There are three celebrities I feel confident that, in an approval poll of Millennials from around 2019, would poll at over 90%: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and John Mulaney.

Or at least he would have.

A former writer for Saturday Night Live, Mulaney broke out in his own right as a stand-up comedian thanks to a string of three wildly successful Netflix specials that quickly became some of the most quoted pieces of media in dorm rooms and Facebook groups across the country. Mulaney continued his Netflix hot streak with sketch one-offs like Oh, Hello on Broadway and John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, as well as a starring voice role alongside his longtime friend Nick Kroll in the animated series Big Mouth, ventures that only embedded himself within my generations’ collective comedic conscious even further. A clean cut Georgetown grad who strutted around stage in tailored suits, Mulaney engaged with familiar stand-up topics like marriage and bad airline service but avoided the hacky, familiar beats of an average club comedian in favor of a more internet and pop culture influenced lens. He was the perfect comedic middleground: neither edgeless nor inaccessible, safe enough to watch with your parents but also weird enough that they might not fully understand him, cool enough to regularly appear on comedy nerd favorites like Portlandia and Documentary Now! but mainstream enough to have his quotes and screenshots cycle constantly through social media. As a substitute teacher, I’ve been in at least one classroom where a screenshot of Mulaney’s bit about being an English major is taped to the wall.

Of course, Mulaney’s nice guy image wouldn’t last. Despite his outwardly square appearance, Mulaney would often joke about his past alcohol and drug abuse, which he relapsed into sometime in 2020 before checking himself into rehab in September of that year. After leaving rehab, Mulaney would relapse again before re-admitting himself that December. When he eventually re-emerged in 2021, he filed for divorce from his wife Annamarie Tendler, which seemed to upset and confuse some fans whose primary experience with the two’s relationship came via Mulaney’s teasing but loving bits about their relationship (“My wife is a bitch and I like her so much,” he famously said in Kid Gorgeous at Radio City). Then things took a turn for the scandalous when it was reported that Mulaney began dating actress Olivia Munn, and that they were expecting a child, something Mulaney had also famously joked he and Tendler were not interested in.

Many of his fans took it upon themselves to be offended on Tendler’s behalf, interpreting Mulaney’s procreation with Munn as another form of rejection of his now ex-wife. This reaction kicked off an internet engulfing discourse about the nature of “parasocial relationships” and what celebrities do (and do not) owe their fans in terms of moral purity. Most people who were writing about this issue, and by extension, thinking the most about it, recognized the extreme responses to Mulaney’s life changes as the overreactions that they were but that doesn’t mean that those extreme reactions didn’t exist, and that they didn’t have career implications. Mulaney had been so successful (purposefully or not) in presenting himself as someone safe and uncontroversial that the moment he went through some public struggles, it felt like a betrayal to some fans. As Gawker’s Olivia Craighead put it, “Mulaney fans saw the ordeal as if their parents were getting divorced, but also as if they too were getting divorced.”

Of course, all of this backstory gave the release of John Mulaney: Baby J, the comedian’s first stand-up special since 2018, a kind of strange suspense. How would this once very well-liked person address that, all of a sudden, there was a very vocal pocket of the population who felt betrayed by him?

Mulaney doesn’t address this immediately. Instead, he begins with a very dark bit about the attention heaped upon schoolchildren when one of their grandparents dies, and how appealing that seemed to him as a kid. How he wished one of his grandparents would die just so he could get some of the elementary school spotlight (or at least a spot on the class’ coveted bean bag chair). It’s a grim, morbid joke, but a telling one. We know what’s going to happen – we know he’s going to have to air his dirty laundry in public. But the way he begins his special gives us permission not to feel too sorry for him – after all, he seems to be saying, this kind of attention is the kind of thing he craved as a kid, and whether that attention is positive or negative may be immaterial.

Of course, Mulaney disguises that insight by insisting it was just a deflection. “I’ve had a weird few years, you’ve had a weird few years,” he says to a crowd that, only two years earlier, was still sheltering in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, before launching into a Broadway-style overture that he insists he didn’t want to start the show off with. 

“We all went to rehab and we all got divorced and now are reputation is different” he sings. “All the kids like Bo Burnham more because he’s currently less problematic, likeability is jail.”

Somewhat to my disappointment, this is more or less the only time Mulaney references the over the top public reactions to his addiction and divorce throughout the special. I’m sure, in the big picture, this is probably the healthiest approach for him to take. “What are you gonna do, cancel John Mulaney?” he asks the hypothetical outraged Twitter user. “I’ll kill him. I almost did.” But what Baby J lacks in social media critique it makes up for with juicy stories about Mulaney’s drug use, both the bizarre episodes it inspired and the awkward nature of being a pretty (but not very) famous person in a group rehab facility. I know that I should feel bad about being entertained by these tales from the darkest moments of Mulaney’s life, but I can’t help it. I’m a journalist, which means I’m also a gossip at heart, and gossiping is much more ethical when someone is doing it about themselves. And as the opening bit implies, there’s clearly something he enjoys about the spectacle it generates and the attention it directs towards him.

The stories Mulaney shares about this period in his life – about his intervention (“It was a star studded intervention,” he says about his concerned collection of friends, which include Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen, Nick Kroll and Natasha Lyonne), his cocaine addled behavior (which includes traveling to 30 Rock for the sole purpose of getting a haircut at Saturday Night Live’s hair department), and the desperate, counterintuitive lengths he would go to fund his drug habit (such as purchasing a $12,000 Rolex and immediately pawning it off for half the price), make up the bulk of Mulaney’s set, and provide it with its best moments too. Mulaney is most compelling when he’s traveling from point A to point B, taking rest stops to fully flesh out a character (such as a shady doctor who wrote him prescriptions for klonopin in exchange for seeing him shirtless) or imitate his much less lucid self (as he does pretty much throughout the special). Occasionally, he wanders too far afield – an extended act-out of an imagined phone call with Al Pacino goes on too long and features a substandard impression – but he manages to find the perfect balance between self-effacement and pure silliness throughout the set, letting us feel like we’re getting a peek behind the curtain, but not so much so that we begin to feel like voyeurs.

But perhaps the most impressive aspect of Baby J is the way it recontextualizes Mulaney’s past work. “I have kind of a different vibe now,” he says to a fifth-grader in the crowd before imitating the hyperactive pitter-patter of his prior specials through gibberish. “I wonder what caused that,” he asks, implying his trademark style was at least a little narcotics induced. While Mulaney has always referenced his past drug and alcohol abuse in his older specials, it was always as a punchline or a way to get to a punchline. He doesn’t treat it with the weight one might expect from a recovering addict but the details he does reveal about his substance abuse – that he had his first drink at the age of six, that by 13 he was getting drunk every weekend, that by 14 he was already into drugs – cast a pall over the stories he told in past specials. The prostate examine story from New in Town is probably remembered by most people as a story about a doctor’s visit gone wrong, but viewed again through the lens of Baby J, the Xanax that Mulaney was trying to obtain at the beginning the of the bit feels like foreshadowing of his future predicament rather than a mere detail. Even the Salt and Pepper Diner bit from his very first album takes on a darker tone when you realize that the friend who designed the prank is also one of the friends he discusses discovering drugs with in Baby J, and it makes you wonder what role, if any, that friend plays in Mulaney’s life now.

Mulaney ends the special by reading excerpts from a Q and A he did with GQ in December of 2020 that he claims he doesn’t remember giving because he was so strung out at the time. Like most of the material in Baby J, it serves a dual purpose. Hearing him repeat his responses in a manic, exaggerated way is funny, but it also poses a question to the audience (and, presumably, GQ editor Frazier Tharpe, who reflected on the piece after Baby J came out): did you really not see this coming? Did you really think this guy who got up and breathlessly joked about his past drinking problem might not run into some struggles in the future? Why did you choose to seize on the parts of his material that reflected well on him, and not the stuff that made him sound bad? You were surprised and appalled when the former alcoholic, admitted people pleaser, and performer did drugs? 

Of course, all of these questions are implied, and I think, for the time being at least, Mulaney prefers it that way. For as large a role as both traditional and social media played in the tabloidization of his life, it’s clear that at this juncture he views his addiction and recovery story as a story about him, not society at large. After he finishes telling the story about the pawned off watch, he tells the audience “As you process and digest how obnoxious, wasteful, and that story, just remember, that’s one I’m willing to tell you.” I look forward, in the coming years, to hearing the stories that Mulaney isn’t willing to tell us now, and to him digging in a little bit more at his critics as well. But for the time being, it’s just good to have him back.