Rolex on a credit card and immediately pawning it for half of what he paid, for cash for drugs. His trickery did not stop once he was in rehab—during his second week, he is reprimanded for ordering Outback Steakhouse on Postmates. Throughout the special, these misadventures add up to a sort of comic-strip rendering of Mulaney as a squirrelly, deceitful lunatic, skittering around New York City in pursuit of a high. It is perhaps not how any of us imagined him, and, in theory, it should produce a rupture in his image. And yet the material of “Baby J,” in tone and concept, feels familiar: after all, the wily smart aleck that Mulaney became when he wanted drugs doesn’t sound all that different from Mulaney the child, who is featured prominently across all of his specials.
Comedians, more and more, are attempting to square the act of public vulnerability with the challenge of being funny, often falling short in the latter arena. As an act of vulnerability, “Baby J” may not live up to expectations. We leave the special with no sense of what precipitated Mulaney’s spiral back into addiction, for example. But comedy is about laughing, and maybe chasing laughs is a bit like chasing a high. Mulaney rises to the challenge of being funny with a doggedness and a writerly precision that suggests neither drug addiction nor sobriety could fundamentally alter that pursuit. ♦
