spent the entirety of his teens and the early
part of his twenties as an addict, spiraling out
of control. He began drinking at thirteen—ini-
tially, he says, to deal with the awkwardness of
adolescence, and then to excess, because “alco-
hol is addictive,” he says, and he didn’t want to
stop. “I drank for attention,” he tells me. “I was
really outgoing, and then at twelve, I wasn’t. I
didn’t know how to act. And then I was drink-
ing, and I was hilarious again.” Drugs soon fol-
lowed. “I never liked smoking pot. Then I tried
cocaine, and I loved it. I wasn’t a good athlete,
so maybe it was some young male thing of This
is the physical feat I can do. Three Vicodin and a
tequila and I’m still standing. Who’s the athlete
now?” When Mulaney was a teenager, his par-
ents sent him to a psychiatrist, who told him
that he was one part nice kid, one part “goril-
la that wants to kill the other half.”
Throughout high school and college, Mu-laney kept up his grades while routinely black-
ing out and doing embarrassing things that
friends filled him in on later—going dead-
eyed and slapping drinks out of people’s hands,
downing a bottle of perfume once. He can pin-
point the day in August 2005 that he finally
stopped doing coke, and the day the following
month that he gave up alcohol. He was twen-
ty-three. “I went on a bender that weekend
that was just, like, fading in and out of a mov-
ie,” he says. “It was just crazy. A weekend that
was... there were...” He grimaces. “I’m nev-
er going to tell you. That’s mine. I didn’t kill
anyone or assault anyone. But yeah, I was like,
You’re fucking out of control. And I thought to
myself, I don’t like this guy anymore. I’m not
rooting for him.” He didn’t use a recovery pro-
gram—he was able to flip a switch, he says—
and he’s been sober ever since.
He spent his childhood in Chicago, raised
Catholic by two lawyer parents along with
his three siblings, Carolyn, Chip, and Claire.
(Claire, his younger sister, also wrote for SNL.)
When Mulaney was four, tragedy befell the
family: His mother, Ellen, gave birth to a third
son, Peter, who, as Mulaney puts it now, “nev-
er came home from the hospital.” He says, “I
didn’t feel like we were growing up in a house
where something had been shattered, if that
makes sense. We’d go to his cemetery every
year. It was not, like, ‘You don’t mention that.’
But there was a tightness in the air.”
Mulaney was a self-described weird kid
with a mile-wide theatrical streak. “We were
a good, uptight family, in a fifties way,” he re-
calls. “There was a lot of fun and love. But a
strictness. My parents were a tight unit, like
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen,” of Steely
Dan. “You couldn’t play one off the other. I
said something once, like, ‘Mom sucks!’ And
my dad said”—Mulaney’s voice hits a stento-
rian register—“ ‘That’s my wife.’ And I went
to a very strict Jesuit high school, so there was
always this, like, ‘Young man, your tie is not
straightened.’ ” He found that strictness as-
phyxiating. Mulaney’s father, a corporate at-
torney also named Chip, plays a prominent
role in his son’s jokes, appearing as a steely
enigma under whose weight the young Mu-
laney squirmed and rebelled. “I remember
once I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he turned to me and
said, ‘The word is yes,’” Mulaney tells me.
He attended Georgetown University, his
parents’ alma mater, where he joined an
improv group that included fellow comedians
Mike Birbiglia, Jacqueline Novak, and Nick
Kroll. After graduating, Mulaney went out
on tour as an MC and opener for Birbiglia.
Later, he landed a Comedy Central job that
eventually led to a writing gig on DemetriJacket and shirt
by Michael Kors
Collection.P. 73