After more than 20 years of near-nonstop work en route to becoming a defining comedian of his generation, John Mulaney is coming off a rare period of calm. The writers’ strike gave him time to do some fishing, watch period-drama sex scenes with his girlfriend Olivia Munn’s mom, and assess the impact Cocomelon is having on his toddler’s brain. “It’s the weirdest type of animation, like, there are too many pixels,” the 41-year-old says, describing the popular—and deeply bizarre—Netflix kids show. “It’s too hypnotic.” The downtime has made him eager to get back on the road to work through a brand new hour of standup material. “One thing that’s bad for me is stopping,” he says. “While a big tour can be tiring, I need to do it immediately.”
His most recent special, Baby J, came out earlier this year, and it covers a massive amount of ground regarding Mulaney’s headline-making personal life following a divorce, two stints in rehab, and the birth of his son. In it, he jokes about wanting to be recognized during recovery and explains how Koala baby changing stations are specifically intended for use by cokeheads, not parents. He describes an intervention packed with famous comedians who all sat stone-faced instead of doing bits. He paints affectionate portraits of his former drug dealer and the highly questionable doctor who made him take his shirt off before he wrote him a prescription for Klonopin. It’s inherently dark subject matter, but according to Mulaney, it was delivered by someone “in a good place.”
Baby J was also released as a comedy album by Drag City, the indie institution based in Mulaney’s hometown of Chicago. It’s an appropriate partnership, as music has been key to his comedy for years. He enlisted legends like David Byrne and Jon Brion to contribute music to his specials, and his 2019 musical comedy John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch was packed with alternate-reality Broadway numbers and included a memorable turn from Jake Gyllenhaal as an oddball named Mr. Music. Oh, Hello, Mulaney’s stage show with Nick Kroll, had multiple Steely Dan jokes (not to mention the music of Steely Dan playing in the theater as audiences walked to their seats). His Saturday Night Live episodes all feature mini-musicals inspired by the chaos of New York City. The guy even helped write an entire Sondheim parody. So it’s no surprise that music has played a prominent role in his life offstage, too.
The Pointer Sisters: “Neutron Dance”
John Mulaney: My preferences really started at 5. Suddenly I was like: I have a style and I’m sticking to it. I really liked wearing ties. I have my hands in my pockets in photos, like I’m proudly admiring a factory floor. I remember wearing my Superman pajamas underneath a shirt and tie so that I could rip it open.
My parents had a Pointer Sisters tape in our car, Breakout. We played it all the time. Beyond “Jump,” which was the hit of the car, “Neutron Dance” had this driving energy to it that I really dug. My dad is a very formal, buttoned-up, law-abiding guy, but when “Neutron Dance” came on, he would just drive faster and faster and faster. We were on a country road once, and he was pulled over while “Neutron Dance” was blasting. The guy was like, “Do you know how fast you were going?” My dad is like, “I got a station wagon full of kids. No.” And he goes, “You’re going 90 miles an hour.” And I remember my mom being like, “Shit.” But it really was the power of the music—“Neutron Dance” had some kind of a spell on him.
Led Zeppelin: “No Quarter”
If I came online at 5, I completely went independent at 10. The notion of needing to go anywhere with a guardian or parent was so off the table. I just walked around Chicago from the time I was 10. We’d go to most of the used record, CD, and tape stores on Clark Street: Dr. Wax, 2nd Hand Tunes had two locations, and then Wax Trax was a little north. My brother knew about Led Zeppelin, so suddenly I knew about Led Zeppelin. When I was 10, we acquired every Led Zeppelin album in some form—mainly tapes.
I could not believe how good they were and how it was not at all like anything else in 1992. I thought I was a pretty savvy kid at 10—I knew about John Wayne Gacy and murderers and stuff—but I remember reading [the Zeppelin biography] Hammer of the Gods and being scandalized by that book. I have a visceral memory of standing in my basement against the staircase listening to Houses of the Holy, which is probably still my favorite Led Zeppelin album. Listening to “No Quarter” on my Walkman, it was the first time I realized, Oh, it’s a dark world. There’s another side to the coin that’s a little scary.
Phish: “Reba”
I was trying to figure out how to be interesting. I had friends, had a decent time socially. I went to a fair amount of parties. We were into drugs, but no one was out of control at the time. I was all over the place musically. At 15, my dad walked into my room while I was blasting his Ike & Tina Turner album with “Proud Mary” on it, and he was just laughing. When OK Computer came out, I read about it in NME and they said it might be the best British album of all-time. I would take the train to my math tutor and blast that or “John, I’m Only Dancing” by Bowie.
I really hesitated telling Pitchfork this, but we were going to Phish concerts and doing that whole thing too. I got into them because of Colleen O’Brien, my best friend John O’Brien’s older sister—she was a senior when we were freshmen. She had a poster for Phish’s A Live One in her bedroom and was playing that song “Reba”—“Bag it, tag it, sell it to the butcher in the store.” It was like, “Oh are these guys trying to be funny?” By that point I was the biggest Talking Heads fan, and the biggest thing that drew me to David Byrne was that I thought he was really funny. The thing that turns off some people about Phish is their lyrics. And the scene. But it was like, “Oh, these guys are dorks. They like The Simpsons, they’re of this time, they have a lot of influences, and they’re phenomenal musicians.” I saw them again recently for the first time in 20 years, and it was the best.
Steely Dan: “Pretzel Logic”
I had a great time in college, to some degree. My first week, I met Nick Kroll and he cast me in the improv group. A couple weeks later, I met Mike Birbiglia. He had just graduated and came down to visit and was doing stand-up. Doing comedy went from being this thing that I really wanted to do to knowing people doing it on campus, and now I knew a guy who lived in New York and did standup. This was really huge. That was also the first time I really had a problem with drugs, where I was like, “Oh, I do more cocaine than everyone else. Oh, everyone went to bed and I didn’t, and now I am going about the day.” So that was not good; that started to feel alienating and isolating. While I was pretty young and having a great time in 2002, I was beginning some behavior that would blow up a few years later.
But I had really close friends I still have to this day. My roommate Kevin and I lived in this brick house in Georgetown. Very early in the school year, all my roommates and I were a little fucked up and driving to Sears to take a family portrait of all of us who lived in the house. We got light jeans—which are back in style, but in 2002, would be a very silly thing to wear—and white button-down shirts and tucked them in with belts. There were seven of us. Kevin just got the CD of Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan, and I don’t know what it was about that moment in time, but we were listening to “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number,” and I was like, “Is this the finest song I’ve ever heard?”
So then we have this townhouse, we are doing lots of drugs, having lots of fun, and we threw tons of parties. We had a fireplace, and we’d walk around D.C. picking up dried-up Christmas trees. We didn’t have a saw, so we’d stomp them until they broke apart, burn them, blast Steely Dan records, and do cocaine. When we wanted people to leave, we’d play “Pretzel Logic,” loudly. We were like, “If you like this a little, stay.” [laughs] It was like we were hiring: We’re interested and looking for recruits.
Jay-Z: “Say Hello”
I was living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There was a track there, and I’d listen to MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” and just run and run. I wasn’t doing any drugs or drinking at this point; I was still smoking cigarettes all the time, but that didn’t have any effect yet. It was a nice moment in time. I didn’t really have a day job. I was doing standup at night. I got to open for Birbiglia on the road. I got to open for the Comedians of Comedy. Life was getting really fun.
I got a call to audition for Saturday Night Live out of the blue. I found out two days before, and I knew I wasn’t gonna get it. They had Hader and Forte and Fred and Seth and Jason—they didn’t need me. They offered a hotel for anyone auditioning, so I took it, and on my walk from the hotel to 30 Rock to audition for the show, I was listening to “Say Hello” from American Gangster. I saw that movie, which was only pretty good. But I heard Jay-Z watched it and became inspired to make a whole album. That’s a funny thing, to be like, “Wait, start recording.” Maybe Heat would make you jump up and make an album.
But “Say Hello” really psyched me up. I went into a place for the 20 minutes I was walking, listening on repeat, where I suddenly had this fake super-confident persona. I have decent self-esteem, but this was like, You’re a killer. [laughs] I worked myself up into a state with that song. I only got hired as a writer, but you know, I got a job out of it. I should listen to that song again.
Destroyer: Kaputt
Saturday Night Live became my complete identity—this all-consuming thing that I loved, and I loved that it was all-consuming. I loved working 36 hours in a row. I loved going into the office on Sundays to get a head start on Monday’s pitch meeting. I loved working late Monday night and staying up all night Tuesday. I just loved being immersed in it.
I had a couple specials come out. I got a couple offers to have a show of my own in different formats. I thought I felt full burnout, but I wish I’d stayed on one more year at SNL, because I think I needed a rest, not to leave. I was very nervous about leaving that orbit, because it’s a fun orbit to be in. The show is in the news every week. It just feels very immediate and relevant.
I knew I was going to leave, and that was around the first time I heard Kaputt. I was in the back of 30 Rock, near the ice rink, at night. We had to go to some function as a staff. We might have been in tuxedos. I was listening to “Kaputt” and heard that line, “Chasing cocaine through the back rooms of the world.” I remember thinking to myself, Wow, can you believe we used to do cocaine? [laughs] Even when sober, I’ve always been a coke-y person.
Weather Report: “Birdland”
I did the Comeback Kid tour and filmed a special that came out in 2015. We immediately went into the Off-Broadway run of Oh, Hello, took that on tour, and then to Broadway, from September 2016 through January of the next year. That went from “Hillary is going to win” to the inauguration.
As the house lights went down on Oh, Hello, “Birdland” by Weather Report would play. From the Off-Broadway run to the end of the Broadway run, we listened to “Birdland” every night. Jazz fusion is objectively hilarious. I don’t mean that like we’re listening to it ironically; it’s great. Did you see that Jaco Pastorius documentary? Joe Zawinul is always shirtless—this strutting, peacocking Hungarian guy with a big mustache playing jazz fusion to stadiums. It’s one of the funniest eras of music. But also, “Birdland” was probably playing as I was born. It’s very primal, like I remember this. That song is how everything felt in 1982.
Nick and I would be waiting backstage, and we would listen to “Birdland” and make up lyrics to it, in character, about George and Gil thinking of every illegal possibility to get into Shea Stadium to meet the Mets: “You can meet the Mets if you want/You just have to get a custodian uniform,” or, “I have a fake police badge to meet the Mets.” Them wanting to meet all of the Mets at once was their dream.
Jessie Ware: “Remember Where You Are”
“Remember Where You Are” was the song we played as the show began on the Baby J tour. My friend Kevin, who introduced me to Steely Dan and formerly of Rolling Stone, told me about Jessie Ware. When I lived with him in Brooklyn, I knew about new things all the time. He’d be like, “This is the Twilight Sad, and this is No Age.” We stopped living together 2009, and the new music I was introduced to cratered. So this was a Kevin recommendation—the lights would go down in the arena and we’d play that song. Going into that show, I had a big soul and R&B playlist going: a lot of Allen Toussaint, Al Green, some Motown stuff, “River Deep, Mountain High.”
Baby J, to me, is not a dark show; I was really happy while I was talking about those things onstage. I’m not saying I’m proud of everything, but the person standing on stage has a new life that’s really happy. That was the vibe of the music, too. Celebratory, but interesting.