John Mulaney Is One of the Best TV Comedy Guest Stars Ever

Audiences have countless associations with John Mulaney. He’s a virtuosic comic. He’s a sketch performer. He’s a Broadway star. He’s an Emmy-winning writer. He’s a talk show host. In a sense, he’s Spider-Pig. (He’s also a recovering drug addict whose substance use contributed to the end of his marriage to Anna Marie Tendler, but we hear about that less these days — not even in her memoir.) What we don’t talk about enough is how great Mulaney is as a TV comedy guest star, but now that he’s popped up in Season Two of Poker Face, we really should.

To be clear: I’m not talking about Mulaney’s work as a series regular or sketch comic. In the former case, this would potentially require us all to engage with his short-lived namesake sitcom Mulaney, something I didn’t care to do at the time, which put me squarely in the majority of critics and TV owners. I’m also not addressing his work as a sketch comic, largely because his character George St. Geegland — a disgraced former short-story professor at SUNY Yonkers and multiple divorcé — deserves its own appreciation.

But even leaving out these two performance categories, there’s plenty to discuss, starting with the second-season premiere of Difficult People. Billy (Billy Eichner), one of the titular difficult people, meets Mulaney’s Cecil Jellford outside a gym; Cecil is unlocking his pennyfarthing bike, because he’s an “old-timey,” which Billy has read about in the Times Style section. It’s a new kind of urban affectation, practitioners of which use antique slang, wear the fashions of yesteryear — and, in Cecil’s case, collect political memorabilia that would put one at odds with the Southern Poverty Law Center and possibly the FBI. The climactic twist wouldn’t hit as hard as it does if Mulaney wasn’t so convincing as a courtly gentleman with a preternatural ability to channel the manners of an earlier era. His ability to conceal dark secrets also anticipates, you know, things we would learn about him later on.

Mulaney’s affinity for vintage characters was on display again a few years later. AppleTV+’s Dickinson is a coming-of-age comedy about Emily (Hailee Steinfeld), the titular poet, told in a playfully anachronistic style that encompasses contemporary figures of her era. In the fourth episode, Emily finds out her favorite tree in the woods behind her family home is going to be sacrificed when a railway track is built through the property. For advice on how to save the tree, she and her friend George (Samuel Farnsworth) travel to Concord, New Hampshire, to meet Henry David Thoreau, a sensation after the publication of his book Walden. Though the book is about Thoreau leaving human society to “live deliberately,” the man George and Emily meet is a fraud, narcissistically agreeing to pontificate about his beliefs to George even though the truth is that he lives close enough to his family’s home that his sister can casually walk over with a basket of cookies, and his mother makes regular stops to pick up his laundry — all (basically) historically accurate, by the way. 

Perhaps this disappointing excuse for a hermit is part of what eventually convinces Emily to show him how reclusiveness is really done. I’d love to share a clip from the episode, in which Mulaney’s jerky Thoreau peels off his undershirt to drop on top of his mother’s laundry basket, but it’s hosted on a male-exclusive Mr. Skin-esque platform surrounded by tumescent penises — maybe the most sincere possible tribute to Mulaney’s performance here.

When it comes to The Bear, there are two kinds of people: 1) those who regard it as a study of some of the most intensely emotional characters ever conceived; and 2) those who wish it could go back to its first-season roots and be just a little funny again. I’m in the latter camp, which is why the Season Two episode “Fishes,” which I know has many fans, is not my favorite. In a Christmas episode heavy with stuntcasting — Jamie Lee Curtis and Gillian Jacobs make their débuts as Carmy’s mother and Richie’s now-ex-wife, respectively, alongside Sarah Paulson and Bob Odenkirk — actual Chicago native Mulaney is probably the least showy as Stevie, a Berzatto in-law via Paulson’s Cousin Michelle. (We will eventually learn that Stevie has to endure living with Carmy during his soul-killing employment at Eleven Madison, so he’s probably earned his way into full Berzatto via misery.) Stevie gets the honor of saying grace before the episode’s titular feast, but he also gets a moment with the Fak brothers that is, if less important, definitely more fun.

There’s a whole sub-category of sitcoms about comics playing barely fictionalized versions of themselves, and in which John Mulaney pops up “John Mulaney.” The Jim Gaffigan Show and Pete Holmes’ Crashing are two such examples, but the best one comes toward the end of Bupkis. The one and only season of Pete Davidson’s autobiographical sitcom tracks the highs and lows of his substance use, ending with Pete deciding to enter rehab. Before he goes, he meets up with John in the season’s penultimate episode — who, in real life, brought Davidson on tour as an opener, which at the time was regarded as an act of friendship toward his troubled young protégé, but which took on a different cast once the fact of Mulaney’s own drug problem became public knowledge. 

We can’t know the full scope of Mulaney’s issues (nor is it our business), but in this scene, “John” doesn’t shy away from talking about them with what seems like a fair amount of candor.

Unexpectedly, the closest antecedent to Mulaney’s Poker Face role is his appearance in Documentary Now!. In the third season of the series, an anthology in which each episode is a lovingly detailed and authentic send-up of an existing documentary film or series, Mulaney and Seth Meyers co-wrote “Original Cast Album: Co-op,” a parody of Original Cast Album: Company. 

The source film, from 1970, finds legendary documentarian D.A. Pennebaker filming the recording of the cast album for Company, a then-new musical by Stephen Sondheim. Mulaney plays Co-op’s Sondheim analogue, Simon Sawyer, who has definite (and often definitely wrong) ideas about the production.

You can’t write a tribute this pinpoint-accurate without intimate knowledge of the work of Stephen Sondheim. Either Mulaney has this knowledge, or he loves researching the subject, because Danny, his character in the new Poker Face episode “Whack-a-Mole,” is also a Sondheim freak. This turns out to be his most likeable quality, since he is also the mole of the episode title: a dirty FBI agent who’s been turned by Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman), a Mobster in the casino business. (The episode also reunites Mulaney with Richard Kind, who played the breath-challenged actor performing as Co-op’s doorman, appeared in Mulaney’s variety special The Sack Lunch Bunch and serves as announcer on Mulaney’s Netflix talk show, Everybody’s Live; here he’s Jeffrey, Beatrix’s adoring husband.) Mulaney really captures the banality of evil as we see a flashback of Danny sitting at Beatrix’s dining-room table, enjoying freshly baked beignets before casually spilling what he knows about judges who’d make good blackmail targets. 

Danny may have collected six figures’ worth of blood money from Beatrix, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to hand it over without thinking: When his whole scheme falls apart and he wants human lie detector Charlie (Natasha Lyonne) to say that the mole is actually his fellow agent, her friend Luca (Simon Helberg), Danny opens negotiations at just $16,000 before desperately bidding himself up to $125,000 — to no avail, of course. Charlie leaves the exchange calling Danny a bad person and wishing him luck with his ulcer. Could be a pretty good starting point for a Sondheim song if we hadn’t lost him back in 2021.

Seemingly as soon as he wraps the current first season of Everybody’s Live, Mulaney is going on the road for his “Mister Whatever” tour, which should keep him occupied through the end of the year. But just because he’s booked doesn’t mean creators shouldn’t still be thinking about ways to use him. Deborah Vance couldn’t run into him in a comedy club green room on Hacks? Why not have him stop by St. Denis Medical to play a guy who cut his hand slicing a bagel? A Man on the Inside just cast 11 people for Season Two: Mulaney couldn’t make it an even dozen as the smarmy son of a retirement home resident? 

If we want to get him back on that quasi-porn platform — and we do, right? — let’s get him acting somewhere else.