Late Night Last Week: Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney Hits Must Watch Status
Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney is rocking and rolling. The Wednesday, April 16 episode featured one of the show’s best bits yet. Throughout the broadcast, John Mulaney cut to a group of 24 men, each wearing a shirt that revealed their respective heights, ranging from five to seven feet. The goal: achieve the perfect diagonal by lining up the men from shortest to tallest.
But there was a challenge, too, Mulaney explained. Men often have a hard time coming to terms with their height. Thus, one of the goals of the evening was for the men to come out, so to speak, and embrace who they truly are as part of the “#KnowYourH” campaign. “Many men become emotional when learning their height,” Mulaney said. “So psychiatric counselors are standing by.” Mulaney, the host confessed, was proud of these men.
The gathering was part of the show’s theme of “Heights.” It was a brilliant bit with a hilarious payoff. And no one summed it up better than one of the show’s guests, David Letterman. “I am so excited. I used to do a television show, and every now and then we’d come up with a lame premise, like the height deal,” Letterman said, genuinely amused and happy. “I am thrilled and stunned that it’s working so well. Congratulations.”
What’s better than that?
That Letterman was the guest on this night was a moment of comedy serendipity. The bit is precisely the kind that Letterman and his team at Late Night, and then later The Late Show, first brought to the genre. While on the couch chatting with Mulaney, Letterman gleefully remembered that on his show, they would often announce the collective weight of the audience. Mulaney asked whether it was a real number. Letterman said it was genuine the first few nights, but then the intern decided it was a waste of time and decided to make it up.
To say there is no one like Letterman on late night today would be an understatement: there is no one even trying to be like him. There is little innovation, few resources dedicated to bits and taking risks, especially on network television. It’s still early, but if there is anyone ready to take over the mantle from Letterman, the one that Conan O’Brien for years carried across channels, it seems Mulaney is ready.
The Richard Kind of It All
When Everybody’s Live returned this year, the big question was this: what would be done with Richard Kind? As the sidekick/announcer to Mulaney on the show, it seemed that Kind was perhaps too big a talent to merely introduce the host and throw in a few one-liners now and again. Figuring out how best to use Kind would be key to the show’s success.
Well, on the April 16 episode, we got further evidence that Kind himself is hitting his stride on the program. Taking on the role of the show’s ombudsman, Kind at one point chimed in to inform Mulaney that he was being a bit of a, well, brat. “You know, and if you were any more of a brat,” Kind said with a chuckle, turning towards the audience, “you would be hanging with Charlie XCX.” Absolute silence.
“Wow,” Mulaney said. “That was rough.”
Kind began to beat himself up, claiming that the writers had led him astray, assuring that such a joke would be a “cultural moment.” They had even recorded a “Behind the Scenes” featurette on the writing of the joke, which Kind then played. In the featurette, writers Rajat Suresh and Jeremy Levick tell the story of how they came up with such a brilliant idea. “I think there is no Charlie XCX joke,” Jeremy says, “without living in an age of the clown-philosopher.”
At one point, Rajat comes clean about being in a dark place while writing the joke. He was responsible for a “pretty famous celebrity death,” he reveals. “We offer counseling to everyone who works on the show,” Mulaney says in a cutaway, “and to their credit, they’ve refused it.”
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