John Mulaney Replies to Fans Online

Hey, GQ, it's John Mulaney.

I'm gonna go undercover on the internet and look at stuff.

It's actually me.

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It's me for real.

This is me doing this.

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Let's see.

This is from Reddit.

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The kid John talks to in Baby J, was the kid hired?

John did the same joke at the show in my city,

and ever since I've seen the recorded version,

I've been wondering, did he do that joke at every show?

If so, how could he be sure the kid

was going to be at every venue?

Okay, so the last standup special I did called Baby J,

there was a young boy named Henry in the audience.

Henry was not hired.

Henry was like Pinocchio before him, a real life boy.

Henry was actually in the audience and I talked to him

and that ended up in the film of the Special.

At other stops along that tour,

there were often children

and often children under the age of 10.

There was once a baby.

It was often weird to go through 90 minutes

of very dark personal stories

while looking into the eyes of a fourth grader,

so I would call it out at the beginning.

I met a lot of kids on my drug stories tour, just a fact.

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If you had to choose a favorite special,

what is your favorite John Mulaney special and why?

Okay, so this is a question for other people other than me.

Now, what's interesting about this question

is that favorite is spelled with a U,

and that means that the person is not from America,

they are from Great Britain.

And as an Irishman, I will not answer your question.

How about one of these guys, parentheses,

John Mulaney slash Pete Davidson as Plastic Man.

I know who Pete and I are,

and I don't know what the rest of that means.

Is Plastic Man a DC comic?

If you know the answer, call my personal phone.

It'd be a money thing.

Honestly, I can answer for Pete as well,

it'd be a money thing.

Apparently these movies pay a lot, these action hero things,

but that is also changing

in today's ever-evolving media landscape.

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Subreddit, BigMouth, which character is most like yourself?

This person answered,

I think I'm most like Andrew Glouberman.

I would say I'm most like Andrew Glouberman as well,

since I have the same voice as him.

A decent amount of his exploits were based off things

I did when I was a younger man and that's all I'll say.

[mellow music] Richard Kind says,

John told him there might be another season

of Everybody's in LA but in a different city.

He said, well, we might be doing it again.

I don't think I ever told Richard Kind

we'd be doing it in a different city.

Recently when I saw him, said,

hey, if you do more, Everybody's in LA

and you want to replace me, I won't be offended.

And I was like, one, I don't want to replace you

and two, of course you would be offended.

No one would be more offended than Richard Kind

if he was replaced from Everybody's in LA.

Sweet man.

I'd go to any city in the union with Mr. Richard Kind.

Why do millennials find John Mulaney funny?

From a confused zoomer.

They don't all.

I've certainly stood in front of some who don't.

I say different names of movies

and things that millennials know

and they go, I remember that

and I go, of course you do.

It's a trick using these references

to get laughs out of you.

They find me funny because they found me

funny in their 20s and they want to still feel young.

Next, Instagram. [mellow music]

I don't know why it's weird

that John Mulaney is wearing Nike.

I feel like he should be wearing grandpa clothes,

which is to say no brand flannels and corduroy pants.

Well, smart guy, I'll have you know

that that is not how I dress.

So I understand why you think I would be wearing

no brand clothing like an elderly man.

I do own some items by Nike and even Reebok.

I absolutely agree with this person.

Whenever I'm wearing a Nike shirt like that,

I feel weird too.

I should be one of those people you see at the gym

who's just like walking slowly on the treadmill,

wearing mainly Carhartt.

How the fuck are you sitting like that?

I am able to sit like that

because I have hip dysplasia, like many dogs,

and I am able to sit completely lotus

with my legs folded over each other.

I actually have a tear in my right hip

because my hip bone is so weirdly shaped and I go to PT,

but they told me it's not gonna work

and that I am gonna need hip replacement surgery.

So who's a grandpa now?

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Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of incels.

From watching the lifestyle of the character Ricky Ricardo

in the program, I Love Lucy,

Mulaney knew he wanted to go into show business at age five.

That is absolutely true.

I liked that Ricky Ricardo sat around the house,

looked at a magazine for some of the day, smoked cigarettes,

and then went to the club at night

and did his job in show business.

I thought that is absolutely the best lifestyle,

and I live that now, except I don't smoke cigarettes anymore

because a man hypnotized me in Santa Monica.

At age seven, Mulaney was a member

of the Chicago children's base sketch group, The Rugrats.

Because of this, Mulaney had an opportunity to audition

for the role of Kevin in the film Home Alone,

but his parents declined.

I was offered to audition for the role

of Kevin in Home Alone.

My mom thought about it for a little while.

I was getting a booster shot

and my mom waited until we were at the pediatrician

and then told me, your dad and I have talked

and we're not gonna let you audition for that movie

and then I got a booster shot.

I think it was like, let's just...

Maybe if we put the two bad things at once,

they'll neutralize each other.

But I remember both and I dislike them both.

I do want to say for the record,

there is no better performance in the 1990s

than Macaulay Culkin and Home Alone,

and he deserved an Oscar nomination

and an Oscar for that role.

If you have a Macaulay Culkin story,

call me at my personal number.

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After graduating from Georgetown in 2004,

Mulaney moved to New York City

with ambitions of a career in comedy.

Yeah.

And was hired as an assistant at Comedy Central.

After a year, he pitched the idea for a parody

of I Love The 80s, called I Love The 30s,

which he developed with fellow comedian, Nick Kroll.

True.

I Love The 30s was a parody of I Love The 80s,

in that we were talking in a flippant way

about pop culture stories but of the 30s,

which had more weight to them

than the type of thing they talked on I love The 80s.

One of them was about the Lindbergh baby,

and we talked about it

like you would cola wars in the 80s,

like just kind of flippantly.

And my nana called me and said,

I was alive for the Lindbergh baby kidnapping,

it was not funny, that baby died,

these are not things you should joke about.

I made it sound like that was a conversation,

but it was a voicemail and I never called her back.

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Okay, these are YouTube comments.

Can someone explain DTLA to a person not from there?

Downtown LA is the downtown part of Los Angeles.

Often downtown means the center of where things are.

This is not the case in LA.

The downtown is a scary wasteland that we all avoid.

As I joked on the show, a lot of people wonder what happened

to New York in the 70s, it moved to downtown LA.

Why did they decide to turn the concept

of a man ordering lobster in a diner into a Les Mis parody?

I don't know.

Am I questioning it?

Hell no.

Okay, Sherlock3134.

And I'm not being condescending by calling them Sherlock,

that is their screen name.

I also don't remember how it became a Les Mis parody.

Colin Jost and I were talking on a Monday in 2009

about how long some diner menus are

and how they always offer

like Thanksgiving dinner and a lobster.

We talked about writing a sketch for that week's host

where someone would order the one lobster

that they have at a diner.

After read throughs, there's always a big bulletin board

with every sketch,

and you move them over into the show's running order

as you plan that week's episode,

and I remember, I remember Lobster Diner

wasn't even on the board. [laughing]

It was a card that said Lobster Diner

that was laying on the floor.

So no one ever said, we hate this,

but it was greeted with a blizzard of indifference.

When I came back to host in 2018, that Monday,

I ran into Colin in the hall and he said, Lobster Diner?

And I said, absolutely.

[mellow music] Okay, these are from Quora.

What is John Mulaney's weakness?

I don't have any well publicized faults.

What's one thing I have trouble resisting?

Can't think.

I have had my ups and downs with various dependencies.

I would say I don't understand

what happens at a four-way stop sign, at all.

I normally just stare forward

and hope everyone else leaves so that I can do my thing.

No part of it makes sense to me.

The waving, I just, I panic.

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How does John Mulaney come up

with this standup comedy material?

Slowly.

What is the best Steely Dan song?

The best Steely Dan song is Sign In Stranger.

Post.

These are questions from X, formerly Twitter.

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Why couldn't John Mulaney host the Oscars?

I'm busy.

There's really no other way to put it.

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Bert Vonnebutt asks,

why is John Mulaney in the Bear the most Chicago thing ever?

I'm from Chicago and the show The Bear is set in Chicago.

My Chicago experience was not filled

with many small businesses

that become michelin star restaurants.

A lot of people ask me

for restaurant recommendations in Chicago

because it is such a great town for restaurants,

but like I grew up there, so I ate at home.

We didn't go out to places.

Sometimes I'd have snacks in a car.

If Spider-Ham was bitten by a radioactive pig,

is it really cannibalism?

No, but I don't think anyone's saying it is.

Everything I know about Spider-Ham

is the lines I say in the movie.

[laughing]

I didn't understand what it was when I arrived

and I don't understand now.

They wouldn't even tell me what it was called.

I showed up and it had like a code name

and they were dancing around that

it was a Spider-Man related movie.

I was like, I don't give a shit.

Like don't tell anyone.

Who am I gonna tell?

Okay, that's it.

I've answered enough of your questions.

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[beeping]

Okay, that's it, I'm done.

Okay, I'm done.

I don't want to do this anymore.

I think we all learned very little.

I know less about myself now than I did at the beginning,

so I'm signing off.