John Mulaney Punctures His Persona in ‘Baby J’
In his new special, “Baby J,” we hear John Mulaney before we see him.
“In the past couple years, I’ve done a lot of work on myself,” says one of the most distinctive voices in comedy, as a black screen transitions into an empty backdrop of a stage. “And I’ve realized that I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.”
Then in a glamorous, swirling shot orchestrated by the theater director Alex Timbers, the camera gives the comic what he needs. It retreats to reveal Mulaney, 40, in a maroon suit, before circling to give us a picture of the commanding power of stardom. Shot from behind, we see his perspective: a hazy mass of people underneath chandeliers in between an ominous series of statues inside the Symphony Hall in Boston.
It’s a striking image setting up a series of bristling comic vignettes that dig into Mulaney’s drug addiction, intervention by friends and stint in rehab. One is tempted to say this is his most personal work, but that isn’t quite right. That first shot tips us off to a theme: You can be invisible in front of a crowd. Mulaney’s comedy, however, has become spikier, pricklier, sometimes slower while remaining as funny as ever, like he’s a pitcher who learned to mix up speeds. He has performed versions of this material throughout the last two years, and this special arrives on Netflix so meticulously honed that the polish doesn’t even show.
At some point in the last decade, John Mulaney stopped being merely a very successful comedian and transformed into something larger in the culture: the boyish sweetheart in a scene full of creeps, the wife guy who doesn’t need children to be happy, the aspirational theater kid. I didn’t grasp this shift until, in a short period of time, he checked into rehab, got a very public divorce, and had a child with the actress Olivia Munn. Judging by the reaction online, not to mention the texts on my phone, people had feelings about this — lots of them. Mulaney made the word “parasocial” go mainstream.
Source: The New York Times
