John Mulaney: Baby J review - Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch some harrowing, hilarious stand-up

John Mulaney: Baby J. Photo / Netflix

HE SAW

You might know John Mulaney from his role on the long-running animated Netflix comedy Big Mouth, or his weird, revered Netflix comedy special John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, or, like all the people he was in rehab with, not at all.

It’s rare for a stand-up comedy special to generate much buzz, especially in the streaming era, which has brought us to the brink of stand-up saturation. One notable exception was Hannah Gadsby’s brilliant, blistering, Nanette, but that was standup only insofar as stand-up comedian was her job title. Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra also blew up, but that was an hour of breathtaking sex jokes performed by someone who was seven months pregnant.

The point is that to get cut through as a funny person in the age of infinite content, it’s not enough to be funny. You have to do the same thing everyone else is doing: something different.

Mulaney’s special is no Nanette, but it has nevertheless achieved enough buzz to set the internet alight and the reason for that is because it’s not just comedy but also a brutally confessional and occasionally harrowing 80-minute account of one person’s journey to get clean from a spectacular array of drugs.

This is brilliant, high-wire comedy, polished over months and maybe even years of relentless practice. Mulaney is so precise in every action and intonation, his delivery so flawless that it appears not just memorised but embedded in his body. His performance is breathtaking in its perfection.

So I was shocked to discover the show was going to end with him reading a published Q&A he gave to GQ magazine while high on cocaine, three days before the intervention he says saved his life.

When someone off-stage handed him the two sheets of stapled-together paper from which he was about to read, I felt my judgment meter sink instantly and deeply into the red. It felt cheap and out of keeping with the amount of effort that had gone into the rest of the show. I could, I thought, just as easily have googled the interview and read it on the toilet later.

So it was with great surprise that I found myself, just a few minutes into the reading, in tears, laughing with a vigour, and at a pitch, I had not experienced in years. I was genuinely hysterical with laughter. Here was a comedian reading a run-of-the-mill magazine Q&A from a sheet of A4 paper and transforming it, before my eyes, into high comedic art. It was as if a magician told you how they were going to do a trick, then did it, and you still had no idea how they did it -but much, much funnier.

SHE SAW

John Mulaney opens his new post-reputation plummet stand-up special by saying that over the last couple of years he’s done a lot of work on himself and concluded that “I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.” The man sitting next to me - Greg - was chuckling in agreement: He too would find inner peace if I, and anyone else in the same room as him, would shower him with infinite attention. I hope the similarities between these two men stop there.

Mulaney is, or at least was, an infamous “wife guy” – a term that dominated the internet a couple of years ago and describes men who are gaining social capital or likeability points by sharing content about their wives and presenting as the quintessential good husband, e.g. Ryan Reynolds, John Legend, Tom Hanks. But after the term was coined, there was a spate of wife guy cheating scandals - including Mulaney’s, which may or may not have involved actual infidelity - that made us all turn on the wife guy and ask the question: why do you have to work so hard to make us believe you love your wife?

The promise of the special Baby J was that it would address Mulaney’s indiscretions so we could all laugh about what a naughty little boy he was, forgive him and move on. I’m not generally interested in celebrity gossip, but nor am I completely immune to the powers of a juicy love triangle. I was keen to hear how Mulaney would turn a story about divorcing his beloved wife and almost immediately announcing the pregnancy of his new girlfriend, actor Olivia Munn, into the loveable jaunt down memory lane that he’s so good at. Well, he doesn’t. The 80-minute set is all drug addiction stories, so unless he genuinely believes that the thing that tarnished his reputation was his stint in rehab, he’s doing the old bait and switch: “I’m going to own up to all my indiscretions - well, only the ones I think you’ll forgive me for.” While I laughed quite a bit, it did nothing to repair his reputation. Which begs the age-old question: do we need to like our comedians or believe they’re good people to find them funny? Baby J proved: not really.

I chuckled through stories about buying a Rolex to sell for drug money, being coked up to the eyeballs at his celebrity-filled intervention and leaving out newspaper articles about himself to impress his rehab buddies. I laughed hysterically when he read an interview he did with GQ magazine that he has no recollection of doing and was clearly extremely high during. The special is good but is Mulaney? Probably not.

John Mulaney: Baby J is streaming on Netflix.