John Mulaney on Subway Showtime, Michael Jordan's Hitler Mustache, and the Susan Boyle Fortune Nobody Saw Coming

John Mulaney walks onto the Desus & Mero set and within ninety seconds someone is doing the Pete Buttigieg dance, which is described as the 2020 Macarena, which Mulaney then reveals he learned before anyone else in America at a Club Med when he was eleven. This is, somehow, the least interesting thing he says in the next half hour. The man contains multitudes. Sorry, that word is banned. The man contains a lot of extremely specific Midwest rage and a working theory about why the Brooklyn Nets gentrified Brooklyn.

What makes this interview work is that Mulaney is genuinely funny on his feet in a room that doesn’t need him to be. Desus and Mero are already running. They don’t need a guest to carry anything. But Mulaney keeps pace, pitches a full Harry and Meghan reality show with a gravity bong subplot and the Queen showing up unexpectedly, and then pivots to doing a Bloomberg Spanish impression that ends with the phrase, and I want to be precise here, snow-o. He’s having a great time. You can feel it.

The Subway as Spiritual Home

A big chunk of this interview is essentially three people who ride the subway cataloguing its horrors with the affection of people who would never stop riding it. Showtime dancers, mariachi guys, the fold-down seat that sounds like a gunshot, the mysterious seat with liquid on it that you will not sit in even with two broken legs. Mulaney’s contribution is the alien with the clarinet and the tin foil crown, who played badly and then announced his fee structure.

He goes, I’m an alien. I’m an alien from outer space. And I don’t think he was.

The clarinet guy, Mulaney explains, eventually lowered his instrument and offered to stop playing in exchange for cash. The train paid. Of course it did. This is the correct New York ending to that story. Mulaney tells it like someone who has been saving it for the right room, and this is the right room.

Michael Jordan, Bob Dylan, and a Hitler Mustache

The sports section of this interview goes places nobody planned. It starts with Mulaney admitting he goes to Nets games because he likes the lighting, the actual physical lighting, the way the old Chicago Stadium was dark except for the court. Madison Square Garden, he explains, has balloons. Any time there’s a balloon, he’s done. Then it escalates into a defense of the Bulls via Bob Dylan, a tangent about John Starks disparaging the Bulls during the Jordan baseball years, and then, right at the end, the mustache.

That’s why when people say, is LeBron better than Jordan, I say no, because Jordan had the audacity to try to make Hitler’s mustache popular again.

There is no coming back from that sentence. Desus just says, wow. That’s the right response.

Susan Boyle Has $40 Million and the Last Laugh

The funniest moment in the episode is purely structural. Mulaney and the hosts are agreeing that British tabloids destroyed Susan Boyle, called her SuBo, broke her brain. It feels like a settled case. Then someone asks a producer to look up her net worth.

She’s watching this like, whose brain got broke, huh, John?

Forty million dollars. The producer just says it flatly. The three of them go quiet for a second, and then Mero says, what are we doing. Which is the correct response to learning Susan Boyle has forty million dollars while you were busy feeling sorry for her. She’s fine. She was always fine. Go home.

Mulaney ends the interview by answering what his bodega neon sign would say. His life philosophy, delivered without hesitation: don’t eat crackers in bed, because you will get crumbs near your feet. You will. He’s not wrong. That’s probably the most useful thing anyone has said on late night television in years.