John Mulaney had only been working in comedy for five years when he landed a role as a writer at Saturday Night Live in 2008. Hilariously, I felt seasoned when I got to SNL, he told For the Record. And he may well have been-after four hysterical years, John left the show and went on to create his own stand-up tours, TV series (Big Mouth), and the Broadway show Oh, Hello. He's renowned for his wit and one-liners, which are what make his most recent special, Baby J, so peculiar and compelling.
Baby J is a wide-ranging conversation on John's life over the past three-plus years following a drug intervention 20 comedian friends held for him. Full of winding stories and recollections, it's a fast-paced, full-throttle hour full of laughter with a fair bit of cringe. The show is available for streaming on Netflix and the album is available on Spotify.
John's an avid lover of audio and is conscientious about the medium as it relates to comedy. He's also a podcast aficionado, which is how he discovers some of his favorite New York haunted places stories, and a music fan. He recently created a Spotify mixtape featuring the early Sun Ra song Dreaming, Television's Days, and Bo Diddley's Say Man that John wants to claim as the first diss track ever.
For the Record had the opportunity to sit down with the comedian for another wide-ranging conversation.
You spent more than four years working on Saturday Night Live. What are a few of the lessons you learned while writing for the show? The biggest thing I learned is that sometimes you have to burn the furniture, which means that if you have a really good idea and you're saving it for a couple of weeks from now and you're faced with a show that looks a little light or a host that you're having trouble coming up with ideas for, sometimes you have to use your best idea right then and there and not save it for the future.
You have to make decisions. When you write a sketch at Saturday Night Live, you're the producer of it. You're in charge of the sets, the costumes, the look of it, any pre-tapes, any special effects. And you have a couple hours, max, to make most of the decisions on a sketch, because then you have to get into the actual doing of it.
This has played out in other career aspects. Just make decisions-you might make the wrong one. What seems to unnerve other people and what seems to shake the confidence of something is when you can't make decisions. If someone asks you, This one or that one? just say, That one! You might be wrong, but you have to move forward. A lot of things die on the vine of indecision.
Who are some of your biggest comedic influences and inspirations? Comedian Taylor Negron. He passed away close to 10 years ago, but he had a monologue he did for The Moth, and it's about how he had a pet monkey as a kid. It's really slow. There's a real presence he has, and a real pace that I love. He even steps back from the microphone during laughs in a way that I've always liked. But I'm trying not to rush through things as much, which is what I did for the first 20 or so years.
But I think about Taylor a lot onstage. His pace has a real warmth to it. I think much less about drawing inspiration from people's material or their point of view. Just stage presence stuff. That's always been a little more interesting to me.
That seems to be apparent in your latest work. In your earlier stand-up specials, your bits are often no longer than two minutes. Meanwhile, your Baby J stories consistently clock in over five minutes. Was this an intentional style shift? The New in Town special I did for Comedy Central a handful of years ago had a mix of one-minute jokes and then one pretty long story at the end. I followed a model of having these very concise tracks-a way to talk fast if you're listening while driving and it comes up on shuffle-and then less snappy, big chunks.
And then with Baby J, I found I wanted to string together as many moments as I could per track, because I've found that people have a memory for what joke went into what joke. People say, Wait I remember he went into something else from that! So if they're on shuffle, the moments feel cut off. So I tried to keep as much stuff married to each other as possible, to keep all the jokes that were the same orbit as each other together.
It's interesting to hear you talk about the way you've thought about your work in audio versus filmed. Why do you find it beneficial to have your shows on multiple types of streaming platforms? There were two things that really marked when I was lucky enough for my career to take off. One was when the New in Town special went to Netflix. The other was when I started to become the second-most-played Pandora station when people would search, say, Jim Gaffigan. And it happened with a few other very big comics at the time. And I just found that a lot of people were listening to the first couple albums that I had because of that. And they were hearing them on shuffle. And I thought, Oh, any of these tracks could be the absolute first introduction someone has to me. Each of these has to talk fast.
There's a tendency on comedy albums to shorten laughs after tracks. But to me, I was like, no, I need that person who's hearing me for the first time to go, Oh that joke killed. What was that again?
Baby J is a departure from some of your previous work when it comes to subject matter. What's the role of comedy in tackling difficult topics? I don't think about it. All I thought in this one was, I'm looking to make the funniest special possible, and these are the topics. And these are the parts of my life I'm going to share. I did not want to lean on the pregnant pause of Isn't this serious? That bored
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
29/05/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
29/05/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent ratings news and is derived from press re...
29/05/2026
The days are getting longer, the temperatures are rising, and playlists are filling up for the season. With summer around the corner, Spotify's global edito...
29/05/2026
New retro-inspired MPC announced
There are few devices that have gained the status held by Akai Pro's MPC range, and in recent years, the company have s...
29/05/2026
Save up to 30 on acclaimed titles
Following a successful launch at Superbooth 2026, Bjooks have revealed that they will be continuing the Kickstarter campa...
29/05/2026
Binaural monitoring application improved
Genelec have just released an update that brings some powerful new features to their HRTF-based binaural headphone ...
29/05/2026
6 June 2026 at SAE Institute, London, UK
IMSTA FESTA 2026 is almost upon us, with some of the biggest names in pro-audio set to descend upon SAE Institute i...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, died April 12, 2026, at his home in...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Comparing 5 AI Video Enhancers for Restoring Old Video Quality
Kate Luvis May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Digitizing VHS, MiniDV, and other legacy formats doe...
29/05/2026
Studio Hamburg Builds New Post Pipeline with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Workflow replaces a patchwork of legacy tools...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
At the Intersection of Music and Dance, an Epic Collaboration Boston Conservatory musicians and dancers found creative parallels in their recent performance o...
29/05/2026
Something fundamental has shifted in how people consume media. Audiences aren't abandoning television or radio content; they're just expanding how, wher...
29/05/2026
Youtube exclusive special drops today
Watch now
UKTV today announces another e...
29/05/2026
Back to All News
The Official Trailer of Physical 100 Italy, on Netflix From Se...
29/05/2026
At just 20 years old, Sean Melia from Summerhill Co. Meath has been revealed as the winner of Super Garden 2026. Sean is the youngest ever contestant and winner...
29/05/2026
Experimental HIV vaccine achieves a long-sought goal In a first for the field, all non-human primates given a new series of vaccines generated antibodies capabl...
28/05/2026
Thomsons Climate Crisis Toolkit is already being put to work, helping journalist...
28/05/2026
FOX Sports' MLB coverage dominated the night at the 47th Annual Sports Emmy ...
28/05/2026
One of the most memorable postseasons in baseball history would have had no memo...
28/05/2026
NBC's Sunday Night Football is among the most-decorated and most-watched pro...
28/05/2026
The 2026 Sports Emmys marked a watershed moment for Prime Video Sports. After bu...
John Mulaney had only been working in comedy for five years when he landed a role as a writer at Saturday Night Live in 2008. Hilariously, I felt seasoned when I got to SNL, he told For the Record. And he may well have been-after four hysterical years, John left the show and went on to create his own stand-up tours, TV series (Big Mouth), and the Broadway show Oh, Hello. He's renowned for his wit and one-liners, which are what make his most recent special, Baby J, so peculiar and compelling. 
