Bill Hader and John Mulaney Spend an Hour Not Talking About Barry

The premise was a conversation about Barry, the HBO series in which Bill Hader plays a hitman who takes an acting class and finds that redemption is mostly unavailable to him. It is a genuinely great show. The audience at the 92nd Street Y had dressed up and gotten babysitters and paid actual money to hear about it. What they got instead was forty-five minutes of Bill Hader and John Mulaney free-associating about a sketch they wrote about Casey Kasem’s fictional son, a Lithuanian vampire named Sidney Applebaum, and the time Mick Jagger played with the Foo Fighters at an SNL after-party and the two of them went inside because it was too loud. This is not a complaint.

The night was ostensibly moderated by Mulaney, who has the air of a man who showed up prepared and then immediately abandoned the plan. He’d written on SNL with Hader from his very first episode, and the dynamic between them is the specific intimacy of two people who spent years in a fluorescent-lit room together failing in private. Hader had literally just landed at JFK. He was drinking coffee. He had not eaten dinner. He would later accept a bag of Milky Way Darks from an audience member with the quiet gratitude of a man who had given up expecting anything to go normally.

The Sketches That Never Made It

The Casey Kasem bit is the one that got away. The sketch, which featured Dana Carvey as the DJ patriarch and Kristen Wiig as the mom, centered on a son who had burned down his apartment and run up debts across the city, and who kept getting his father to engage by asking Top 40 trivia. It died in silence at the table, died again on air, and then years later Mulaney did it at Largo in Los Angeles and Dana Carvey showed up in the audience and they performed it live and it worked. The lesson here is either that some comedy is ahead of its time, or that live audiences in a comedy club at midnight are more forgiving than a studio audience at 11:30 on a Saturday. Probably both.

five unicorns is only need to get picked up for volleyball if the Yakuza is holding me I will send you three unicorn three unicorns and a emoji means the Yakuza’s all right don’t call the cops

That was not about Barry. That was Hader explaining his emoji-based emergency communication system with his daughters, which he had to clarify because his phone kept buzzing during the panel. He apologized. He also apologized for not noticing the balcony until someone pointed it out, at which point he looked up and said ‘oh man I feel bad’ with the sincerity of a person who genuinely felt bad.

When the conversation did land on Barry, specifically the season two episode Ronnie/Lily, in which a child martial artist beats Hader’s hitman senseless before climbing a fully CGI tree, Hader was thoughtful and precise in a way that made clear exactly why the show is as good as it is. He talked about pulling the music out of the fight sequence entirely, about a camera that moves like a surveillance feed rather than a participant, about the decision to make the whole episode out of what was originally just the first ten minutes. ‘You just kind of are hoping it’s gonna work,’ he said, which sounds like a shrug but was actually an argument for instinct over architecture.

the biggest thing I will say with that episode is following the emotion of it and that’s everything in writing everything is those when Barry has those flashbacks to see coming to Fuchs and him realizing like Oh Fuchs isn’t good for him he’s being used

Lexapro Gets Applause, Wellbutrin Gets Nothing

An audience member asked about managing anxiety while pursuing a creative career, and both men answered with the directness of people who have been through it and come out the other side still a little shaky. Hader mentioned meditation, exercise, not drinking anymore, Wellbutrin, and the occasional Klonopin. Mulaney mentioned Lexapro, which received genuine applause from the crowd. Wellbutrin got nothing. ‘Wellbutrin people are like hey we got to figure out what Lexapro does,’ Hader said.

I do TM I do meditation I honestly it’s like you do it’s like all the kind of fun things like I don’t drink anymore and like all these things you have to like really like to work like exercise not to like look better but just to like not be a basket case

The Stefan mythology got its obligatory airing, including the revelation that Black Dracula’s full name was Sidney Applebaum, that there is a bodega sponge joke that never made it to air, and that a Stefan Halloween costume was once sold commercially and neither Hader nor Mulaney saw any money from it. The line that may best summarize the entire evening came from a Vincent Price sketch they wrote together in Mulaney’s first week. The setup was what would Vincent Price say to Liberace. Mulaney, new, nervous, mostly quiet, finally offered: ‘savior sassiest sides for your windowless bars.’ Hader has been thinking about it ever since. So have we, frankly.