Gone are John Mulaney’s halcyon days.
Once showered with myopic adulation – renowned as the clean-cut, spiffy-suited poster boy of American mainstream comedy – he’s since been relegated to front-page tabloid fodder.
Comedian John Mulaney on stage in Las Vegas, Nevada, in October.Credit:Bryan Steffy/Getty Images for The Shaquille O’Neal Foundation
His first full show since the immaculately produced pre-pandemic Netflix special, Kid Gorgeous at Radio City, chronicles the Saturday Night Live alumnus’ recent self-destructive trajectory.
For the Melbourne leg of his tour on Friday night, Mulaney performed at Margaret Court Arena. The aptly-titled From Scratch is indeed just that – a vulnerable and at times uncomfortable hour of a man describing his downfall from the highest of comedic peaks, and the attempt to then claw his way back up the mountain with an icepick blunted by media scrutiny and his own social missteps.
Often, it blurs the line between a comedy show and a cathartic mass-group therapy session.
Mulaney revealed in 2014 that he had been sober for the best part of a decade – and his career flourished thereafter. It didn’t last through COVID lockdowns.
Following a star-studded intervention organised by Seth Meyers in December 2020, he began a two-month stint in a Pennsylvania rehab centre for alcoholism alongside cocaine and pharmaceutical drug addiction. This was followed by the subsequent collapse of his marriage with Anna Marie Tendler.
His every ill-calculated move was put under the microscopic lens of the unforgiving public eye. He hasn’t been “cancelled” to the level of excommunication as his peers such as Louis CK, Chris D’Elia or James Veitch – but his rose-tinted public image has taken a serious hit.
Far-removed from the physicality and jovial whimsy of the viral sketches that saw him rise to global prominence (Hillary Clinton’s favourite Horse in the Hospital, or The Salt and Pepper Diner, et al), 80% of the material in From Scratch focuses on Mulaney’s relationship with drugs. Be it scoring from shady dealers, tricking doctors into uncouth prescriptions, and of course, the anarchy that ensues when under the influence.
While his articulation and delivery remain impeccable, and the anecdotes themselves are amusing enough, they grow tiresome – more reminiscent of something you’d expect at an open-mic night from a first-timer seeking shock guffaws than from a veteran of the global scene performing to 5000 people.
Signalling a metamorphosis of comedic persona, From Scratch is Mulaney’s most personal and purgative body of work to-date. But the shared mirth between audience and performer doesn’t come close to reaching the heights of the upper echelons of his back catalogue.
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