Baby J - John Mulaney Netflix Special

I have opinions on John Mulaney's new netflix special.

First of all, he is a great storyteller, and that is his main strength as a comedy writer. Here he tells stories that are interesting, sometimes funny, and more morbid than we are used to from him. But unfortunately I see this as a detriment to his whole comedy style. For me this is the only Mulaney special that I could really relate to on a personal level, and yet I found it to be his weakest Netflix special so far. This special had a similar selling point to Chris Rock’s most recent Netflix special, in that people were watching to see him address the Will Smith slap. And here with Baby J, everyone wants to see how the strait-laced, goody two-shoes image, evaporated so quickly for Mulaney, and the life of scoring Percocet and cocaine, star-studded interventions, and rehab stints, become the talk of the town. But ultimately I found Rock’s special more compelling and more cohesive than Mulaney’s.

Mulaney told many of these same stories on a recent podcast episode with Theo Von, and as I suspected, that format is far more preferable for discussing this serious subject matter, in my opinion. I struggle often with modern-day comedians who feel the need to make comedy more vulnerable, serious, political, more Hannah Gadsby TED-talky…where we seem to have forgotten that the point of a comedy special is to be funny. Seems like stating the obvious to me but, I digress.

It's incredibly difficult to pull off darkness through humor, and vulnerability more so, in a way that doesn’t tarnish the intent or create hypocrisy. The ambition requires deep understanding of oneself. So keeping up the persona of the upper class liberal, educated comedy writer, wearing tailored suits, who has an aversion to the outdoors, who speaks like he’s from a Howard Hawks movie, combined with this new darker tone…creates a major disconnect in the comedy. He’s clearly been through a hell of a lot, and yet his drug stories still sound surprisingly square to me. They sound like stories from someone who just recently discovered drugs, and doesn’t realize that this isn’t news to your audience. But I know that’s not the case for Mulaney. That he has had a history with addiction over the course of his life, which makes it worse.

Now, perhaps because of my history with addiction, my insight might be more extensive than average…But I feel like most of what he is saying here is stating the obvious, nothing I haven’t heard before, and told a million times better and fresher by other comedians and/or drug addicts with a past. A couple of his “insights” into how to score drugs these days, were things I tell my mother jokingly, simply to educate her about the kids these days. But Mulaney here is using the same jokes, in a similar tone, presumably talking to an audience of average millennial demographic, not middle-aged suburban moms. Perhaps its just the company he keeps but, he seems very out of his element here. But maybe I’m wrong. I’d love to know how you guys felt about it. Maybe it was all insightful and more eye-opening to people than I assume.

Another glaring thing that bugged me is the aimlessness of the humor. I don’t think Mulaney is even close to understanding his pain enough to make an interesting point about it, at least to the public. He doesn’t use the material to reflect on himself as he claims. All I feel I learned from this is that Mulaney is not who you thought he was, that he is desperate for attention, but also quite lost so far as where to shape his comedy from here. For someone who was in so deep, you’d think he would have a much bolder, more honest, more risky angle to explore here other than “this is what I’ve been up to the last two years. Aint it funny?”

What is there to gain from that laughter? More masochism? Cynicism? More attention?.....and that right there is the key to the whole thing. The thesis if you will: Mulaney is desperate for attention. This is the layer that is by far the most interesting to peel apart, but we don’t get to sink our teeth into it. At the beginning of the special he mentions being young and feeling jealous of other kids in school when their grandparents died, because they got all the sympathy and attention from everyone in the class, and it made him jealous. He does another bit where he gets offended that no one in rehab knew that he was a celebrity, and it drove him nuts. The superiority complex combined with the lack of awareness makes it feel patchy and indulgent to me. I wont go so far as to say it collapses in on itself, because it’s not a bad special. Just fairly forgettable, when it should’ve been anything but forgettable. I'm not sure what the point is of exploiting your experience...if you're only gonna dance around a lot of the things we really want to know, while avoiding the mirror at the same time. and I'm not sure what the point is of turning it into humor...when the jokes depend on the acceptance of shame in order to work.

He claims at the end of the special that he doesnt care what people think anymore. "What is someone gonna do to me that's worse than what I would do to myself?" And then makes a joke about how he almost died as an ice breaker, I guess. It gets a big laugh from the audience...and I feel uncomfortable quite frankly by the reaction. At the opening of the special too, he talks about how he would do lines of coke in gas station bathrooms on baby changing tables. In my mind I knew he was going to return to that image at the end to bring it full circle...and he did. Talking about using changing tables now for his new baby instead of for doing lines as the quaint conclusion. But...again, it's not enough. It’s easy, it’s safe, it’s too clean.

And thus a lot of my issues with certain mainstream comedians and the need to self-actualize in the public, remains somewhat of a dangerous notion to me (the Mulaneys the Gadsbys the Patton Oswalts, the Marc Marons). I think this was just all too soon to explore, from someone who makes it their business to conceal vulnerability by default. This is yet another reason why Norm MacDonald could often get away with murder in his comedy. You never knew a single thing about the man, what was real of false. His onstage presence was the only illusion you had, and that became the crux of everything. In that space the humor can stretch in a myriad of directions, and it doesn’t lead to nearly as many contradictions.