John Mulaney

You know, you’re very funny. But these people have no time for your cleverness. Just get to the point. (advice told to John by Ross Bennett)

I liked most things about Georgetown. I miss it a lot. I kind of liked that Birbiglia, Kroll and me and the Improv group were the only people doing comedy there. We had little competition.

Start a show. Host the show. at a bar or any space. then you have guaranteed stage time and you do other comics favors by giving them spots so then they will give you spots on their shows. also hang out a lot at comedy clubs.

Nick and I came up with Too Much Tuna in five seconds with Jessi Klein about ten years ago at a restaurant on 6th avenue called French Roast. We got a plate with too much tuna and we said "this is too much tuna."

My favorite Stefon thing ever was "three screaming babies in mozart wigs" because it made my wife laugh really hard.

Too many to name. I would say the very very late nights writing with Marika Sawyer and Simon Rich. We would laugh and laugh and laugh. It was so fun. I cannot express in words how fun it was.

I never have a good answer for this. Any joke by Dave Attel, Todd Glass or Mitch Hedberg probably. Also Paul F Tompkins joke about Fabio is way high up there.

One thing I never get tired of is the film Burden of Dreams, which is the documentary by Les Blank about Werner Herzog trying to make a movie called Fitzcarraldo, which involves moving a steamship over a steep hill. That's the story they were dramatizing, and in an attempt to dramatize, Herzog wanted to actually move a steamship paddleboat over a hill, and he wanted to do it in the jungle the same way it was done in the script. It’s tense and fascinating because the film crew is in a terrible predicament, yet it’s fundamentally hilarious because it’s a predicament that they put themselves in. No one asked them to do this. I find a lot of life is bitching about having to do something like mov...[Read more]

This was the year that my wife and I discovered HGTV overall. It’s a great channel: They have all these shows that are located in some vague Canadian city and feature who people who refuse to understand that places can be renovated or even cleaned. Every time somebody walks into a house — which is a lot — they shoot the scene with horror music scored over it, and the couple is complaining that the place is dirty and there’s an outlet that doesn’t work. At which point someone will say, “You know, you’re with a contractor who will fully renovate the house, right?” It’s that journey every single time. Unless you’re watching House Hunters International, in which someone is just people trying to ...[Read more]

This year, I really got into “The Champs,” a podcast in which the hosts, Neal Brennan and Moshe Kasher, will only have minority comics on. They’re both very white comedians but they only have non-white comedians on. Seaton Smith, who’s on my show, just did an episode; the George Wallace episode is amazing. There’s also “You Made It Weird,” a marathon two-hour long podcast each episode. Pete Holmes hosts and “makes it weird” by bringing up embarrassing things that stand-ups purposefully don’t talk about onstage. When I was on it, he brought up a sex story I’d told him in confidence about how I felt like God was mad at me. He asked like it was a normal question that I hadn’t just told him. At ...[Read more]