Discomfort Viewing
John Mulaney tests the boundaries of Netflix with Everybody's Live.
The show’s not good, guys… It’s great, but it’s not good.
—John Mulaney, addressing the writers of Everybody’s Live
Irony to John Mulaney is like oxygen, but he’s capable of slipping into breathless fanboy mode, as he did recently with John Cale on his Netflix talk show Everybody’s Live, currently streamed weekly worldwide with “no delay” from a studio in West Hollywood. “Do you think there’s a thriving avant-garde now?” he asked, having demonstrated his credentials by name-dropping Cale’s 1960s collaborator La Monte Young. “Do you think there are acts now, comedians, musicians, who like to make the audience as uncomfortable as you might have?” Cale didn’t really have an answer, mumbling something about hip-hop without naming names. Truth be told, he seemed a bit out of his element, an old sailor washed up on a shore far from any region known to him in the past, even if his former captain Andy Warhol had his own fixation on semi-famous people doing little or nothing in real time.
Viewed from the other side, the exchange tells us a few significant things about Mulaney: he’s into the idea of the avant-garde, he’d like to think that comedians could be part of it, and he takes for granted that making people uncomfortable is a worthwhile artistic goal, for all the success he’s had seemingly doing the opposite. A stand-up comic first and foremost, he’s securely embedded in the mainstream, all the more so following his well-publicised stint in rehab; his newfound sobriety is gag fodder for Everybody’s Live, along with his new responsibilities as the father of a young family. Still, he remains the same well-camouflaged oddball he’s always been—with his deceptively wholesome look, his bent for morbid gags about incest or the Son of Sam, and his officious speech patterns suggesting a child’s impression of an adult laying down the law.