Anyone who has John Mulaney pegged as America’s most wholesome comedian is only partially correct. Yes, the thirty-seven-year-old is a mild-mannered, Midwestern Irish Catholic who went to Georgetown and nearly always performs in a tailored three-piece suit. He has an old-timey sensibility—he avoids the raunch of many of his peers—and moves about the stage with a Broadway actor’s flair. And yet there’s a black-sheep quality to him that’s often ignored. He started drinking at the age of thirteen, and by twenty-three he was already in recovery from drugs and alcohol. As the emotional child in his family, he was imbued with a streak of petulant darkness, which runs subtly through all of his work. In one joke from his 2009 standup album, “Top Part,” he imagines himself as a drunk eight-year-old, being grilled by his father about what he’d done that day. “What did you color?” his dad asks. “Some biiiiig f*ckin’ brontosaurus,” he imagines himself replying, slurring his words.
This interplay between the squeaky-clean and the morose sets the tone for Mulaney’s new children’s variety show, “John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch,” which is on Netflix, and which marks a departure from the comic’s run of award-winning standup specials and appearances on “Saturday Night Live,” where he also worked as a writer. Not quite a children’s show for adults and not quite an adult show for children, “The Sack Lunch Bunch”—which Mulaney wrote with his former “Saturday Night Live” colleague Marika Sawyer and the composer Eli Bolin—portrays Mulaney as the slightly grumpy host of a “Sesame Street”–like show, guiding children through an array of songs and scenarios. (It also has a guest list that includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Richard Kind, and David Byrne.) Mulaney, who is open about not wanting to have children, stands at a skeptical remove from his young co-stars, curious about them but also plainly aware of just how alien they can be.
As a performer, Mulaney has a pinballing adrenaline, as if he’s just downed a shot of espresso. In person, he’s calm and thoughtful, and often speaks elliptically. Recently, we met for breakfast at , in New York, to talk about the new show, his niche in today’s comedy landscape, and more. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
You took another reporter here during the making of “The Sack Lunch Bunch,” and he noted in the piece that you didn’t eat anything.
Well, that was during a two-week period when I was very stressed out.
Why were you stressed out?
I don’t mean to make it sound like Abstract Expressionism, or like this was some crisis of genius. But I was very bad at articulating what I wanted “The Sack Lunch Bunch” to be—and still am, in terms of a log line. We had an hour and forty minutes of material, and I just kept thinking, We’re not going to know until day one of shooting what works and what doesn’t. At the same time, we had a budget and a schedule. I hadn’t ever done anything where I was, like, I can’t describe this, but I can picture it. Normally, most things I’ve done have been pretty straightforward. It was also July in New York, and I felt kind of insane doing it.
You’ve talked about not wanting children. Where did the idea for a children’s variety show come from? And did you use your nieces and nephews, or any other children in your life, as a focus group for the project?
In a way, but not really. At the time I was thinking about doing this project, all of my nieces and nephews were under five. I’d had minimal conversations with them. It was more that, in doing standup, I’d thought a lot about being a teen-ager, and, looking back on it, that teen-ager wasn’t me. That was a different person. I think that what I was as a teen was far different from what I am now.
How so?
As a teen-ager, I was just incredibly emotional. I didn’t realize that if I held it together just ten per cent more my life would be a lot easier. I had a lot of meltdowns, telling people how much I liked them and falling into despair. I always thought you were supposed to tell a girl how much you liked them. In the movies, that was the only thing that worked—really spelling it out. And I started to feel like I was more myself when I was nine, ten, eleven than I was between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three.
Photograph by David Brandon Geeting for The New Yorker
I had an idea, which was a sketch show, with kids, that wasn’t Nickelodeon but wasn’t trying to be adult. The novelty was not going to be kids saying adult things. That was as articulate as I could be about it last March, when we started. I started talking to Marika about it, and when we went and looked at [Marlo Thomas’s] “Free to Be. . .You and Me” and “Sesame Street,” they struck us as really funny. They actually used kids far less than we remembered. “Free to Be. . .You and Me” features a lot of adults. There are kids in it, but it’s a lot of adults singing. Roosevelt Grier and Harry Belafonte have a song about how moms and dads can be doctors. It’s a lot of parents defending themselves. We thought, That’s what it would look and sound like. I think [Marika] really gave it context.
You say in the special that you’d watched a bunch of modern-day children’s television and didn’t like it. But I’m trying to think of what modern-day kids’ television is, and I can only think of YouTube.
They do watch YouTube like crazy. At no point did any of the kids say, “I watch ‘Paw Patrol’ or ‘Fancy Nancy,’” or any of those Disney Channel shows. It was all, like, “I watch YouTube.” And ads for anything come up on YouTube. A bunch of them had seen the trailer for “Us” and were freaked out. One of the girls had seen the movie in full. They were telling me about things like Slender Man and Momo.
Many of the kids have other acting gigs or big social-media presences. On a scale of naïve to savvy, how would you characterize the cast?
They seemed to me to be show-biz kids, the way me and my siblings and my friends were. They wanted to be putting on a show, but they were not Hollywood. None were too stage-managed, and none were experienced in a way that they ever held over anyone else’s head. It’s an eclectic show, where someone might have more screen time than others, and I was very concerned that that would present problems. But they had a much better compass for how to treat people than I thought me and my contemporaries had. It made me realize that the thing Marika, Rhys [Thomas, the show’s director], and I had to base this on was “Saturday Night Live.” I think kids would be much better at “Saturday Night Live” than adults are.
Someone should pitch that to Lorne Michaels.
We actually pitched that to Lorne back in the day. We wanted to get a kid in a sketch. Marika always had an idea for “Lil’ Update,” with little kids in it. But the 11:30 P.M. time wouldn’t have worked, because of child-labor laws.
How did you pitch such an abstract idea to your guest stars, like Jake Gyllenhaal and David Byrne?
Jake was sent the demo without the preamble explaining the concept. He responded to the material! When I got on the phone with him, the fact that he was already interested in it as a character was really fun.
With Byrne, I explained it as kind of like an examination of fear and anxieties, with sketches and songs. And he wrote back, “When I was a kid I was afraid of volcanoes. I don’t know why. I grew up in Baltimore.” He came over to my apartment, and Marika and Eli and I were sitting around my kitchen table. I cleaned before he came over. I didn’t know what to do. And then he came in, and he was so nice, and he had his bike helmet. I realized that we were just going to have to play the demo in front of them. He was, like, “O.K., great. What date?” And he took out a day planner. I think, when stuff goes in the day planner, he does it.
