John Mulaney says his act was never about being a great guy

‘Parasocial’ wasn’t the Oxford dictionary’s word of the year in 2021 (that honor went to “vax”), but it could very well have been. That year, one lot of people pretended John Mulaney was a close personal friend who had completely betrayed them. That particular group took the stand-up comedian’s time in rehab for drug addiction and subsequent divorce from ex-wife Anna Maria Tendler (and relationship with now-wife Olivia Munn) personally in a way that only a fan who had completely bought into a constructed persona could.

That part of his life “feels very far away,” Mulaney said in an interview new GQ profile; After all, he is now happily married with two children. Yet he emphasizes that the image of the parasocial fans is a strict image tall child who could never hurt a fly (he sat on the couch!) – never really existed in the first place. “I tried really hard to tell everyone,” he explained. “What I said… is that I Look harmless.”

In retrospect, the signs – both of his dissatisfaction with his first relationship and of his previous substance dependence – were there. This writer doesn’t want to fall into the trap of reading his jokes too much in the other direction, but some bits that are right there in the specials include the “why with the cow?‘marriage segment The comeback kid and the quote from Child beautiful about living on “cigarettes and alcohol and Adderall” (and no water!) throughout college. We wouldn’t bring it up at all, except for the fact that he said that sometimes the person he’s on stage feels like “the most me.” Fans don’t have to take Mulaney’s stand-up as pure fiction; it’s never sold that way; they just have to take into account the fact that the person presenting it is just as complex and layered as anyone else. We only see a small part of his world.

In retrospect, one thing that might have helped would have been using a stage name, which Mulaney says he began to regret not doing a few years into his career. “I don’t like when they say the same name I had when I was 10. I don’t always like to read that name there,” he explained. ‘I wonder if it’s fun when you see that ‘so and so is rubbish’ and you say: ‘That’s actually not me.’ I always wondered if that helped artists say, ‘I’m not Dean Martin. So be angry at that thing anything you want.’” It’s no wonder he and Chappell Roan-WHO do use a stage name for exactly the same reasons – things seemed to go well when they both performed on SNL the other weekend.