Anyone who has John Mulaney pegged as America’s most wholesome comedian is only partially correct. Yes, the thirty-seven-year-old is a mild-mannered, Midwestern Irish Catholic who went to Georgetown and nearly always performs in a tailored three-piece suit. He has an old-timey sensibility—he avoids the raunch of many of his peers—and moves about the stage with a Broadway actor’s flair. And yet there’s a black-sheep quality to him that’s often ignored. He started drinking at the age of thirteen, and by twenty-three he was already in recovery from drugs and alcohol. As the emotional child in his family, he was imbued with a streak of petulant darkness, which runs subtly through all of his work. In one joke from his 2009 standup album, “Top Part,” he imagines himself as a drunk eight-year-old, being grilled by his father about what he’d done that day. “What did you color?” his dad asks. “Some biiiiig fuckin’ brontosaurus,” he imagines himself replying, slurring his words.
This interplay between the squeaky-clean and the morose sets the tone for Mulaney’s new children’s variety show, “John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch,” which is on Netflix, and which marks a departure from the comic’s run of award-winning standup specials and appearances on “Saturday Night Live,” where he also worked as a writer. Not quite a children’s show for adults and not quite an adult show for children, “The Sack Lunch Bunch”—which Mulaney wrote with his former “Saturday Night Live” colleague Marika Sawyer and the composer Eli Bolin—portrays Mulaney as the slightly grumpy host of a “Sesame Street”–like show, guiding children through an array of songs and scenarios. (It also has a guest list that includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Richard Kind, and David Byrne.) Mulaney, who is open about not wanting to have children, stands at a skeptical remove from his young co-stars, curious about them but also plainly aware of just how alien they can be.
As a performer, Mulaney has a pinballing adrenaline, as if he’s just downed a shot of espresso. In person, he’s calm and thoughtful, and often speaks elliptically. Recently, we met for breakfast at Russ & Daughters Café, in New York, to talk about the new show, his niche in today’s comedy landscape, and more. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
You took another reporter here during the making of “The Sack Lunch Bunch,” and he noted in the piece that you didn’t eat anything.
Well, that was during a two-week period when I was very stressed out.
Why were you stressed out?
I don’t mean to make it sound like Abstract Expressionism, or like this was some crisis of genius. But I was very bad at articulating what I wanted “The Sack Lunch Bunch” to be—and still am, in terms of a log line. We had an hour and forty minutes of material, and I just kept thinking, We’re not going to know until day one of shooting what works and what doesn’t. At the same time, we had a budget and a schedule. I hadn’t ever done anything where I was, like, I can’t describe this, but I can picture it. Normally, most things I’ve done have been pretty straightforward. It was also July in New York, and I felt kind of insane doing it.
You’ve talked about not wanting children. Where did the idea for a children’s variety show come from? And did you use your nieces and nephews, or any other children in your life, as a focus group for the project?
In a way, but not really. At the time I was thinking about doing this project, all of my nieces and nephews were under five. I’d had minimal conversations with them. It was more that, in doing standup, I’d thought a lot about being a teen-ager, and, looking back on it, that teen-ager wasn’t me. That was a different person. I think that what I was as a teen was far different from what I am now.
How so?
As a teen-ager, I was just incredibly emotional. I didn’t realize that if I held it together just ten per cent more my life would be a lot easier. I had a lot of meltdowns, telling people how much I liked them and falling into despair. I always thought you were supposed to tell a girl how much you liked them. In the movies, that was the only thing that worked—really spelling it out. And I started to feel like I was more myself when I was nine, ten, eleven than I was between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three.
I had an idea, which was a sketch show, with kids, that wasn’t Nickelodeon but wasn’t trying to be adult. The novelty was not going to be kids saying adult things. That was as articulate as I could be about it last March, when we started. I started talking to Marika about it, and when we went and looked at [Marlo Thomas’s] “Free to Be . . . You and Me” and “Sesame Street,” they struck us as really funny. They actually used kids far less than we remembered. “Free to Be . . . You and Me” features a lot of adults. There are kids in it, but it’s a lot of adults singing. Roosevelt Grier and Harry Belafonte have a song about how moms and dads can be doctors. It’s a lot of parents defending themselves. We thought, That’s what it would look and sound like. I think [Marika] really gave it context.
You say in the special that you’d watched a bunch of modern-day children’s television and didn’t like it. But I’m trying to think of what modern-day kids’ television is, and I can only think of YouTube.
They do watch YouTube like crazy. At no point did any of the kids say, “I watch ‘Paw Patrol’ or ‘Fancy Nancy,’ ” or any of those Disney Channel shows. It was all, like, “I watch YouTube.” And ads for anything come up on YouTube. A bunch of them had seen the trailer for “Us” and were freaked out. One of the girls had seen the movie in full. They were telling me about things like Slender Man and Momo.
Many of the kids have other acting gigs or big social-media presences. On a scale of naïve to savvy, how would you characterize the cast?
They seemed to me to be show-biz kids, the way me and my siblings and my friends were. They wanted to be putting on a show, but they were not Hollywood. None were too stage-managed, and none were experienced in a way that they ever held over anyone else’s head. It’s an eclectic show, where someone might have more screen time than others, and I was very concerned that that would present problems. But they had a much better compass for how to treat people than I thought me and my contemporaries had. It made me realize that the thing Marika, Rhys [Thomas, the show’s director], and I had to base this on was “Saturday Night Live.” I think kids would be much better at “Saturday Night Live” than adults are.
Someone should pitch that to Lorne Michaels.
We actually pitched that to Lorne back in the day. We wanted to get a kid in a sketch. Marika always had an idea for “Lil’ Update,” with little kids in it. But the 11:30 P.M. time wouldn’t have worked, because of child-labor laws.
How did you pitch such an abstract idea to your guest stars, like Jake Gyllenhaal and David Byrne?
Jake was sent the demo without the preamble explaining the concept. He responded to the material! When I got on the phone with him, the fact that he was already interested in it as a character was really fun.
With Byrne, I explained it as kind of like an examination of fear and anxieties, with sketches and songs. And he wrote back, “When I was a kid I was afraid of volcanoes. I don’t know why. I grew up in Baltimore.” He came over to my apartment, and Marika and Eli and I were sitting around my kitchen table. I cleaned before he came over. I didn’t know what to do. And then he came in, and he was so nice, and he had his bike helmet. I realized that we were just going to have to play the demo in front of them. He was, like, “O.K., great. What date?” And he took out a day planner. I think, when stuff goes in the day planner, he does it.
Throughout the special, you seem a bit aggrieved by the children. Was that performative?
Did I seem aggrieved?
A little bit. Like in the sketch for the focus group for the kids’ movie. You seem impatient with them.
When I watch the special, I see someone going from being, like, I’m going to write for these kids, and it’s going to be funny for me to hear them say what I’ve written, to being a far softer person who really just enjoyed their talking.
Did doing the special make you rethink your decision not to have children?
It didn’t, no. We shot an ending where they asked me if it did. And I say no, unless I have a tremendous mental shift, but I liked hanging out with all of you, and each of you is the perfect argument for and against having children.
I heard you were spotted at the Lizzo concert at Radio City. You have a reputation for having a retro sensibility and being anti-trend. I wonder which aspects of modern pop culture you engage with on a regular basis.
When I first moved to New York, my roommate was a music writer. I knew about everything new from him. In 2009, we got separate places, and after that it just started to nosedive. But I don’t find anything fun about not knowing current references. I’m very happy when [my wife] Anna gets me into something new, but I also cannibalize it too quickly. I’ll be, like, “I really like Phoebe Bridgers.” And she’ll be, like, “I told you about her album.” She’s one of my few lifelines to the world, and I forget that I’ve taken her taste.
“The Irishman” made me think about how boring I am. I nodded off during it. When I came to, Al Pacino was, like, “These fuckin’ Kennedys are comin’ after me!” And I was, like, I know where we are. I’ve never not known about Robert Kennedy going after the Mafia. Ugh. Sometimes things in my wheelhouse are so . . . ugh.
What do network notes look like from a streaming platform like Netflix?
It’s very preproduction. There’ll be post-notes, but it’s not during [the production], which is nice. On a network half-hour show, they come every day and observe: “We’re not sure about this.” And you’re, like, “But this is all I have!” Netflix is more macro. You know, I won’t spend too much time praising a powerful company, but in this case I have to say they were really patient with me. I’m embarrassed to say I had a lot of mini-tantrums: “How am I supposed to get them my script when I don’t even know if Richard Kind is available?”
At this point in your career, do you still go out and workshop your material at small clubs?
I was doing that, showing up and doing shorter sets. But I haven’t for a few months. I kind of got out of the rhythm, honestly, of, at 9 P.M., being, like, “I’d like to go out and stand for a while.” But I’m always happy when I do. The best thing that I found was doing these shows with Pete Davidson, doing thirty-five minutes each.
On paper, a lot of people would assume you and Pete Davidson are mismatched. How did you become friends?
I understand why they would say that. I met him at the fortieth-anniversary thing for “S.N.L.” There was one dressing room you could smoke in. I was sitting in there with Bill Hader, and Pete comes in and is, like, [in a Staten Island accent] “Are people here liars?” I was, like, “Yes.” And it was funny talking to someone who’d been there for maybe a year or two who was very wise about what was happening. He was really funny and rebellious, but he kind of saw the whole thing right away. He’d be, like, “They’re only lying because they’re afraid.” It took me so long to figure that out!
I think one thing about standup is that you’re friends with people who, in a lot of other situations, you wouldn’t know. At the Comedy Cellar, you can hang out with someone for hours who is thirty years older than you and who is not an uptight dork from Georgetown.
I went to your Georgetown-benefit show at BAM without realizing it was a Georgetown thing. The crowd was extremely buttoned up, and I remember you needling them in a way that was very funny.
I remember having an emotional journey that night. And then at the end I was, like, “Thank you, good night. I know I make a lot of fun of you, but it was a very good time.” I think, being the black sheep of a very buttoned-up family, I had to be, like, “You uptight pricks!”
Your black-sheep-ness tends to get lost in your image.
Wherever I used to perform, I was the squarest of the square. And then, when I would go home to visit, it was like I was Andy Warhol.
Have you ever been in hot water, or been afraid of getting in hot water?
Do you mean the personal hot water that many of the people in the arts have found themselves in lately?
Yes. Being made fun of, or being cancelled, or being the subject of negative attention online.
Well, I don’t want to equate it with being “cancelled,” but, when my sitcom just died in the ambulance, it felt like that. [The autobiographical sitcom “Mulaney” was pulled after two episodes, in 2015.] And I think, maybe privately, and maybe sometimes publicly, I would wear that a little too much. “I know you all think I’m a fucking loser.” It’s, like, they paid to see you. Relax.
And many people probably didn’t even know that you had a sitcom.
They didn’t. And now there’s a whole generation coming up who Google my name, and they’re, like, “What is this?”
But have I ever been on the brink of getting in hot water? [Long pause.]
Now I feel like this is a curse I’m going to bring upon you.
I mean, it’d be absurd to act like I’m thinking about this for the first time. I’ve thought, Oh, that joke might not age well. I’ve written comedy for fifteen years. [Pause.]
O.K., I’ve thought a lot about this. In general, I would not enjoy a shitstorm. But I don’t stand by all the work. I’d happily apologize. A big thing I look back on is that people don’t know that you think of yourself as a really progressive, liberal, open-minded person. It’s not a given. I felt like sometimes on “S.N.L.” we would get into that: “You know our politics.” And they’d be, like, “No, we don’t!” There’s that murky territory.
There’s this notion that “P.C. culture” was invented in the last few years. Do you agree?
We did this twenty-five years ago. At the time, people were, like, “Now you’re supposed to say ‘mentally challenged.’ What the hell?” And I remember thinking, Well, it’s nicer. And these aren’t laws. They just seemed to be suggestions that were immediately shot out of the sky.
You’ve had a busy career. Does it feel that way to you?
I’ve been fairly selective in that I do two things a year, max. And one will often be, like, a guest appearance. But I like everything I’ve picked. I also think ages twenty-five to thirty at “S.N.L.” felt like twenty years. I have fewer goals now, in a nice way.
Will you put out another standup special soon?
In 2021, I bet. I like spacing them out.
You won an Emmy for your last special. At this point, is standup your crown jewel?
It’s the thing I really love the most. What was nice about this kids’ special was that I had not done anything from the ground up since I did that half-hour sitcom. I normally operate within someone else’s show. “The Sack Lunch Bunch” was as satisfying as anything I’ve ever done, and it wasn’t standup or just writing.
Bizarrely, if I write a joke for whoever’s hosting the Globes, or whatever, and they use it, and it works, I get more satisfaction out of that than a lot of things. I don’t know why.
This was your first year at the Oscars. Did you feel like an outsider, or like you were part of the club?
It was really nice to present with Nora [Lum, who performs as Awkwafina]. I felt a little bit out of place, but everybody seemed like they felt out of place. They did cut to me at one point when they were, like, “Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Morello.”
You play Thoreau in the new Emily Dickinson show. Did you do any kind of transcendentalist exercises to prepare for it?
Well, I read this profile of him in The New Yorker that inspired the episode. He was a dilettante hipster prick. Walden Pond was extremely close to his family, and bustling. He was just a contrarian.
I feel like we’re on the brink of a new transcendentalist movement against social media. Do you subscribe to any of that?
No. I am alone without it a lot, and also sometimes totally buried in my phone, because it’s a TV and it’s really neat and fun. But working with “The Sack Lunch Bunch,” people were talking like it was the end of days with kids on their phones. And I thought, Yeah, that person is eleven and they have an Instagram account. But we had pellet guns. We would ride our bikes around the city of Chicago. We were vulnerable in different ways. Those fears are just generational snobbery.
