I’ve missed John Mulaney. In late 2020, the stand-up comedian checked into rehab and, unless you saw his stand-up live, has been fairly quiet since. With his newNetflixspecial, Baby J, the comic is back to talk about his substance abuse issues with a degree of frankness we haven’t seen from him until now.
Not that he hadn’t told us about this before. “I’m Irish… I keep things very bottled up, and I don’t drink. Which is not what you’re supposed to do when you’re Irish. I don’t drink,” he joked in his 2012 special, New in Town. “I used to drink and then I drank too much and I had to stop. That surprises a lot of audiences because I don’t look like someone who used to do anything. I look like I was just sitting in a room in a chair eating saltines for like 28 years and then I walked right out here.”
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With that joke, Mulaney gestured at the key reason his rehab stint, nine years later, would surprise so many of his fans. He had told us, on several occasions, who he was and what his demons were. But he looks, in his words, like a “tall child,” not like an adult with the kind of adult problems that would require an intervention.
That’s exactly what Mulaney got, and early on in Baby J, he walks the audience through the moment he was cornered by 12 people, mostly very famous friends, in an apartment where he was expecting a casual dinner. The metanarrative around Mulaney’s personal life gives Baby J a voyeuristic quality that his work has never really had before. Going in, I knew that he had been to rehab, divorced his wife, and started dating Olivia Munn, with whom he now has a son. As the special begins, it’s an open question how much or how little of this he’ll be willing to address. That central question adds a forward momentum to the jokes, similar to the way Jerrod Carmichael’s intimate special Rothaniel built to the comedian coming out as gay.
In the end, Mulaney doesn’t reveal much at all about the people closest to him. He tells one story involving his son, doesn’t mention Munn, and only briefly alludes to his divorce. Although, he doesn’t have much to say about the people most important to him, he does have plenty of stories about people who will be significant to the audience. Seth Meyers, Nick Kroll, and Fred Armisen get namechecked at his intervention. And Pete Davidson, who Mulaney says people incorrectly assumed had done drugs with him, calls him early in his rehab stint, shocking the nurse because his number is listed as Al Pacino on Mulaney’s phone (not that Pete Davidson repeatedly calling your patient would have been much less remarkable).
As fun as it is to hear Mulaney discuss his celebrity friends and their role in his sobriety, it’s equally interesting when he delves into how not famous he realized he was among the general public when he got to rehab. He jokes about leaving a newspaper with a story about him going to rehab out in a shared space to see if anyone would realize he was actually famous. The fact that no one was starstruck by him brings home how niche the drama around his personal life really was.
And it gives the special a strange feeling of smallness, like his story was a tempest in a teacup, pulling fans into its swirl, but leaving the rest of the world unaware. Looking at the packed crowd in Boston’s Symphony Hall, it’s hard to believe that this could be less than noteworthy to the rest of the world. But, if Mulaney’s contrast of image and reality teaches us anything, it’s that it’s easy to miss things you aren’t looking for. Even if someone tells you they’re there.
