John Mulaney thinks likability is a jail - but the real problem is that relatable humour is a trap
Likability isn't just a jail, it's a business model
There was a time a few years ago where Twitter, every improv show I attended, and the entirety of Tumblr became a John Mulaney quote book. If it wasn’t his various funny lines - “streets smarts!” or “I was over on the bench”, or the gag that I think most accurately summed up the Trump era “there’s a HORSE loose in the HOSPITAL” - it was every skinny guy in his twenties imitating his delivery and physicality. I’m guilty of it myself, I say things with intonation and I flounce. I am the target market.
But there’s really only one line from his latest special, Baby J, that’s stuck with me - and it comes after breaking out into a kind of whimsical song and dance, where he quickly and roguishly reflects on his personal yet very public scandals he was involved in over the last few years.
“You know what I mean / We all quarantined / We all went to rehab and we all got divorced and now our reputation is diff-rent!”
He’s referring to his largely publicised divorce from his ex-wife, artist Anna Marie Tendler, his new relationship with actress Olivia Munn, the BABY he quickly had with Munn, and his stint in rehab. He’s also obliquely referencing a couple of other moments of public criticism, such as when he brought Dave Chapelle out on tour, and Chapelle continued his trend of transphobic jokes. Don’t ask me why, but John Mulaney has a large and vocal trans and queer fanbase (I think because he’s tall and goofy and used to write shows about how much he loves his partner?), who felt justifiably ambushed by transphobic jokes at his show.
To finish off his faux-vaudevillian little routine, John Mulaney then says “Likeability is jaaaaaaaail”, before miming the doffing of a hat.
It’s a throwaway joke that quickly winks at the near-cancellation levels of scrutiny and criticism he’s had, and acknowledges in one form or another that he is aware of his own public persona and popularity - and subsequent decline.
It’s an interesting way to frame things - essentially that he is helpless to be so beloved, and while he isn’t proud of his actions, it’s his audiences fault for putting him on a pedestal. He’s essentially throwing responsibility back to the audience - which is not entirely incorrect.
I can’t stop thinking about his statement that likability is a jail, because I think it reveals a really interesting truth about art and storytelling and relatability - and a lesson for people like John Mulaney and myself who peddle in the dangerous world of art about our own lives. Because while he’s not unjustified in pointing out the audience’s expectation that he adheres to some kind of likeable, toothless, goofy persona - all natty suits and anecdotes about his dog and his wife - what this ignores is that he’s painstakingly built his career around relatable personas.
Is Baby J a comedy special or a reputation rebuilder?
Baby J is a really interesting comedy special - he doesn’t go into the new relationship or the divorce, but he delves deep into his drug addiction and rehab. It’s funny, but in its attempt to deal with darker subject matter and still get laughs at the same time, it’s less whimsical and quotable than his earlier specials. It’s not all about rehab, but the sections structured around that experience are its most intimate. It’s confessional comedy, which isn’t a new phenomenon at all.
I’ve always enjoyed Mulaney because his standup is closer to storytelling than many other comedians - he’s got a deft and skilled hand at interweaving narrative and satisfying punchlines and a magical way of thematically linking anecdotes and paying them off with callbacks. He’s not unique in this - plenty of other comedians lean further towards this side of the gag/narrative spectrum - but he does excel at the form, and itch the part of my brain that appreciates a constructed story that delivers on comedy. Also, he elevates his own writing so much through his performance and stage presence - it’s not what I’m focusing on, but it shouldn’t be ignored.
There’s something defensive about Baby J. I’ve seen TikToks from PR experts pointing out that through the special, he’s essentially reclaiming the narrative around his public image, spinning the story back to focus on his time in rehab, prioritising his own voice again. Many reviewers have seen it as a cynical way to reclaim his reputation - glossing over the “objectionable” things he’s done, and casting himself as a figure of pity.
That may be true, and is probably at least subconsciously motivating him in some small way. But what it ignores is that Baby J should be seen less as a cynical PR move, and more as a show dealing with the consequences of someone who has consistently created art that relies on letting people into his life, of creating relatability to power his stories and provide the fuel for his comedy. Baby J is a consequence, a symptom - and the hilarious thing is that it relies on relatability, that same double-edged sword, to work.
It’s not so much that likability is a jail - it’s more that being relatable, which is what John Mulaney’s humour is based off - is a trap.
Relatability and storytelling
Relatability is crucial in storytelling - for anything from an op-ed to a memoir to a comedy show, it’s a foundation for the audience. It’s the way that we as the storyteller create context for the audience, the extended hand that lets them understand what is going on. Even though most stories are about the weird and wonderful and unique experiences of the storyteller - things that they find funny or sad or special from their own lives, in Mulaney’s case a highly publicised divorce and rehab stint - they rely on relatability as part of the formula for it to be successful. In fact, the weirder the story, the more important an entry point of relatability is.
I write a lot of comedic stories from my own life, and I learned so much about how to do that from the long-running Sydney event Story Club, run by comedy writers Ben Jenkins and Zoe Norton Lodge where a bunch of writers of various stars and stripes read out a humorous 15 min story from their own life, loosely based around a theme. Many of the stories feel like a John Mulaney anecdote. It’s such a joy.
I remember once watching a story told by a journalist fail to hit with the audience, despite it being an objectively funny situation being recounted. It was the manner in which they were attempting to coach the story that didn’t hit the mark. It was about a series of escalating tragedies that happened while on a work trip to a far-off country - but I can’t remember any specific, which is telling.
When I was chatting to Ben about it afterwards, he said that as a rule, travel stories are harder to make work in this format- and it’s because there is a subconscious belief in the audience minds that maybe weird and wonderful things like the humorous accidents being described by the journalist were just normal over there, that there’s perhaps nothing notable about it. The storyteller hadn’t created a safe, solid foundation of shared experience for the audience to settle upon, before finding the humour by contrasting and comparing that relatability with the point of weirdness, of difference. Ben himself has a story about going to Argentina and encountering a knife-wielding bird that expertly fixes that problem. Part of the relatability he creates at the beginning is placing himself as a kind of good-natured fool, a bit of an idiot that is bewildered and baffled by the bird as much as we are.
For most people, an intervention for a celebrity held by American comedy legends like Seth Meyers and Fred Armisen is not really relatable. John Mulaney helps make it relatable by viewing himself as a kind of silly, tragic figure, who the audience finds kinship with. In this case, Mulaney makes a clear distinction between his past self - a chaotic cocaine addict doofus - and his current self telling the story. He shares the experience with us.
The john mulaney character
The primary way to create relatability for an audience is through depictions of self - in other words, the persona we create. The character of John Mulaney is obviously not the same John Mulaney his friends and family would know. That’s just normal. The Patrick Lenton character who appears in my writing plays up my foibles for humorous reason, glosses over other aspects (for example I pretend i’m a silly little long guy with anxiety, and not a handsome musclebound jock). It’s all based on truth, but it’s cutting and pruning and plumping and preening my personality, my public persona, in a way that helps the story get told efficiently.
For Mulaney’s style of storytelling, he hyperbolises his own neuroses, playing up the silly Wonka-style, hapless, victim of fate style persona. He shows us an aspect of himself that is recognisable and relatable to the audience, blows it up for comedic purposes, and then uses that persona as the vehicle for the rest of the story. For these stories to work, it has to be funny that it’s happening to Mulaney, and not just any person.
Once we are all aboard, then Mulaney strategically uses his life as fodder for comedic stories. He humanises himself by inviting us in to moments of intimacy - stories about his career, his family, growing up. We learn about him - it grounds his character. We all have families and friends and careers! We’re just like him. His first two specials have so many stories about his wife (of the time) that he basically created the blueprint for the online wife guy phenomenon.
What I’ve discovered from my own work is that a good story from your life - whether comedic or tragic or both - requires a small sacrifice. It requires an offering of something personal, private, but beyond everything else, intimate. There has to be an element of braveness in sharing this. That’s why trauma stories do so well , like that rash of trauma op-eds from years ago - people respond to the intimacy of having the worst moment someone’s life shared with you. One of the stories I’m most proud of is one I did for the Queerstories event, about the death of my friend Sam. It was hard to present my authentic grief, AND make people laugh at the same time. It was the deepest, rawest emotion I’ve ever captured and presented to an audience. It was definitely a sacrifice.
But it doesn’t always need to be trauma - it just had to be something truthful you are brave enough to give. For Mulaney, he invites us into his life, shares with us thoughts and experiences from personal things like his relationships. He also gives us emotional vulnerability, the truth of his feelings.
You need to snip off a tiny bit of your soul and package it up.
Likability isn’t a jail it’s a consequence
So this is where we get to Mulaney’s “cancellation”. He was the recipient of much discourse around the divorce, the baby, the messiness of it all. People really did attempt to equate his personal relationship dramas with something publicly accountable like a MeToo movement, which I think is unfair. You don’t have to like him for what he did to his ex-wife, but I don’t think it’s really any of our business.
I think his uncritical support and boosting of Chapelle is worth more public criticism.
Baby J mocks the entitlement his fans feel towards his life. It also chooses the things we’re allowed to criticise him for (being a drug addict in the past), while recontextualising himself as a victim of weird nosy public scrutiny and judgement.
It’s about creating boundaries, which is integral for storytelling. Storytellers guide the narrative, create personas entirely so they can try to control which parts of their lives are offered up to the audience to eat. It’s delicate - here, you can have this part of my life to consume, but not this part - and it’s easy to see that the boundaries are porous as a result.
I don’t think it’s fair, but of COURSE an audience will feel in some way entitled to make commentary and judgement about your marriage, when you’ve spent at least two of your comedy specials talking about your marriage. Mulaney gifted his audience with a snippet of truth about his relationship - which I think makes it harder to enforce as a boundary. His fans are kind of like vampires, in the sense that once you’ve invited them in, there are consequences (can you imagine if that was the tagline of Bram Stroker’s Dracula? Once you invite him in… there are consequences).
I feel like it’s kind of like inviting a huge Labrador into the front room of your house, and then getting super mad when it starts rampaging through every other room, sniffing all your stuff and jumping on the bed. You’re the one who invited a DOG in and expected it to adhere to boundaries it can’t even see or understand.
Is Baby J an apology video?
It’s interesting to look at another public response to “scandal”, with the extremely cringe ukulele video from YouTuber Colleen Ballinger, responding to accusations of grooming and inappropriate interactions with young fans.
The only thing that really connects the two is that both forms are responses to public discourse around their lives, and neither of them are an apology. Mulaney never “apologises” for the things he’s been criticised for, but rather reclaims the narrative. Ballinger attempts the same thing, but far less successfully.
But on further thought, there’s another connection - and it’s that both of these people rely on sharing bits of themselves to their audiences as their artform and ways to make a living, and both of them have struggled with the porous boundaries with their audience as a result. I would say that Ballinger is not unique - YouTube and YouTubers RELY on invested fandoms, in a literal financial sense. The content she produces is powered by the connection between her and her fans. It’s no surprise that she, and other YouTubers, regularly run into issues where they have no created suitable and sensible boundaries between themselves and fans. It’s no surprise that her efforts at being relatable and accessible to her fans, even as a persona, has backfired.
Meanwhile Mulaney doesn’t court his fans in the same way, but the access he gives them to his life, to his persona, still makes them feel entitled in a similar way. The fans are pouring over the fragile boundary he’s put up.
They’re kind of two sides of the same coin, both dealing with the consequences of permeable boundaries with fans.
There’s so much more to be written about in terms of toxic fan cultures, the monetisation of them by artists, and entitlement to artists by fans. There’s a lot to be talked about in terms of capitalism turning fan connection into some kind of weird subscription model, which forces boundaries to blur as a feature, not as a mistake. But we do not have time for that.
What I will say is that it’s almost impossible for any artist right now to work without cultivating a fandom. From TV actors to pop musicians to comedians to YouTubers, every one of them relies on nurturing a relationship with fans. As a response, audiences and fans feel more entitlement to the intricacies and specificities of public figure’s private lives. It seems like the only way you can opt out is become as big as Beyonce - who doesn’t really engage with her fans via social media or interviews or much at all. She’s big enough to firm up her boundaries.
Conceal don’t feel
But as we’ve already established, this kind of relatability in Mulaney’s standup isn’t a bug, but a feature. It’s the core and essential ingredient in the formula, and one that works. I would say that Baby J is his least effective special yet precisely because he had to work so much harder to spin his persona into something relatable.
This is because he wasn’t just inviting us in with his old, familiar John Mulaney character. Now he was showing us his previously constructed character, telling us implicitly that he wasn’t that person anymore, and showing us that we are able to laugh and pity that past self. There’s literally a joke where he imitates his physicality from his old specials, and then implies that he was acting like that because of all the cocaine.
But then he is also creating a NEW persona, similar to the old persona, that wants us to love him and relate to him in a new but similar way, but also absolve him of too much responsibility for his past self.
That’s a lot of work for a comedy show! He manages it, imho, but I don’t believe the storytelling is as strong and cohesive because of it, the jokes a little darker, the punchlines still expertly crafted, but the way we get to them a longer and more rocky journey. It’s less quotable.
For comedic storytelling, relatability is a crucial part of the narrative joke process. John Mulaney has triggered the consequences of using it, but is seemingly helpless to stop doing it, because it is so effective and integral to the craft. These standup shows are his artwork, and I have a lot of empathy for people who untangle the experiences of their real life through their art. I do it all the time. I don’t think it’s an inherently cynical motive on his part - I think this is how he, as a storyteller, interacts with the world. It’s his art, his livelihood and his passion.
“The past couple years, I’ve done a lot of work on myself,” Mulaney begins the show, “and I’ve realised that I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.”
That’s funny, but he’s also gifting us with a truth and a relatable character flaw - much more relatable than being a rich former SNL head writer with a cocaine addiction. And like with a lot of storytelling, just because it’s an exaggerated flaw, a comedic trait we’re being told we can laugh at, it doesn’t mean it’s not a perfectly valid motive.
John Mulaney in Baby J acknowledges that his old persona traded off “likability”, that he doesn’t like how trapped he is by this, by the jail of likability – but then he uses the same storytelling tools in Baby J, the same relatability set up, to try and do this.
If John Mulaney truly believes likability is a jail, then he needs to understand that he’s actively courting being likable and relatable in all his shows. In fact, it’s pretty clear that he’s obsessed with it (which is fine, I relate to that myself - god, he’s just so relatable!). You don’t get put in jail if you haven’t done a crime, and Mulaney seems incapable of not trying to be likeable.
Relatability… It’s a trap! That’s why from now on, I will never share another personal detail about myself.
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