John Mulaney's ‘Everybody’s Live’ Is Just as Delightfully Weird In Person

We’re about halfway through Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, the latest iteration of John Mulaney’s gloriously random late-night experiment, and at this crucial juncture, the reading on the heat check comes in at “fire.” In one of the longest-running and most staid formats on television, Mulaney is a breath of fresh air still in mid-exhale. I had the pleasure of watching from the stands at Sunset Gower Studios as last night’s episode unfolded, and can report that the show’s looseness—the key to its trademark weirdness—feels just as organic in the room.

The show thrives off its aura of fluidity and its obsession with the bizarre and ephemeral; it’s more subservient to its creator’s idiosyncrasies than it is to any late-night talk show conventions. “It’s fun to have a topic, and not to interview people about their career or life,” Mulaney told Vulture in an interview when the series returned to Netflix a few weeks ago. The original iteration, Everybody’s in L.A., was loosely themed around Los Angeles-specific topics; the new, non-regional Everybody’s Live is free to range wider, for good and for ill. An episode from a few weeks ago whose theme was “cruise ships” left Mulaney struggling to find compelling angles to riff on with guests Quinta Brunson and card-carrying Poseidon Adventure fan Ben Stiller, while a cameo from Silkk the Shocker flailed once the shock of his appearance wore off.

The lesson? A truly successful episode requires more incisive themes, and maybe a more calculated lineup for assured banter. So an installment reuniting Mulaney with longtime friends Bill Hader and Chelsea Peretti, both riffers extraordinaire, plus the always-game Johnny Knoxville, and a broadly-relatable topic—“getting fired”—is about as close as a show like this can get to guaranteeing a hit. And it was, while still feeling light on its feet. Early into sitting down, Hader audibly whispered to Mulaney “Is the whole show like this?” and Mulaney, laughing, answered “Yes,” with the excitement of someone who’s just roped his boy into chaos he clearly wasn’t quite prepared for. No sweat: Hader told a great anecdote about getting fired from his first job, while gleefully lobbing candy from the trusty food-delivery robot Saymo into the crowd, to John’s bemusement.

But of course the real charm here are the throw-it-at-the-wall ideas that seem to pop out of Mulaney’s brain, a factor no one can calculate or predict. On last night’s episode, Mulaney started the evening off with an insane, zigzagging eight minute monologue about career dejection, Madden and Ray Lewis—a sequence long and intricate enough that he could have slotted it into his next standup special. This week’s courtside-seat cameo from a fake VIP in the audience turned into an extended dance number from a heroin-addicted pimp whose likeness is the secret inspiration for Cheetos mascot Chester Cheetah. And this week’s digital short was a prolonged 60 Minutes-esque interview with Bubbles the Chimp—on the strength of the gloriously thin peg of the Michael Jackson movie being delayed—that felt like a so-goofy-it’s-brilliant bit you might see in latter-series Atlanta.

Shortly after his monologue, Mulaney did one of his recurring bits, matter-of-factly reading dry trade-paper news about which celebrities signed with which agencies off of a clipboard. When he brought his guests out, he sat back down and apologetically read off one last name: “Emmy Rossum signed with WME.” Did he truly miss a name, or did he “forget” on purpose, then rectify as if it really mattered, to score a chuckle later? I can’t call it, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter; that gray area between the inadvertent and the inspired is where this show’s brilliance lives.