“Baby J”, John Mulaney’s new Netflix special

If you don’t know who John Mulaney is by now, you may have been in rehab with him.

In the ten-plus years since his first streaming special, the charming former Saturday Night Live writer has become one of the most prominent names in stand-up comedy.

As it turns out, fame doesn’t mean all that much when you hit rock bottom and find yourself checked into a rehab facility for an out of control drug problem. No one recognized Mulaney, even though he brought in a newspaper as a way of bragging to the other addicts about how big of a celebrity he is. That’s just one of the many of the sobering albeit hilarious anecdotes he tells in John Mulaney: Baby J, premiering April 25th on Netflix.

Mulaney looks a little weathered and isn’t as buoyant as you may remember in say Kid Gorgeous at Radio City, not just because he’s now in his forties. As he told an 11-year-old he picked out of the Boston Symphony Hall crowd to entertainingly interact with, “I have kind of a different vibe now”. Contrasted with a usual hour of material touching on a variety of observations, “Baby J” focuses exclusively on the circumstances since December of 2020 that led to him to getting clean from cocaine and prescription pills courtesy of a Dr. Michael no last name given, hopefully for good this time. This wasn’t Mulaney’s first rehab rodeo, but maybe coming clean over the course of a prolonged 80 minutes before an audience should be a mandatory step for recovering comics going forward.

If you’re familiar with any of Mulaney’s previous specials his delivery style remains unchanged, unpretentious and not over the top expressive. The funnyman’s ability to devote an entire set that makes light of an extremely dark time that’s hopefully behind him for good is what’s new. “Baby J” is a reference to his adolescent street name, but the mood from the unique cold open is akin to Mulaney atoning for sins and starting over. He did used to be an altar boy if you’ve seen The Comeback Kid. Not bad for the first drug addict to turn an innocent man into a drug dealer. Just take my word for it and watch “Baby J” to understand that last point. You’ll be rooting along for Mulaney by the end for the next chapter of his comedy career; as everyone knows, America loves a good comeback story. I just hope it doesn’t take him another three years to make up a Toronto date again.

He is brutally honest about his past actions. Self-deprecation has forever been a trope of stand-up, Mulaney’s act included; the resulting laughs describing shameful transgressions are still genuine despite the realization of how close he came to dying due to his addiction. If there ever was a poster child for a likeable egomaniac who knows the types of people he resonates best with, Mulaney fits the bill to a T. “Yeah ask your daughter,” he quips at one point. “Or your son if he’s not an athlete.”

Mr. Mulaney isn’t doing any media around “Baby J”’s release, allowing his onstage confessions to speak for themselves. Not to give away any spoilers, but it would be tough to ever top the ramshackle mess of an interview he gave GQ Magazine a few days prior to his much-needed intervention. An interview he printed out and reads aloud to close out his special as a reminder to never wanting to go back to that state of being again.