Martin’s cerebral-absurdist series, Import-
ant Things. In 2008, SNL hired Mulaney
as a writer, a job he loved—“writing for
Fred Armisen is like writing a song for Jimi
Hendrix.” He left in 2012 and landed an ir-
resistible deal to write, produce, and star on
his own sitcom.
Back then, the dominant style for smart
TV comedy was the handheld, laugh-track-
free, fifty-jokes-a-minute, single-camera for-
mat exemplified by The Office and 30 Rock.
Mulaney wanted no part of that. He opted
instead for a multicamera sitcom indebted
to I Love Lucy and Seinfeld. When Mulaney,
as it was called, debuted on Fox in the fall of
2014, the ratings were bad, the reviews abys-
mal. The network killed it after one truncated
season. When I suggest to Mulaney that the
show “struggled” for survival, he grins and re-
jects the euphemism. “We didn’t ‘struggle,’ ”
he replies. “We were a clay pigeon shot out of
the sky immediately.”
He still has a fondness for Mulaney, he says,
while conceding he hasn’t watched it since he
was in the editing room. (“I have reread some
scripts.”) In a postmortem on the show’s fail-
ure, he praises the jokes but faults its norm-
ie-sitcom “wrapping paper,” which gave it a
generic feel. “I lost the thread; I didn’t aim it
right,” he says in between nibbles of an every-
thing bagel. “It didn’t welcome in the people
that knew who I was, and everyone else didn’t
know who I was.” Instead of wallowing, he flung
himself back out onto the road mere days after
the cancellation—reorienting himself, city af-
ter city, by concentrating on the thing he did
best: getting a room of strangers to laugh. The
resulting special was called The Comeback Kid.
“I’m an entertainer, not an artist,” he says.
“I do it for audiences. I do it for people to con-
sume. There’s a Rilke thing about how a true
poet would write every day in a jail cell, poems
no one would ever see. I’m not in tune with
that. I want people to have a good time.” As a
comedian, you become profoundly dependent
on the laughter of strangers, not only for your
livelihood but for your sense of identity. On the
surface, telling jokes for a crowd resembles a
good-natured powwow for like-minded peo-
ple, yet there’s something irreducibly antag-
onistic about it, too, with the balance of pow-
er whipping back and forth between the guy
onstage and the people sitting in judgment of
him. “The audience is both looking up to you,”
Mulaney says, “and they are Mount Olympus.”
His foray into network sitcoms did teach him
an important lesson. “There’s a benefit to fail-
ure,” he’s said. “It gives you an existential ‘Who
cares?’ ” Or as he expresses it now, “Sometimes
you need to say, ‘Fuck the audience.’ ”
“Are you still working on that?” our waitress
asks. There’s a fat mound of golden-pink lox in
front of Mulaney; he sends it to the compost
bin along with the bagel and asks for the check.
He’s got a meeting in TriBeCa, so I walk him
there. When we arrive, we notice an intercom
next to the door, but instead of buttons be-
side names there’s a keypad for dialing ten-
ants. Though Mulaney’s on time, he doesn’t
know the number he’s supposed to punch in.
That means he’s going to be late, which he
doesn’t like at all. He emits a sound of pure
anxiousness: “Uhhh.. .” Maybe the number
is in his email? He takes out his phone, digs
around. I leave him there as he shouts a dis-
tracted goodbye in my direction and swipes
at his screen—exasperated about something
he shouldn’t get that upset about.Jacket and
shirt
by Berluti;
jeans by
Rag & Bone.“I’M AN ENTERTAINER,
NOT AN ARTIST.
I DO IT FOR
AUDIENCES.
I DO IT FOR
PEOPLE
TO CONSUME.”
P. 74