John Mulaney Is Not Your Boyfriend

When John Mulaney was 17 years old, a therapist neatly summed up his psyche. “He goes, ‘Half of you is this really nice guy who wants to do the right thing and be a good person,” Mulaney recently told podcaster Theo Von. “And the other half of you is a gorilla whose sole purpose in life is to destroy the first half.”

Until recently, most audiences only saw the first guy in Mulaney—a sharp, kinetic standup comedian with an old-timey sensibility, who wore impeccably tailored suits to perform crowd-pleasing bits about Law & Order: SVU and his childhood meeting with Bill Clinton. But the gorilla takes center stage in Baby J, Mulaney’s newest Netflix standup special. It’s his first since his highly publicized journey through relapse, recovery, and a spectacularly messy breakup with Anna Marie Tendler, the wife Mulaney frequently mentioned onstage in his “nice guy” era. Baby J makes clear, over and over again, that Mulaney is finished with that chapter of his life. 

“We all quarantined! We all went to rehab, and we all got divorced,” he sings in a carnival barker belt near the beginning of the special, joking about how unrelatable he became during the pandemic. Mulaney ends the ditty with a tip of his imaginary cap and a conclusion pulled straight from one of the many takes about parasocial relationships that proliferated in the wake of his split from Tendler: “Likeability is a jaaaaaiiiiil.”

You may well walk away from Baby J believing that Mulaney is all ape—self-centered; callous; weirdly hostile to the close friends who staged an intervention for him in December 2020, the same people he credits with saving his life. (For what it’s worth, he’s not as tough on them in the special as he was during his recent From Scratch standup tour. At least in the New York date I caught last year, Mulaney was especially brutal toward his college pal and frequent collaborator Nick Kroll, painting the Big Mouth creator as a well-meaning but shallow cornball.) 

Sobriety doesn’t seem to have mellowed him. Onstage, at least, it’s made Mulaney darker, meaner. “If you’ve seen me do standup before, I have kind of a different vibe now,” he tells an 11-year-old boy who’s inexplicably in the taping’s audience. (Maybe young Henry was a fan of John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch, a faux children’s variety show released on Netflix just before the World Health Organization learned about a mysterious virus proliferating in Wuhan.) There aren’t many jokes here about typical Mulaney fodder like Xennial pop culture or the weirdness of adolescence. Baby J is focused instead entirely on Mulaney himself—the origins of his drug problem, when he hit rock bottom, and what happened to him in treatment. 

Though Mulaney has always been open about his demons—he’s said he started drinking at 13, and quit when he was 23, after a few too many blackouts—he used to describe himself as a pathological beta. “Some people give off a vibe of ‘Do not fuck with me,’” he said in his 2015 special The Comeback Kid. “My vibe is more like, ‘Hey, you could pour soup in my lap, and I’ll probably apologize to you!’” In Baby J, he paints an entirely different portrait. This Mulaney is a degenerate schemer who’s convinced himself that nobody can see his very obvious drug problem, a deluded narcissist who still, two and a half years later, believes that he was the coolest person at his own intervention. The drugs didn’t help, of course, but Mulaney doesn’t blame this side of his personality on them; one of the special’s funniest gags concerns how devastated he is to learn, in rehab, that nobody there knows or cares he’s famous.

Still, longtime followers of his work won’t be caught totally off-guard. Much about the special is familiar, and not just because Mulaney has already performed portions of this material on Late Night with Seth Meyers and Saturday Night Live. Mulaney’s idiosyncratic vocal cadences haven’t changed; he can still wring laughs out of a single well-placed “but!” or elongated “ohhhhh.” Setpieces still segue smoothly into each other, giving Baby J a propulsive energy even though it’s 20 minutes longer than the typical standup special. Mulaney is still wearing a suit onstage, albeit a natty magenta number allegedly crafted by King Charles’s pajama guy—a signal of some essential post-breakdown continuity.