John Mulaney escapes the prison of likability in his new Netflix special

In one of John Mulaney’s most famous bits, he asks the audience to imagine a horse running loose inside a hospital. A horse pops up in Baby J, his new Netflix special, too, once again in unlikely proximity to medical treatment. But this time the circumstances are much different.



The gist of the earlier joke is that a certain unnamed president had recently sunk the country into unprecedented chaos that could only be described in terms of an equine rampage. This time, however, it’s Mulaney who has crossed the chaos rubicon—landing himself twice in rehab, where actual horses are available in a therapeutic capacity. Although the punchline involves an act-out of a junkie petting a horse, Mulaney now identifies as a junkie, so the joke is also on him.



It’s far from the only one. Nearly all the jokes in this special are on him, but it’s a different him than we’ve ever met before. Contrary to the approachable persona he once cultivated and inhabited onstage, the comedic bloodletting of Baby J reveals John Mulaney in his most depraved and abrasive form. Thankfully, this person also makes for great material.



Just before he blew up his reputation and life, Mulaney had reached a career peak. The former SNL writer bounced back from a quickly canceled sitcom in 2013 with a pair of standup specials that actually felt special (one was nominated for an Emmy; the other ended up winning), followed by a hit Broadway show, and a string of SNL appearances that established him as one of the show’s most reliable hosts ever. By the time Fast Company named him one of the Most Creative People in 2020, on the back of an eclectic, kid-centric variety show for Netflix, he was popular enough that movie audiences cheered upon recognizing his vocal cameo in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. In other words, it was a bad time for a drug freak-out.









Mulaney originally got sober in the early aughts, a few years before he started to pop as a stand-up comic. His previous drug use sometimes informed his act, but it always came across as ancient history—right up until he twitched his way through a train-wreck appearance on Seth Meyers’ show in late 2020, looking like a stranger unto himself. Complicating matters, Mulaney had partly earned his previous status as a gold-star Good Guy with flattering bits about his awesome wife and their fantastic childfree life together . . . only to file for divorce right after rehab and have a baby with a new partner.



Fans felt betrayed. This wasn’t the John Mulaney they had signed up for! To them, it was as though Keanu Reeves had murdered a dog. Rather than reflect on why they had ever invested so much emotional stock in a comedian’s personal life to begin with, they got weird about it online. Mulaney’s self-immolation, in fact, is directly responsible for much of the internet learning the phrase “parasocial relationship,” along with the fact that having one is not very healthy.



Less than half a year removed from rehab, Mulaney threw himself into workshopping the stand-up show that would become Baby J. Why did he start so soon, selling tour T-shirts that accurately read, “I saw him right after he got outta rehab”? Clues abound in the Netflix special. He mentions midway through that a rehab counselor once asked him to write an autobiography of his experience with drugs and alcohol—a perfect springboard in the show to some funny stories from his wayward youth. Perhaps reliving every aspect of his path to rehab got him fired up about examining those wounds while they were still healing.



Perhaps it was something else, though.



Baby J begins with some material on another of Mulaney’s lifelong addictions: getting attention. This is, one imagines, a primary driver for just about every stand-up comic ever, but Mulaney is especially forthcoming about how important attention is to him. At different points in the show, he mentions how impressed he was at the lineup for his “star-studded intervention,” and how humbled he was when nobody in rehab recognized him. In his previous special, Kid Gorgeous, he talked about needing everyone to like him so much that his then-wife claimed walking around town with him was like being with someone who was running for “Mayor of Nothing.”



As a result of his 2020 implosion, though, for perhaps the first time in his enchanted career, he received negative attention. Lots of it, and impossible to defuse. The only way he could exert any control over all this negative attention was to address the cause of it using the same mechanism that had always resulted in positive attention.



[Photo: courtesy of Netflix]



Sometimes public figures seek to tell their side of a deeply unflattering story in order to clear their name. That is decidedly not the case here. Baby J is less a phoenix rising from the ashes than an unsparing forensic examination of those ashes. After an introductory 10 minutes picking up right where Kid Gorgeous left off, Mulaney announces, “Okay, here’s what happened.” Cue the opening credits, featuring original music from Sack Lunch Bunch costar David Byrne. What follows is a thematically cohesive, immaculately structured, colonoscopy-intimate journey through a comedian’s lifelong struggles with substance abuse. Obviously, it’s Mulaney’s most personal special yet. But what does it even mean for a comedian to “get personal”?



A comedian’s onstage persona is like what most people bring to a first date. It’s not you, necessarily, or at least not the real you; it’s a version of you designed to elicit a desire to keep coming back for more. When John Mulaney got personal in past specials, telling stories about his private life, it was with the goal of getting viewers to like him. It was a performance, in other words, like smiling for a photo when you’re not really happy—an act he perhaps not coincidentally invokes early on in Baby J. Sometimes, we all have to be someone we are not at any given moment.



Stand-up comics have to do it every time they step onstage.



In addition to being a “recovered” addict and a consummate Wife Guy, John Mulaney’s old onstage persona was a Ferris Bueller-esque Chicago rascal. He had gotten much zanier and broader, though, by the time he taped Kid Gorgeous in 2018. He even does an impression of this version of himself during Baby J, whirling around the stage energetically, with his trademark racetrack announcer’s voice, before declaring: “Those days are over.” The audience then applauds, even though they’re applauding the absence of the very person they came to see.



Mulaney’s physical comedy is now mostly restricted to facial expressions, and apart from the occasional silly accent, his voice is more subdued as well. But something much more significant is missing from this special: any material in which the audience is on Mulaney’s side.



“Likability is a prison,” he says during the show, and it’s a prison he both built and abruptly broke himself out of. Lest anyone thinks he wants back inside, Mulaney fills this special with stories that make him sound desperate, ungrateful, and vicious. He wants us to know that he is all those things, even if he also happens to be an extraordinarily gifted comedian.



Because he was unable to shield this side of himself in perpetuity—and knows we’ll never be able to unsee it—he is now putting it on display. Baby J bounces around in time, starting with Mulaney’s intervention, moving on to his time in rehab, and going back to childhood, before concluding with the most harrowing material of all: what the comedian was like in the months before his intervention. The only thing likable about Mulaney in this special is that he does his ex-wife the favor of not mentioning his romantic life, past or present, whatsoever.



“I used to care so much about what other people thought of me,” he says toward the end of the special. “And I don’t anymore. Because I can honestly say: What is someone gonna do to me that’s worse than what I would do to myself? What, are you gonna cancel John Mulaney? I’ll kill him. I almost did.”



John Mulaney is no longer running for Mayor of Nothing. But he’s not running from anything either.