Mulaney Is Back! Performs at City Winery with Roy Wood Jr and Surprise Guest Chris Rock
Guest contributor Brian Martin is writer and avid comedy fan.
Having secured tickets for tonight’s show, announced only a week earlier, we made our way to Manhattan’s Meat Packing District and the City Winery’s brand-new location for an evening with John Mulaney. Having proof of full vaccination was a requirement for entry and we came prepared. After securing our phones in a locked pocket to be opened at the end of the performance, we were seated at a socially distanced table in a space that easily accommodated the perhaps two hundred people attending. Masks were required to be worn whenever we were interacting with our servers or moving about the space.
Roy Wood Jr started the evening with an energetic, upbeat set where it was wonderfully apparent that he was happy to be on stage in front of an indoors, New York City crowd. After a quick 10 minutes he brought out our next opener, lingering on a showman’s pause before announcing “ladies and gentlemen, Chris Rock.”
The crowd hushed themselves into silence waiting for the punchline to this cruel joke. There wasn’t one. Chris Rock, dawning a jean jacket and Detroit Lions cap, sauntered on stage and immediately sized up the kind of audience that John Mulaney brings in. We ate it up; enthralled to have him try out new material and eager to help him find his way through a loose, joyfully meandering, one-of-kind set. He then introduced Mulaney and the audience erupted.
Strolling out in a simple jeans and white sweater – not his more characteristic suit and tie – Mulaney first lamented others unfairly “reviewing” his previous two shows. These shows were, after all, intended to be starting points for new jokes; not the tight, finished, “memorized” (his word) material that would ultimately result. He took issue with the internet calling his set “raw” and “vulnerable,” and then announced that, whether or not that may have been true earlier in the week, “I don’t feel like that tonight.”
The “raw and vulnerable” were obvious references to Mulaney’s retelling of particular events that had found their way into the tabloids. Anybody keeping up with him was likely expecting him to touch on a few of those things. He did not disappoint. Nearly the entire show was devoted to this most recent chapter of his life. A December interview he didn’t recall giving became our introduction to the dark path we were embarking upon. A dinner party invitation he’d accepted became a deliciously voyeuristic glimpse into an evening shared – but certainly not enjoyed — with friends and family. And an extended stay away from home became a sincere and hilarious coda for both this part of his timeline and the evening’s performance.
Throughout the show he thrillingly flipped back and forth between reenacting and narrating – revealing his thoughts at the time, and his more measured opinions of those thoughts now — while the audience enthusiastically supported him during the entire ride. Evident throughout the night was Mulaney’s deep comfort on stage, made all the clearer when he told us exactly that. It was a marked contrast to the deeply uncomfortable situations he shared with us via his artful storytelling. A few times, I found myself squirming in my seat with cringe and self-recognition. It was a journey of poor decision-making and self-reflection, told with that confident and hilarious John Mulaney swagger. We were overjoyed to be hearing this story directly from the source, in no small part because we knew this tale had a happy ending. We were looking at it.
