a huge fan!” she tells Mulaney. The maître d’
looks at her, then at the clean-cut, unassum-
ing guy with the enormous backpack whom
she’s praising. “We have a table for you,” he
announces.
Mulaney places a spartan order: French-
onion soup, tap water, bread. “Food is a nui-
sance,” he says, eating with astonishing slow-
ness—maybe one slurp per minute—almost
to illustrate the point. After this he’s due at a
writing session to tinker with the new show’s
script. In one sketch, he tells me, “A kid does
a book report on A Year of Magical Think-
ing, by Joan Didion, thinking it was a magic
book: ‘Unlike 1001 Marvelous Magic Tricks to
Amaze Your Friends, this is a gripping mem-
oir of grief from one of the greatest writers of
her generation!’ ” Mulaney pauses. “Some-
one said to me, ‘You know you mention Joan
Didion three times in this special, right?’ ”
He shakes his head. “We probably have to
cut one of those.”
In the world of stand-up, where nothing’s
valorized quite like edginess, Mulaney rel-
ishes his squareness to an almost defiant de-
gree. The better part of a decade ago, when
he was still honing his style in the comedy
clubs, Mulaney saw a sea of dudes on stages
and in crowds dressed the same way he was,
in flannel shirts and jeans. So he began wear-
ing tailored suits onstage and inflecting his
delivery with the retro tones and cadences
of a fifties TV announcer absolutely crushing
an Ovaltine ad. He ignored the trend toward
confessional, morally knotty, often filthy hu-
mor—pioneered by Richard Pryor, repopu-
larized by Louis C. K.—and dug instead in-
to a finely observed silliness that he aimed
at all manner of unlikely subjects: the stric-
tures of his upper-middle-class upbringing,
the oedipal weirdness of Back to the Future,
the sublime preposterousness of Ice-T’s di-
alogue on Law & Order: SVU. Mulaney fills
his jokes with evocative details and deft turns
of phrase. He cares deeply about what you
might call joke math, tweaking and deleting
to get phrasings just right. “It’s not ‘I was so
tired that blah blah blah,’ ” he says. “You want
‘I collapsed.’ ” What’s consistent throughout
is his disregard for what’s popular. “I’ve nev-
er been relevant,” Mulaney says, “so I’m not
worried about feeling irrelevant.”
Like Jerry Seinfeld, one of his biggest influ-
ences, Mulaney is obsessed with finding the
humor in the quotidian and the banal. He’s
never funnier, as far as he’s concerned, than
when he gets “exasperated about things you
shouldn’t get that upset about.” Trying out
new bits, he knows he’s onto something when
it feels like “having a crush. When you can’t
stop thinking about, like, ‘Why do they do
that on House Hunters?’ and your take on it
is as strong as something written by Robespi-
erre.” (It takes a unique mind to draw a line be-
tween HGTV and the French Revolution.) At
one point, out of nowhere, he brings up an ob-
scure poster, depicting a blond woman hold-
ing a gyro, that he’s seen hanging for years in
restaurants across New York—a sight most
of us might clock once, if at all, and then nev-
er give a second thought. “I can think about
that poster for so much longer than I can think
about sex and politics,” Mulaney says.
He is deeply uninterested in political mate-
rial. At a moment when politics feels impos-
sible to ignore, the furthest into Washington
he’s ventured is an extended Kid Gorgeous run
in which he likens the president—whom he
doesn’t name—to a horse set loose in a hos-
pital. (“It’s never happened before; no one
knows what the horse is going to do next, least
of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospi-
tal before; he’s as confused as you are.”) Mu-
laney has donated extravagantly to liberal and
Left politicians—many thousands of dollars,
including at least $1,250 to Bernie Sanders
during the 2016 primaries—but keeps such
concerns out of his act. “I have a problem with
‘Comedians are really brave and we need them
now more than ever,’ ” he tells me. “It’s like,
we’re not congressmen. We’re court jesters.”
The tricky thing for Mulaney, as a joke pur-
ist, is how to come off in his comedy as appeal-
ingly out of time without coming off as boor-
ishly out of step or blithely out of touch. His
early sets included miscalculations on this
score—jokes about the confusing (to him)P. 70
“PETE INVITES ME OVER
WHILE HE GETS A
TATTOO.
LIKE, ‘YO, I’M GETTING TATTEDAT MY HOUSE.
YOU WANT TO COME
OVER AND WATCHBACK TO
SCHOOL?’”