John Mulaney: Addiction is Actually Very Funny

Dramatizations of addiction tend to be annoyingly sentimental and maudlin. John Mulaney's ingenious new comedy special found a way to make addiction funnny.

As readers of this newsletter well know, I once wrestled, stuggled, battled, whatever, with addiction. I went to rehab, both inpatient and outpatient, then lived in multiple sober living situations of various restrictions and curfews and meetings and chores and group dinner times—two in St. Paul, Minnesota, and one in Chicago as I finished undergrad at DePaul University in Lincoln Park—and after all that, I eventually arrived at living a pretty OK life. I’m getting married, I write for popular and cool magazines, I have a Substack!

My bout of detoxes and treatments and sober houses spanned a solid chunk of my early twenties. Much of that took place a decade ago. I turn 34 at the end of May. Around this time of year I tend to look up at life’s rearview mirror, seeing all the objects of my history fading into the distance, BigLife Events becoming tiny fuzzy blips. I look behind me at everything that happened, and sometimes, I can’t help it, but I laugh.

So does John Mulaney, the stand-up comedian also experienced series of Big Life Events (in no particular order) over the last two years:

1. Cheated on his wife

2. Got divorced

3. Was the subject of a “star-studded” intervention

4. The outcome of said intervention was a stint in rehab for cocaine, Adderall, Xanax, Klonopin, and Percocet (Mulaney’s preferred drug cocktail he inexplicably named: “The Providence Special”)

5. After rehab, Mulaney moved into a sober living type situation

6. Then he moved to Los Angeles, into Jimmy Kimmel’s guest house, which I imagine to be a classic poolhouse, with French double-doors opening on to a big bright blue pool surrounded by fake, perfectly trimmed, deep-green grass. Mulaney said the guest house had a cafe-quality espresso machine and that every morning he woke up to a basket of fresh bagels. (Already, a sign that Mulaney’s addiction, intervention, and recovery, aren’t quite, let’s say, normal)

7. After getting divorced, Mulaney and the actress Olivia Munn gave birth to a son named Malcolm (…Munn? …Mulaney?). Malcolm is now older than one.

8. Finally, the Big Life Event that convinced me to write about Mulaney: This week he ingeniously mined numbers 1-7 into nuggets of comedy gold for his hourlong Netflix special called, “Baby J.”

Addiction, especially lately, hasn’t’ felt very funny. With all the awful morbidity and mortality, the girm statistics, injustices, incompetence, the endless well of pain and loss, so much of which is preventable but is just not being prevented, only adding to the pain and fury. But John Mulaney’s hourlong performance—and he is an ace performer, which is important to emphasize for reasons I’ll get into later—has managed to be comical and original while also crystalizing something true about the experience of addiction. Yes, addiction is the purest form of pain that a human can create for themselves. But that we can and do create this level of pain is also absurd and hilarious. Mulaney’s special plays with the internal logic of addiction, which is only logical to the person who is buckled and strapped into the addiction. On some level, I have to imagine that this comedy special was therapeutic for Mulaney. Suprisingly, it was for me.

It was also more than that. In a new way, he made addiction funny. Even if his cocaine fueled antics aren’t exactly “relatable” because of his celebrity, his performance presents the twisted logic of addiction to a broad audience. I think helping people understand a really misunderstood condition is a useful exercise.

I’ve also long griped about the way addiction gets dramatized. From reality TV to Hollywood, the way addiction is depicted tends to obscure the real nature of the beast. I wrote about this twice, once in The Nation and again in The New York Times Magazine. The way addiction is presented to audiences in fiction, in dramas, and on TV feels cheesy, melodramatic, maudlin, eye-rollingly sentimental. It’s often trite and full of cliche, inducing the audience to respond like, “Sheesh! Glad I’m not that bad!” Or to look upon “the addict” is some alien species that has nothing in common with the rest of humanity. Mulaney accomplished something different in his new special. He told a non shitty story of addiction to a big audience, and made people laugh.

“My Least Favorite Kind of Intervention” — Mine

Mulaney sets the stage. It’s the night of his intervention on December 18, 2020. A time when he says he was, “loose in New York City, not doing well—feral.” He was invited to a friend’s house for “dinner” at 7:00 p.m., unaware of what was in store for him. Zipping around town on cocaine, Mulaney showed up to this dinner two hours late because he had to run “two very important errands.”

The first errand was going to his drug dealers house. He had to pay him in cash because that week he had max’d out his Venmo account. “Did you know you could max out your Venmo account?” He asks. “By the way, while I have you all here, allow me to say something about Venmo on behalf of the drug addict community: Venmo is for drug deals. That’s what it was for. None of us in the drug world have any clue what all of you civillians are doing on our app with your, public fuckin’ transactions?”

The second errand he ran that night, which he thinks is very amusing, is that he got a haircut. “Dinner was scheduled for 7 p.m. so I went to get a haircut at 7 p.m.,” he says, laughing at himself. “And I truly believed I could make both work.”

Here, Mulaney is laying the first bricks. The theme of his special is also a theme of w hat it means to be addicted. More than once, he tells a story where he is trying to “bend logic.” To use his own will to break the laws of the universe, only to have those laws snap back and slap him in the face. Addiction, at its core, is ambivalence. It is to be split. It is to be caught between contradictory and opposing ideas, stances, beliefs, and desires—all at once. People tend to walk through the world thinking of themselves as a united whole. Each one of us has a self, and yes, that self is constituted of many different parts. But when the gears are working and the mind is properly oiled and lubricated, all these parts work more or less in unison—at least creating the illusion of unity—and all this amounts to something like the experience of our self as a comprehensible, unified person.

The experience of addiction is not that. Instead, we are all tangled up. These many parts of our self just don’t add up. We are not of two minds. We are of too many minds. Minds that are in irreconcilable contradiction. They are at war. They want fundamentally different things. And in addiction, one side keeps on winning the battle of volition and agency against the other.

So Mulaney arrives at this “dinner” two hours late: “Cocaine skinny with a new haircut.” It was peak Covid, and everyone at the intervention had been under heavy quarantine. “Everyone else looked like shit,” he said. They looked like “Jerry Garcia.” He says he was the best looking person at his own intervention, “by a mile.”

Mulaney knew right away that this dinner was not an actual dinner. “When I got there, it was a trick!” An intervention, he says, at its core, is a prank. It’s rooted in deception. And to this day, he’s still kinda mad about how it all went down. That sentiment feels very real and very true. Interventions are designed to blindside the person. To catch them off gaurd. To confront them. The whole premise is to try and jolt the addicted person, to bash them over the head with the hammer of reality, to get them to see they have a problem, and that they need help and that there will be dire consequences if they don’t get it. That’s usually why they don’t work! A much more effective approach is something like Motivational Interviewing or Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT), approaches that do not rely on threats and confrontation.

Mulaney’s intervention was typical but also not typical at all. Fred Armisen, Nick Kroll, Natasha Lyonne, Seth Meyers, and several other people I have to assume are Very Funny Famous People were all there. It took place in New York but some people in Los Angeles zoom’d in. Mulaney explains how defensive he was. If you really cared about me and thought I had a problem, then you would’ve flown in! He crossed his arms, and smugly said, “I’ll stop doing drugs when all of you stop drinking and smoking weed.” That also feels very true. Because the people on the delivering end of an intervention also probably have their own problems!

Mulaney says he’s very grateful for the intervention. He says it saved his life. But he’s still mixed about it. “I wish I felt that one emotion,” he says. “But I feel two emotions.” He’s grateful, but he’s also mad. That ambivalence is a very real fact of recovery. We know life is better when we’re not strung out, but we’re not totally psyched about it.

This mad but grateful feeeling reminded me of a silly scene from my own time in treatment. Each morning before group therapy started, we were supposed to go up to a white board in the room and write down next to our name what we were feeling that day. I would take this opportunity to flex. Some mornings I wrote adjectives and feelings like “nonplussed” or “phlegmatic.” One dope sick morning I was also feeling an unearened smugnes and I wrote: “ambivalent.”

See, I was 22 years old, on medical leave from college after I stopped showing up to every single class. I had zero prospects in life. No friends because I was not a fun guy to be around. I spent my all my time alone doing dope. I had all this time on my hands and so I thought I should try and culture myself. Plus, I had fantasies about being a writer, even though I wasn’t capable of writing anything. Most of this time I spent reading and watching movies. I was strung out but dammit I was going to be cultured, very well read and know things. I was going to know big words. So I would use my intellect to intimidate my compatriots in treatment by writing big words on the white board to describe my mood. Pathetic!

The facility I was in was for “young people.” The ages ranged from 15 to 23. I was at the older end of the spectrum. And there were kids in my group who were young and definitely did not have any real addiction or drug history to speak of. They got caught smoking weed and their parents flipped out. One kid said he liked to do parkour. His friend gave him a Xanax. And he climbed up a building so he could jump around and do spinning carthweels or whatever and he got in trouble for “criminal trespassing” while blacked out on benzos. I also got a “criminal trespassing” charge once. It carries no real consequneces. It’s what cops give to young white middle-class kids to scare us. I got this charge because I was trying to inject heroin in a Walgreens bathroom and a security guard bursted in and called the police. I knew this group was young and inexperienced. And I knew that when I put down the world “ambivalent” next to what I was feeling that morning, that one of them would ask, “What’s that mean?” And then I would respond, schooling them, “It means I’m torn. It means I care. It means I don’t really want to be here but here I am.” And my counselor would sigh, exasperated by me. One morning, I wrote that I was feeling “laissez faire,” which really pissed this counselor off. “Zach, that is not a feeling.” And I said, “You’re right it’s more of a position or atitude. For me, lassiez faire is the stance I’m taking here. I’m not going to interfere with the process and I’ll just let things unfold as they unfold.” That was an improvement from “ambivalent.”

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The Performer

Mulaney’s special begins with blacked out screen and we hear his voice say, “The past couple years, I’ve done a lot of work on myself. And I’ve realized that I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.” Then we see him come into frame in a stylish magenta suit. “I do. I love attention. I always wanted attention. When I was a little kid, I didn’t get enough attention.”

What pissed Mulaney off the most about being in rehab was the fact that nobody knew who he—a famous person—was. The guys in his group asked what he did for a living. And he said “stand-up comedian” and they asked, “you can make a living doing that?” While in treatment he left out a newspaper clipping of a story about him being in treatment, hoping the others would notice.

And this is what I meant about the importance of Mulaney being an ace preformer. Mulaney’s story of addiction is highly selected, curated, and refined. It’s been edited down and rehearsed a gazillion times. The result is a show that transformed two years of pain and misery and humiliation into something hilarious. It reminded me of something Wittgenstein once wrote: “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” Mulaney is saying something serious about the nature of addiction. Yes, he’s joking, but he’s also serious.