I’m the Guy Who Did John Mulaney’s Infamous
“Frazier?” John Mulaney, peering out from the City Winery comedy club stage, was looking directly at me.
It's commonly understood that you don’t want to be the person a comedian addresses in the audience. At best, you’re about to become a prop in a bit; at worst, you’re about to get fully roasted.
In this case, though, I had invited the attention. Mulaney was using me as a prop, in a way, ending the set at the time by reading out printed excerpts from an interview we’d done six months prior, in December 2020. I’d heard about the bit, and when my buddy David and I decided to go see the set, we concluded that we had to let him know that I was in the room. So we yelled it out. (If you’ve never been to City Winery, just know that it’s intimate enough to do this without coming off like a heckling jerk.) Mulaney didn’t flinch—he reacted calmly, as if he knew this day would come.
But let’s back up for a minute.
“Open up with an ice breaker about seeing ghosts to get him talking.”
That was the advice David, the biggest John Mulaney fan I know, gave to me when I told him I’d be talking to our boy a few weeks before Christmas 2020. I’ll often mention it to friends when I have interviews coming up, and sometimes they suggest questions that I wind up using. In this instance, I genuinely wanted to tap David, a true stan, for ideas. (To paint the picture: Pete Davidson once complimented David on a rare Mulaney merch tee he wore to an afterparty.)
As people in media know, interviews and profiles are usually “pegged” to a specific release or event that the writer is expected to ask the subject about. But when I spoke to John Mulaney, it was a rare case where there was no peg: His team had him doing press because he was reprising his role of Spider-Ham in an Into the Spiderverse videogame, but they were fine with me asking about whatever I wanted.
Normally, this is an ideal scenario. It can be much more liberating to talk to an entertainer with no guardrails or boxes to check. A few months ago, I spoke to A$AP Rocky on the occasion of him designing a Mercedes for the Need for Speed video game; we wound up having a poignant conversation about him approaching 10 years in the industry and his late friend A$AP Yams.
I wasn’t quite sure where to start with John. Two months before, he hosted Saturday Night Live, commenting on the current events I might have asked him about, and he’d also recently appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers. So David and I settled on opening with a callback to a bit in Mulaney’s Kid Gorgeous special about blurting out “You ever seen a ghost?” as an icebreaker. It was a reference to his material designed to elicit an interesting answer. Clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose.
Source: GQ
