John Mulaney's Baby J

or, the drunk catholic kids

Deep into John Mulaney’s new special Baby J, he mentions that the first time he drank alcohol was when he was six years old. He then recounts how he and his friends would get drunk every weekend when they were thirteen.

That was me too, for better or worse.

I remember my first taste of alcohol when I was about six and I remember the first time I got drunk, in middle school, and how the weekends after that almost always included alcohol. A year later, I began smoking cigarettes.

This is where Mulaney and I diverge, I suppose. And it’s not because I became a healthier version of myself. I mean, I guess a little bit I did, but I spent way more nights than you might think believable, let alone reasonable, drunk when I was in high school.

I drank alone even, which is an alarming sign for anyone, but especially for a sixteen year old.

This moment struck me powerfully. Baby J is about the destructive behavior leading up to his time in rehab, his time in recovery, and then about a lot of other things, but the entire show—his longest—is about addiction.

And I suppose addiction is the difference between us. And maybe that has more to do with the fact that no one ever gave me coke when I was sixteen than anything else. Because had I encountered an addictive narcotic, I may be a very different person.

I mean, in all likelihood, I’d probably be dead. As I’ve spoken about before, I was not especially good at taking care of myself and even had a hunger for my own destruction, which led me to many of the worst moments of my life, but also some of the best.

And, I mean, it should also be said that many of the most destructive experiences in my life were also among the funniest. Not always when they were happening, but almost always when I looked back on them.

I love attention. I always wanted attention.

This is one of the first things you hear Mulaney say in Baby J and, sadly, I feel this deeply as well. No matter how often I assure myself it isn’t true, I know that I need attention.

I may not need it in the same way as Mulaney, but all these words exist in this newsletter and the various novels and all the hundreds of thousands of words I kept at my old blog because of this need.

It’s why I’m writing this here instead of in a private journal or, better yet, nowhere at all.

You don’t write a whole novel unless you crave attention. You don’t perform—even for an audience as small as mine—if not for the attention.

I sometimes think of all the people who don’t create art or whatever else. What do they do with their lives? What do they want from this one and single chance they have at life?

I don’t know, babies. Probably they’re just content to be here, don’t think about posterity or what they’ll leave behind. That’s not to say they’re necessarily happier or better adjusted than I am, but they at least have the advantage of not needing to project the performance of themselves to strangers.

In many ways, this may be one of the more alienating aspects to this special. While most of us haven’t been addicted to drugs, even more of us have never been famous, and this is the first of Mulaney’s specials to really be about his fame.

It’s also often not especially funny. I mean, it’s still funny. Mulaney is a very funny man and even him at his least funny is still pretty dang funny.

Or at least I think so.

I don’t remember how I discovered John Mulaney but I know it was 2013. Either through mindless scrolling on Netflix or because my roommate told me to watch it, but one thing that immediately grabbed me about Mulaney was how instantly familiar he felt. And I mean that in a good way.

Shortly after, people began telling me that John Mulaney reminded them of me.

I didn’t even question why. I knew why. It’s probably why I liked him. His sense of humor is my sense of humor. Hearing jokes I would tell told better and by someone else felt good. And so I’ve been a fan of Mulaney for a decade now and I’ve watched his specials a number of times. We even saw him live a few years ago and would have seen him live last year but he was in town the same weekend as our own Baby J’s due date.

Had we known our baby would come two months early, we would’ve gone to the Mulaney show.

Alas.

I have always preferred Mulaney at his most deadpan. Which is to say, the loud and buoyant version of him is the one that misses most often with me, and this special is definitely him at his smallest, his most subdued. And yet I still think it may be his worst special, or at least the one with the fewest laughs (which I’d argue is the same thing).

Now, I don’t want to get into a debate about the goals of standup. My view is that comedy should be judged by the laughter it elicits.

There is no morality to comedy. It’s not about punching up or down. It’s not about being the cleverest or teaching the audience or being the modern court jester or whatever else.

It’s about the laughter.

And just to throw a controversial bit of chum here: Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette is good.

Anyway, despite this being maybe his weakest special with his least memorable characters—mostly because he is the only character here; rather than being the silly straightman stumbling into interesting situations or colorful characters, Mulaney himself becomes the colorful character, in all his egotism and self-destruction—it’s also one that I think feels closest to me.

I have been a fool my entire dumb life and I have swung like a wrecking ball through my own life and the lives of others and I’ve often been forgiven for the worst aspects of myself because people have been remarkably kind to me for no reason that I will ever be able to understand, but maybe it’s my stupid childish face and my abject silliness.

Whatever the case may be, I found the biggest laughs, for me, in this new special were during bits my wife didn’t really laugh at.

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Hope you enjoy your Saturday.

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