John Mulaney Is Really Good At This

My stance on awards shows remains as follows:

• They are all kind of silly
• Like, as though there’s an objective way to declare a winner in a format as subjective as artistic expression
• If we’re gonna insist on doing it and I can’t talk anyone out of it, let’s at least give these suckers to cool people

That seems to have worked out at this year’s Emmy Awards, with people like Rhea Seehorn and Stephen Root snagging awards. I love those two. I'm glad they're happy and have nice trophies. Beyond that, I’ll just catch some highlights online.

Those highlights usually feature John Mulaney. They’re often pretty similar. Mulaney walks out to present an award, proceeds to go off on whatever related or unrelated tangent he has chambered, absolutely destroys both in the room and for the cameras, then glides offscreen to let the rest of the show sputter along without him.

Here he is at this year’s ceremony doing a bit about men, generally, but also male actors, specifically.

God, that’s good, straight through from the very beginning right up to the end. The joke about Method acting alone would be the highlight in anyone else’s appearance, but here, it’s like the third or fourth best line he delivers. Being funny at a stuffy event like this is hard. Being funny in three minutes is hard, anywhere. None of this is as easy as he makes it look.

What's crazy is that, as good as this is, it’s still not my favorite awards show appearance he's done. It’s not even my favorite recent one. That honor goes to the time he marched out on stage at the Oscars and proceeded to ramble about Field of Dreams for a while.

Two things I appreciate about this equally:

• The actual words he says, which are hilarious
• The fact that he wasted a few minutes of the 2024 Oscars to get off some jokes about a movie that was released like 40 years earlier

As a fellow boyish-looking man with the face of a sweetheart and a mischievous streak that runs straight down through to my bone marrow, I find this inspiring. Look at that sparkle in his eye right before he starts talking. Look at the one in the first video right before he does the bit about DJ Khaled. His commitment to being a little shithead in public is admirable. I think he might enjoy doing it as much as the rest of us enjoy watching it. Probably more, now that I think about it.

Which brings us to the question that pops up every time he struts out there like this and kills everyone dead in less time than it takes to air fry some tater tots: Why hasn’t John Mulaney hosted one of these awards shows yet?

To which I always reply:

• Good question!
• Actually, he has, and let’s all go watch the videos from when he and Nick Kroll hosted the Film Independent Spirit Awards together like a decade ago

Here’s the monologue from 2017…

… and here’s the one from the very next year.

In conclusion:

• It really is time we let him host either the Emmys or the Oscars, though just to see if he can pull it off in a longer format and become the kind of reliable master of ceremonies Conan was for a while
• If not, let’s just give him like six minutes at every awards show to let him cook
• I do mean every awards show, even the ones that have nothing to do with the entertainment industry, like have him pop up at a convention where the real estate industry honors its top performers and put a clip of him rambling about, like, the music video for Twisted by Keith Sweat – you know, the one where Keith Sweat plays a cool detective in a leather jacket who arrests a sexy female jewel thief after she murders a guy in a bathroom stall during the kind of fancy event that should also hire John Mulaney to do a bit, but lets her get away while helping an old lady who dropped a bag of groceries, and then hooks up with her just before she gets shot while climbing a ladder and somehow dies sexily on the ladder without falling off of it – on YouTube for the rest of us to enjoy at our leisure

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STUFF I CLICKED ON

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— good blog about how maybe the “AI will kill us all” stuff might be a bit much

— Matthew Rhys made Emmy history, which is nice, both because Matthew Rhys is cool and because it resulted in me watching bloopers from The Wine Show again

— Paul Feig wants to make an Italian Job prequel

— a sinkhole opened up under Nic Cage’s house

— turns out having 100 years between seasons of your TV show might hurt viewership 

— Nashville is renaming its airport after Dolly Parton

— genuinely excited to see Philomena Cunk interview Michael Bay

— Stephen Root will be in GTA 6

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— “Hobbyist Archaeologist Uncovers Finland’s Largest Viking-Age Coin Hoard”

— “Catnapped bodega cat in Brooklyn reunited with owner after intense grassroots campaign”

— the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers is in trouble for stealing and from a beach 

— Gary Oldman met Air Bud

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