Last Week Tonight is done for the season, and after a hard push leading up to and after the election, The Daily Show took a well-deserved week off. So, as is tradition, I’m tagging in a standup special in place of News Satire Roundup, and this special, in a word, is aces.
I remember John Mulaney first catching my attention years ago during a rare onstage bit he did at SNL (where he worked mainly as a writer,) extolling the wonders of Girl Scout cookies. Ever since, I’ve periodically caught the odd standup clip of his on YouTube, increasingly so since I started watching Big Mouth, where Mulaney voices Andrew. That’s what led me to see his exquisite “there’s a horse loose in a hospital” bit, which is why, when I found myself in need of a standup special to watch, I turned to this one.
We’ll get to that bit specifically later on, but there’s all kinds of funny jam-packed into this special before that. Mulaney does a number of extended story routines in which maybe a few hilarious narratives are woven into the same theme, or in which a story begins along one theme and carries over to another. There’s his reminiscences over school assemblies, his indignation at receiving mailers from his alma mater soliciting donations, his shameful admissions of having reached the “gross” stage of life, and memories of going to mass as a child, among others.
And all of it is hilarious. Like, laughing-so-hard-I-have-to-remind-myself-to-breathe hilarious. Much of it is down to Mulaney’s delightfully-offbeat delivery, with his old-timey radio voice and weirdly-emphatic diction. Some of it is the cognitive dissonance of his wholesome appearance, the youthful-looking face and the clean-cut suit, mixed with the often-outrageous things he says (this special doesn’t get as profane as, say, Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra, but plenty of what he says is naughtier than you’d expect from someone who looks a bit like a 14-year-old dressed up for his cousin’s baptism.) And then, a huge helping of it comes from Mulaney’s wonderfully out-there brand of humor.
What’s not to like? I love the grounding asides he makes to the audience in the middle of his wild anecdotes, slices of the mundane to remind us just how absurd they are (like amid his impression of the “stranger danger” speaker’s presentation, “ ‘Now, when kidnappers throw you in the trunk of a car’ – it is 9:00 in the morning!”) I like the weird but amazingly-apt descriptions he gives (like in explaining what college was like for him, “I lived the life of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.”) I really enjoy the way he takes time to let a joke build, at times allowing the audience to realize where the routine is heading and start laughing in sheer anticipation until he teases out the punchline (like as he begins to realize his wife’s misconceptions about The Last Supper.)
And then, yes, “there’s a horse loose in a hospital.” What an expertly-crafted routine – what at first seems like a ludicrous analogy turns out to be a stunningly-perfect examination of the Trump era. Every aspect of this is golden. To pick out just a few great bits from it, I love 1) the opening thesis, “I think everything’s eventually gonna be okay, but I have no idea what’s gonna happen next!”, 2) the observation that, “when there’s a horse in the hospital, you’ve gotta stay updated,” with everyone constantly on their phones checking to see what the horse is up to, and 3) the terrific line, “And then you go to brunch with people, and someone says, ‘There shouldn’t be a horse in the hospital!’, and it’s like, ‘We’re well past that!’” So, so good – I die, OMG. If you haven’t seen this bit, get yourself over to YouTube, and if you haven’t seen the special, I highly recommend checking it out.
Warnings
Language, drinking/smoking/drug references, sexual references, and thematic elements.
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