Last week, John Mulaney hosted his weekly talk show blindfolded, because, well, why not?
Covering his eyes enabled him to make a joke about what he has in common with the pope: “We’re both from Chicago and we both willfully blind ourselves to the absurdities of our job.”
Yet the stunt had less to do with opportunities for punchlines than with short-circuiting the rhythms of the talk show. Putting a host in such a predicament scrambles the script. Mulaney occasionally wandered away from the camera, leaving us, his viewers, abandoned and slightly worried for him. What’s remarkable is that if you were to rank the most bizarre aspects of that hour of “Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney” (every Wednesday on Netflix), blindfolding the host might not make the Top 10.
Consider the competition: Mulaney’s sidekick, Richard Kind, told a story about taking a nap on a toilet during a date. An actor playing Yakub, a bulbous-headed ancient scientist who the Nation of Islam believes invented white people, came onstage to sing a show tune. That was followed by an actress who did an impression of Jean Smart — that is, if she weren’t smart. (The character’s name was, naturally, Jean Dumb.) Steve Guttenberg appeared and underneath his name onscreen, it read: “Defund the Police Academy.” Then there was the subplot of a daredevil robot named Saymo who broke up with his girlfriend in front of a crowd on a studio lot, then tried to roll off a ramp and fly over a car. He failed and crashed to bits.
With a lab-experiment aesthetic, “Everybody’s Live” is the most ambitious, most anything-goes television talk show in many years. Whether it works is more of an evolving question.
The season began with a firm idea of what was wrong with other talk shows: actors promoting projects, overly planned chat, generic topicality, formulaic structure. Critics like me have long complained about these elements, and Mulaney, bless him, just did away with them. But figuring out the show you want to do is harder than knowing the one you don’t.
“Everybody’s Live” is less original than it appears (even the blindfold had been done before). Trying to escape topicality, Pete Holmes’s short-lived talk show organized monologues around not the news but broad subjects like marriage or family. Mulaney did something similar, centering every episode on quirkier themes like “Can major surgery be fun?”
Nearly everything has been done before, of course, but Mulaney tends to steal from the best. (Like “Late Night With David Letterman,” he did a Christmas special far from the holiday season.)
Mulaney’s opening monologues have been a consistent highlight, mixing behind-the-scenes stories, like a failed attempt to book Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, with polished stand-up bits, like an irreverent case against the F.B.I. But some of his fever-dream stunts (recasting “Seinfeld” with members of Phish) are easier to admire than laugh at. The phone calls from viewers he fields in a recurring segment have often been awkward. And the panel chat can be aimless. How did they pull off a boring chat with Conan O’Brien, Tina Fey and Mulaney?
That’s the risk you take when you do away with more prepared conversation. Mulaney asked Fey if she collected anything, learned she didn’t and hit a dead end. “Everybody’s Live” is still always interesting because of its taste and ambition and mad chutzpah. But a guilty thought occurred to me watching the first few episodes: What if someone went to great lengths to make exactly the kind of talk show that I want to see — and I didn’t like it? Is that on me?
Truly adventurous talk shows take time to find their voice. And if you gave up on this program early on, you’ve missed out, because “Everybody’s Live” has evolved, gotten tighter, funnier, more meta. Mulaney has downplayed the viewer calls (which could be cut altogether without much loss). And he has done more work strategizing for interviews, like one in which he and Andy Samberg read fan-fiction written about them online.
The bookings have become savvier, mixing relaxed stars with a chaos agent like the comic Robby Hoffman, who has the critical quality of appearing more at ease the more uncomfortable everyone else becomes.
In an episode spoofing fictionalized movies inspired by real people, Mulaney said everyone on the show was based on a real person. When an elderly man in the audience loudly complained that Samberg was playing him (“I’d never sit like that!”), the actor responded: “He’s just mad that as part of my research, I slept with his wife multiple times.”
Mulaney has also cultivated his own Lonely Island-like secret weapons, with hilarious videos by the writers Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh that skewer pandering anti-Trump political comedy and obsessive behind-the-scenes documentaries with pitch-perfect precision.
In late-night talk-show writers rooms, the true comedy purists have long pleaded for evergreen rather than topical jokes, but riffing off the news pays off. “Everybody’s Live” has smartly embraced it more, parodying the “60 Minutes” interview with Bill Belichick by having a woman interrupt Kind throughout one episode, creating a sidekick to the sidekick.
The show’s core identity is that it takes big comedic swings that might go over people’s heads, greenlighting ideas that other mainstream shows would reject. But as the season has progressed, the volume of jokes has increased. What started as loose and rambling now feels as punchy as a “30 Rock” episode.
Recently there’s been considerable anxiety over the future of the late-night talk show in the streaming era. Everyone from Donald Trump to Jimmy Kimmel has said it is dying. I am more of an optimist, but there’s so much disruption in entertainment right now that anyone would be foolish to confidently predict that in five years, late night will look like it does now.
But we tend to focus too much on these business questions when discussing the health of this venerable art form. And this breeds caution. It’s worth remembering that the winner of the late-night war during the height of the genre’s popularity was Jay Leno, a solid joke-merchant who has faded into obscurity. David Letterman lost, but that had little impact on his beloved reputation.
No artistic genre deserves to be around forever, but late-night talk shows should stay alive if they can continue to feature risk-taking artists doing funny work. Sometimes, that will mean safe jokes about the news, but the entertainment landscape is far more crowded than when the only laughs to be found on television around midnight were on “The Tonight Show.” Now there’s more of a premium on novelty and the unexpected.
There is a rich tradition of that kind of late-night work going back to Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen. Mulaney is making a high-profile case for that legacy, with the help of some of the biggest stars in popular culture. Whether their efforts will reach a big enough audience to get renewed is an open question. But an upcoming stunt has commercial promise.
About a month ago, Mulaney announced that on the final episode this season (May 28), he would fight three 14-year-old boys. Not since Hunter S. Thompson wrote about getting beaten up by a bunch of bikers to close out his book “Hell’s Angels” has an artist promised a more pugilistic finale.
Is this whole thing a trick to get your attention? If so, it’s a good one, because I have spent a fair amount of time considering ways that the host could possibly avoid taking a beating. It’s not easy to dream up a winning strategy for a delicate-looking 42-year-old comic that doesn’t include weapons or rigging the rules.
Mulaney appears confident about his chances. Of course, he always does. He takes part in all these stupendously stupid and absurd things, not with an ironic wink like Letterman or a sense of childlike silliness like O’Brien, but with an alien sureness, as if he were born to tell jokes blindfolded and get pummeled by teenagers for our entertainment.
Until recently, he was the wholesome, very nice young man of stand-up comedy. Then divorce and rehab shifted his image, and his special about it catapulted him to a new position: the most acclaimed stand-up of the moment. That he is now spending his cultural capital on this weirdo show is something that deserves attention, credit and, I hope, another season.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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