“Parasocial” wasn’t the Oxford dictionary’s word of the year in 2021 (that honor went to “vax”), but it very well could have been. That year, a lot of people acted as if John Mulaney was a close personal friend who’d completely betrayed them. That particular group took the standup comedian’s time in rehab for drug addiction and subsequent divorce from ex-wife Anna Maria Tendler (and relationship with now-wife Olivia Munn) personally in a way that only a fan who’d wholly bought into a constructed persona could.
That part of his life “feels very distant,” Mulaney said in a new GQ profile; he’s happily married with two kids now, after all. Still, he insists that the parasocial fans’ perceived image—the one of the clean-cut tall child who could never hurt a fly (he was over on the bench!)—never really existed in the first place. “I very much tried to tell everyone,” he explained. “What I said… is that I look harmless.”
In retrospect, the signs—both of his dissatisfaction in his first relationship and previous substance reliance—were there. This writer doesn’t want to fall into the trap of reading into his jokes too much in the other direction, but some bits that are right there in the specials include the “why buy the cow?” marriage segment from The Comeback Kid and the quote from Kid Gorgeous about living on “cigarettes and alcohol and Adderall” (and no water!) throughout college. We wouldn’t bring it up at all, except for the fact that he said the person he is onstage sometimes feels like “the most me.” Fans don’t need to treat Mulaney’s standup as pure fiction—it’s never sold itself that way; they just need to allow for the fact that the person presenting it is as complex and layered as anyone else. We’re only seeing a small part of his world.
In retrospect, one thing that might have helped would have been using a stage name, which Mulaney says he started to regret not doing a few years into his career. “I don’t like when they say the same name that I had when I was 10. I don’t always like reading that name out there,” he explained. “I wonder if it’s nice, when you see ‘so-and-so sucks,’ you go, ‘That’s not me, actually.’ I always wondered if that helped performers be like, ‘I’m not Dean Martin. So be mad at that thing all you want.’” It’s no wonder he and Chappell Roan—who does use a stage name for those exact same reasons—seemed to hit it off when they both performed on SNL the other weekend.