John Mulaney recently put up a new stand up special called
Baby J. It was pretty good, if very dark and honestly a bit overwhelming and bitter about needing help, needing rehab, needing to air out comedy for an audience that is probably well aware of the scandals that rocked through his life in 2020 onwards.
For the sake of this editorial, I am only going to comment about said scandals in the sense that John addressed him- the main one, about his wife, is a bit confusing as an outsider and I don't want to pretend I have any intention to look into more than I already have. I don't know what was the cause of his divorce and to be frank, I don't think either party really wants me to know. It does color his backlog quite a bit especially with a son now with a different woman, but John doesn't mention his ex-wife even once during the special and it's really not in my business to find out the truth of the matter.
So much of
Baby J is about John Mulaney's drug addiction and getting himself clean through rehab, even as he tells the story kicking and screaming. There is a real sort of bitterness to his stand up this time around- even when not talking about drug addiction he goes on a bit about wanting a grandparent to die so he gets special attention in school. It's this sick, dark intrusive thought he brings on stage and there's sort of a disquieted laughter to it. It's not inherently a bad joke but it was probably the weakest part of the special to me, but it does reflect a different angle to John Mulaney's act that he almost kind of has to make.
John Mulaney was known for sort of a speedy, disarmingly charming stand up routine style in the past. While he did talk about his drug addiction, it was always in the past, a distant memory of a time where he could make mistakes. John never really put on an act that he had to be more masculine and hithers between camp you only really see come out of gay people and the sort of disarming tone of a passionate art teacher.
I think the part of it that really stuck out to me though was him describing how he used the drugs- it was an interview done a couple months ago that he talked about with another podcast host about how he just used stimulants to sort of achieve the kind of act and attitude he needed for his routine. There's another part of
Baby J where he discusses a GQ interview he did over the phone that he has no memory of- and while he does a great job commentating and reading about it as part of the last act of his performance in the special, it does raise a quiet concern in me that the interviewer couldn't tell John Mulaney was acting unusual in a way that was cause for concern.
Perhaps it's easier to maintain energy for a single act that night, but John's energy on that stage during the special was the same energy he had brought before, just with twilight coloring his material. He described a story about how he had turned an artist into a personal drug dealer, not knowing how they knew each other or how this particular exchange happened. I wonder if John really has any sobriety or if it's still a mask he's putting up. The impression I got was that while he saw the rehab and intervention necessary, it was still something he didn't want to go through. It's a funnier act if he doesn't want to do it, obviously, but the tone reads very odd.
Like ultimately
Baby J is unique in the stand up world because it colors almost all of Mulaney's previous material as the ramblings of a man on speed, a man who thought he was in a happier relationship than he actually was in, and for all intents and purposes he was doing some rather shady stuff to put up this act. You can't actually read that closely into a stand up set no matter how honest it feels because the intention is always to be funny, not to be having a one person conversation in a crowd of people that aren't supposed to be interacted with.
I think about what Louis CK said about developing stand up material, and I think it really sort of holds true for
Baby J, perhaps more than ever.
...Then I listened to a CD of George {Carlin} talking about comedy and talking about it seriously and the thing that blew me away about this fellow was that he just kept putting out specials every year. They just kept coming and each one was deeper than the next and I have just thought how can he do that. It made me literally cry that I could never do that. I was telling the same jokes for 15 years.
So I’m listening and they asked him how do you do all this material and he says well I just decided every year I’d be working on that year’s special and I’d do the special and then I just chuck out the material and I’d start again with nothing and I thought that’s crazy. How do you throw it away, it took me 15 years to build this shitty hour, if I throw it away I got nothing. But he gave me the courage to try.
I thought well okay, when you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs you throw those away, what do you have left? You can only dig deeper, start talking about your feelings and who you are and then you do those jokes and they’re gone and you got to dig deeper. So then you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares and doing jokes about that and then they’re gone, and then you start going into just weird shit.
For a lot of people I feel like what happened with John Mulaney was deeply disappointing in a way they probably still can't quite articulate. For me, a lot of these same feelings came from watching Louis CK undergo allegations of serious misconduct and then having to admit that they were real to myself after a verdict saying so. I haven't listened to a single Louis CK thing afterwards, nor gone back through his stand up material. I know for a time it was very influential to me, in a way I didn't think stand up could be, and then I couldn't take that in any more knowing where it came from.
John Mulaney isn't on the same level, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't feel like I should be talking about him in any sort of good or concerned light. However it still causes a hitch in his unproblematic image and he jokes about it twice- they're not great jokes but they don't really come with the same sort of bile a lot of other comedians joke about when they complain about colleges or society being too woke for their act.
In any case then, I'm sure John finds that new material is going to require him digging through his fears and nightmares, his very identity, and maybe one day he'll be able to drop the mask he's still at least partially wearing. Hopefully under that mask is still a likable person, but when so much of you is boosted by stimulants, can you even remotely mellow that hard without dropping what made you stand out in the first place?
Every part of Mulaney was defined by a drug addiction- and
Baby J is a sobering conclusion to that. However, it will still define his act for a while, if not forever, because he still has to imitate the personality he was under that drug addiction. Which of itself is concerning, and it's a cycle he can hopefully break out of. At least, that's the empathy calling to me.
