Late Night Last Week: John Mulaney Still Not Cruising, Bill Burr on Billionaires, and More

By Will DiGravio  |  March 24, 2025 | 1:30pm
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Late Night Last Week: John Mulaney Still Not Cruising, Bill Burr on Billionaires, and More
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Every week, ​​​​Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. In this week’s late night TV recap, John Mulaney returns for the second episode of Everybody’s Live, Bill Burr swings by The Tonight Show, Lewis Black tackles airline travel, and Michael Kosta visits a luxury doomsday prepper ranch.

Colbert, Tomlinson, Meyers, and Oliver all were off last week, thus ceding some of the late night ground on Wednesday night to the new(ish) guy: John Mulaney, then hosting the second episode of his limited Netflix series, Everybody’s Live. It was about 15 minutes into the show when the great comic said: “Most shows would stop now.”

I was thinking the same thing. “We did two songs,” the host continued, summing up the show thus far. “Richard and I talked twice in two totally different bits where we played totally different energies.” The songs in question were a pair of music performances, first by Kim Gordon, just after an abbreviated monologue, and then another by Kim Deal, who played “Nobody Loves You More” after some banter between Mulaney and his sidekick, Richard Kind. (Gordon and Deal returned at the end of the show to play their Sonic Youth duet “Little Trouble Girl.”)

It was not necessarily that I, a grizzled pro of the late night TV recap wars, wanted the show to stop, it’s just that it truly seemed like it all might come crashing down at any minute. The vibe was somewhat fitting. Each episode of Mulaney’s show has a theme, which, on Wednesday, was “cruise ships.” Jokes about the Titanic were naturally in play.

But it was not until that 15th minute of the show did the admittedly quirky theme of cruise ships surface, when Mulaney welcomed Ben Stiller and cruise industry expert Anne Kalosh to the couch. By this point, the segments felt as if they were mashed together puzzle pieces, not quite fitting. The show has an unnatural rhythm, with swings from great music performances, to Abbott and Costello-style bits, to post-ironic flourishes that remind us that we are, in fact, watching a mess of a talk show. It’s all a bit head-spinning.

Mulaney seems acutely aware when a bit or joke doesn’t work: it plays out across every part of his face and body. But rather than lean in and commit, he seems to (forgive me) abandon ship. He pivots to jokes about the show, glancing at the audience as if to distance himself, to let them know he’s with them. The bit just isn’t sold.

On Wednesday, Bill Burr stopped by The Tonight Show to talk about his upcoming role in Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway. (What a sentence!) Looking good in a suit and tie, Burr had a lot to get off his chest. Lately, he has emerged as the loveable billionaire basher, voicing America’s frustration with this absurd accumulation of wealth. His chat with Jimmy Fallon was no exception.

“Why does Elon Musk dress like he just got out of a Hot Topic?” Burr asked. “I am so sick of that guy trying to rewrite his origin story like he was Matthew McConaughey pulling into the high school.” Burr then went on to reference his recent comments about billionaires. As always, he didn’t mince words. “They’re horrible heartless people,” he observed. “And then for some reason if you say that, you’re like a communist and you’re in bed with the Russians. I don’t get it!” “Shouldn’t you pay your workers?” he asked. Keep going Comrade Bill, keep going!

And now we turn to another angry fellow: Lewis Black, who was on the Wednesday episode of The Daily Show (I swear I watched shows on other days last week) to remind us that, uh, well, it wasn’t so long ago that a bunch of planes just started crashing. Probably not a story we should move on from too quickly. First, Black took a trip down memory lane, to the times when air travel wasn’t insufferable. “People got dressed up. The food was good,” Black recalled. “And if someone put their elbow on your armrest, you could burn it with your cigarette.”

Black made the point that such problems in the skies should not be such a surprise, as America treats its air traffic controllers “like crap.” “Luckily,” Black said, “inbred Freddie Mercury is here to help.” Cut to an image of Musk and a news clip on DOGE cuts. “Good God, Elon. What are you doing? How can I put this in a way you’d understand?” Black asked. “You’re supposed to keep the planes up here,” he explained, lifting his arm straight into the air in salute.

And now we come to Michael Kosta. On the Thursday episode of The Daily Show, Kosta, as he so often does, was ready to talk to us about what matters most: profiting from the end times. He paid a visit to a luxury doomsday prepper ranch, where the rich and powerful can live out the apocalypse in comfort. “In a way,” Kosta asked the owner, “are you kind of hoping there’s a total collapse, just to prove you’re right?”

He then took a tour of the facilities, which, depending on the quality of the room, can cost thousands of dollars per year. At one point, Kosta laid out on the Murphy bed in the penthouse and began screaming, seeing how it would feel to stay there during the apocalypse. “Yeah,” he said, “this feels perfect for the collapse.”

Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic, researcher, and late night comedy columnist, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He’s been writing Paste’s late night TV recaps since 2024. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.

 
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