Parent Trap

John Mulaney is baby. Or daddy? That’s the conversation his new special has with itself.

- KATHRYN VANARENDONK

BABY J, the latest stand-up from John Mulaney, is a herculean effort, but what exactly that effort aims to achieve is not entirely clear. After his highly public, intensely tumultuous past several years—an intervention, a long period in rehab, a divorce, a sudden new relationship, a new baby—the special is both a presentation of who the comedian and actor was during that period and an attempt to align that person with who he is now. It’s designed as a self-examination: He wants to be able to laugh at that guy he used to be and for the audience to laugh at that guy too. So he tries to create a lot of space between them. That Mulaney who was addicted to substances? He’s certainly related to the guy standing onstage, but he’s not quite the same. He’s an object to be held up and tut-tutted over, a guy we can laugh at safely now because he no longer exists.

Some distance from a past self is necessary in this kind of storytelling— without it, there’s just a rattling off of events with no room for artistic transformation. But Mulaney attacks Baby J less like a product of creative consideration and more as if he’s examining a severed limb. He is so entirely, confidently unruffled. His sharp suit and shiny dress shoes are back; he’s on the big Boston Symphony Hall stage. Inside the stories he tells is the implication that we should now understand that this old-timey soft-shoe act was always a cover for some very dark stuff. And yes, maybe all this is an attempt to reconcile the Mulaney everyone knew onstage with the Mulaney who lived behind the scenes. The act has returned, but this time it’s fine! See, look—there’s so much distance! We can laugh now! Except when you create that much separation between who you are and who you were, reconciliation starts to look like dissociation.