John Mulaney Is Back

In Baby J, his new Netflix special, the comedian leads viewers through a darkly hilarious journey.

‘T he past couple years, I’ve done a lotta work on myself. And I’ve realized that I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.”

Those are the first words we hear from John Mulaney in his new Netflix special, Baby J. The camera then circles around behind him to reveal, at a sold-out Symphony Hall in Boston, 2,625 Mulaneyphiles who bathe the comedian in the attention he needs as he delivers the finely honed writing, impeccable timing, and crisp articulation that his fans have come to expect.

He is stylishly turned out as ever, in a burgundy suit and matching repp tie. His hair is longer and less gelled than in past Netflix outings, causing a lock to frequently flop over his forehead. The less buttoned-up look suits a tone that is a bit darker and an affect that is a bit more subdued. All of which is in keeping with the ground he covers over the special’s 80 minutes: the intervention friends had staged to rescue him from his drug addiction, his two-month stay in a rehab facility, and the various schemes and self-deceptions he had used to feed that addiction.

And his acting skills, if one is permitted to use that term when referring to a stand-up comic, have improved. Or perhaps it’s just that the subject matter required more nuance than standard comic tropes. Either way, he’s a masterly storyteller throughout Baby J, where a subtle inflection of a word or cock of his head brings life to his characters, such as the mysterious Dr. Michael, whose office was the kitchenette in his Manhattan apartment and from whom Mulaney was able to secure prescriptions for controlled substances merely by asking for them.

But above all, Baby J is very, very funny.

Mulaney opens with the story of his envy of a grammar-school classmate who became the center of attention because his grandparent had died. He admits to hoping and, yes, even praying that one of his grandparents would die “between September and May” so that he could be the center of attention. “I’m not saying you pray to kill one of the important ones” — as he conceives it, those would be your mom’s mom or dad’s dad — “but you could kill one of the unimportant ones.” He settles on praying for the demise of his dad’s mom, and his rationale is both darkly logical and hilarious.

A bit of crowd work with an eleven-year-old named Henry whom he spots in the balcony is funny in itself — he asks Henry whether he had seen him do stand-up before, “or did a babysitter cancel, and suddenly you were, like, in a van” — but also leads to a number of perfectly placed callbacks, more markers of a looser, less gelled Mulaney. When he’s about to describe the bad road he’d gone down before coming back, he gives Henry a word of Nancy Reaganesque advice: “DON’T!”

He then gets down to business with the story of the intervention staged by a dozen comedian friends, whom he proudly describes as “a ‘We Are the World’ of alternative comedians over the age of 40.”

“Do you know how bad of a drug problem you have to have if, when you open a door and see people gathered, your first and immediate thought is, ‘This is probably an intervention about my drug problem’?” That’s an example of something else that’s new about Baby J: Mulaney himself is the foil of most of his jokes and observations (which is, after all, in keeping with his opening words about needing constant attention).

The funniest set piece recounts Mulaney’s first night in rehab, ending with a long-form impression of Al Pacino that’s a cross between Looking for Richard Pacino and Any Given Sunday Pacino. Mulaney/Pacino sticks the landing with the Italian-to-English translation of “Pacino” into “Daddy Khaki Pants.” (Give it a sec — it’ll come.)

One of his rehab exercises has Mulaney text his drug dealer to tell him that he is now sober and will no longer be needing his services. Through that text thread, Mulaney discovers that his drug dealer isn’t really a drug dealer at all but only bought drugs for Mulaney because “I didn’t want you to get worse drugs on the street.”

“I like that story,” Mulaney concludes, “because there are many tales of drug dealers who have turned innocent people into drug addicts.” He adds, “I might be the first drug addict to turn an innocent man into a drug dealer.”

I happen to have attended the performance that was filmed for this special, and I thoroughly enjoyed it in the moment. But after leaving Symphony Hall, I had a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It lingered for a few days, then faded.

Two months later, while I was watching Mulaney’s performance on Netflix, that feeling began to return. At one point he tells of how, at the time of his friends’ intervention, he had three grams of cocaine on him, but that the staffers who frisked him upon arrival at the rehab facility had come up with only two. The joke? He’d done a gram of cocaine on the way to rehab. The live audience, including me, had laughed at the skillful way he unspooled the tale. Netflix viewers will laugh, too.

But that’s when things crystallized for me. A very close friend of mine has been in and out of rehab many times. I have seen the toll that addiction takes, not only on the addict, but on family and friends. I’ve experienced the tears and the anger and the anguish and the fear of relapse that never, ever goes away. And in that context, the thought of Mulaney in the back of a car on the way to rehab doing coke no longer seemed all that funny.

This is not to knock Mulaney. Rather, it is to serve as — and please forgive me for using this term, but it seems apt here — a trigger warning for those sitting down to watch Baby J who have had up-close experience with addiction. It may bring up some tough memories. You may feel uneasy at times. I suspect that Mulaney, just as he needed to purge all those drugs, needed to get Baby J out of his system as well. And if that’s what he needed to do, good on him for doing it. Just be aware that that’s the ride he’ll be taking you on.

To wit: To come up with some quick cash to buy drugs, he once used a credit card to buy a Rolex for $12,000 and then, within minutes, pawned it . . . for $6,000. There are many twists and turns to this story, and he tells it brilliantly. After the laughter dies down comes the philosophical and comic payoff:

“As you process and digest how obnoxious, wasteful, and unlikeable that story is, just remember — that’s one I’m willing to tell you.”

Viewers of Baby J will be giving John Mulaney 80 minutes of the attention, albeit virtual, that he needs, and they in return will get 80 minutes of solid laughs, some of which come from pretty dark places. If you’re good with that, then it’s more than a fair trade indeed.