Last year, Netflix announced that they’d signed a multi-special deal with John Mulaney, starting with his brilliant Emmy-winning Kid Gorgeous, filmed during his sold-out run at Radio City Music Hall. In a profile in Esquire–in which he talks about a range of issues from his road to recovery from drug and alcohol abuse to the frustrating unwillingness of (mostly white male) comedians to adapt to current culture–he finally gave some details as to what his next special will look like and holy wow does it sound incredible.
Like Muhammed Ali and Roy Cohn, I too am now on the cover of Esquire. This was very fun. Thank you and congratulations to new Editor-in-Chief Michael Sebastian @esquire. Thank you @anwander @nicksullivanesq@kumicraig And thank you @jonahweiner for watching me not eat. pic.twitter.com/93fwcnMPwC
— John Mulaney (@mulaney) September 12, 2019
Kid Gorgeous was hands down one of the funniest comedy specials of the last, I don’t know, ever. His comedy isn’t usually explicitly political but his four-minute bit comparing Trump (without ever actually mentioning Trump’s name) to a horse loose in a hospital is possibly the best political joke of the Trump era and I still think about it nearly every day.
But while Kid Gorgeous worked within the structure of the standard stand-up comedy special, Mulaney’s new (still untitled) project sounds like something entirely different: a “children’s variety show.”
He tells Esquire that he wants to make something that children and adults can watch together. His goal, he says is twofold. “It’s something I’d like to watch,” he says. “And I don’t wanna do anything anyone else is doing.”
What’s described in this profile certainly doesn’t sound like anything anyone else is doing. He’s working with a cast of child actors, doing skits and compared the entire special to “a blooper reel.”
He says he’s drawn a lot of inspiration from the shows he grew up on, like 3-2-1 Contact, a PBS adventure-science show from the 80s like a cross between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Reading Rainbow with a dash of Mythbusters thrown in. Mulaney also cites Sesame Street and Really Rosie, a 1980 musical by Maurice Sendak and Carole King, as influences on this special.
Mulaney has been watching old episodes of those shows, especially Sesame Street, “in thrall to their elastic approach to narrative,” writes Esquire. “It’s modular, fast-paced. Bizarrely paced,” says Mulaney. “They’ll cut to a kid who blows up a balloon, draws a smiley face on it, and pops it. Like, ‘Great, love it, moving on!’” He also apparently made so many Joan Didion references in this children’s show that they had to cut out at least one.
I have no idea how all of this is exactly going to translate to Mulaney’s Netflix special but I cannot wait to find out.
(via Esquire, image: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for NRDC)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
