John Mulaney on “Everybody’s Live,” sobriety and fatherhood

John Mulaney is a comedy superstar finding the funny in the familiar.  At 42, he already has five highly-rated specials to his name … three primetime Emmys … and a reputation as one of the best stand-up guys in the game.

“Now, I don’t know if you’ve been following the news but I’ve been keeping my ears open, and it seems like everyone everywhere is super-mad about everything all the time.”

But for his new job, the stand-up is sitting down. Mulaney is hosting a talk show on Netflix, complete with a couch and celebrity guests. And the whole thing is live, in part because he likes it better that way. “It feels like there’s more at stake,” he said. “I love that. It’s the best.”

I asked, “Explain that feeling – it’s like coming up against a cliff and kind of dangling over it?”

“No,” he replied. “It’s dangling over it all the time.”

It began as an experiment during the Netflix Comedy Festival last year, called “Everybody’s in L.A.,” talking about “L.A. things,” like earthquakes and coyotes. Now the show is back with a broader focus, and a new name, “Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney.” It will go live every Wednesday night, starting this week. “It’s a fun feeling to know that hopefully a lot of people are watching,” he said, “and it’s live, globally, with no delays, and you could really damage your career!”

To watch a teaser for “Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney,” click on the video player below:

And he knows all about live TV. For Mulaney, “Saturday Night Live” is home turf. He started as a writer there in 2008, and helped create some of the show’s biggest characters, like Bill Hader’s Stefon. Mulaney would often change the script at the last second to throw Hader off, like during this Halloween skit:

Stefon: “Have you heard of Blacula, the Black Dracula? Well, they have a Jewish Dracula.”
Seth Meyers: “Oh, what’s his name?”
Stefon: “Sidney Applebaum!”

Seems like this was the thing John Mulaney was born to do. Raised in Chicago, Mulaney says he grew up feeling that comedy was his destiny. Asked if he has a memory of when he realized that he was funny, Mulaney said, “Always interesting in these things, ’cause you don’t want to sound egotistical, but I don’t remember a time when I didn’t think I was funny.”

Not long after graduating from Georgetown, he joined “SNL,” and a career was launched. He made his mark in New York, but he’s fascinated with Southern California, where he now lives year-round.

He took us record shopping at one of his favorite places, the legendary Amoeba Music in Hollywood.

I asked, “When you come out to places like this, do people come up to you? Or do they leave you alone?”

“A little bit,” he said. “My joke is that I’m like Louis Farrakhan: I mean a lot to a small group of people.”

Truth is, Mulaney is a lot bigger than he’ll admit. In his most recent special, “Baby J,” he played to a sold-out crowd and focused on his drug addiction, and recovery. He describes a 2020 intervention on his behalf staged by friends like Seth Meyers and Fred Armisen: “Let me just call this out now, I don’t mean to be weird, it was a star-studded intervention.” 

It’s funny now, of course: Mulaney says he’s been clean for more than four years.

Asked if sobriety is something he thinks about every day, Mulaney replied, “Well, that’s a good question. I don’t think about cocaine, opioids, and benzodiazeprine every day. I’ll acknowledge that I understand the vigilance I need. I do not think about it every day. I just don’t. I do think about the ways that I can lead my life to perhaps never feel the kind of strain that got me there. So, yeah, sobriety maybe being, like, a bigger term than just abstaining from the chemicals, I definitely think about it every day.”

Mulaney credits his wife, actress Olivia Munn, with helping him navigate his recovery. You might remember her from Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” or “X-Men: Apocalypse,” in which she played Psylocke. But she’s a bit of a superhero in real life as well; she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, and has shared her whole journey online, from the initial test to a double mastectomy. Other women have since credited her with saving their lives.  

Mulaney said, “There’s this lifetime risk assessment test that is really the only reason her cancer was discovered. And seeing so many women publicly and privately come to her that [say] they discovered how high their risk was from that, it’s astonishing.”

She’s also mom to their two young children, Malcom and Mei. “I have this feeling a lot of times, I go, ‘I can’t believe I know this person, let alone am married to her,'” he said.

Fatherhood has given him not only new material, but also a whole new outlook on life.

From his November 2024 monologue on “Saturday Night Live”:

“My wife and I just welcomed a baby girl into our family. … My wife takes care of the five-week-old, and I take the two-year-old out. And that’s not fair. That’s not an equal distribution of labor at all. Saying, ‘You have a five-week-old, I’ll take a two-year-old,’ that’s like saying, ‘I’ll transport this convict across state lines. You hold a potato.'”

John Mulaney has made a good life making people laugh. Now, as a husband and father of two, he says he has something to live for.

Asked how fatherhood has changed how he looks at the world, Mulaney replied, “I’m in the world now that I’m a father. My head was my only home before that. When my son was born, the first thought I had was, I went, ‘Oh, there you are.’ And when my daughter was born, I had this – not to sound ‘woo-woo’ or anything – but when she was born, I went, ‘Oh!’ My thought was like, ‘Oh, we’ve met before. I’ve collided with you some other time.’ So, it’s like these people came in that just, I don’t know, make me like the world a lot more.”

Online exclusive – watch an extended interview with John Mulaney:

      
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Story produced by John D’Amelio. Editor: Lauren Barnello.