Comedian John Mulaney has had a wild career full of high highs and low lows but he has landed on becoming one of the most interesting people in the comedy field, in large part because of how unconventional his career is but also because of his unique persona and his level of talent.

Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1982, the son of two lawyers in an Irish Catholic family, John Mulaney knew he wanted to be in show business from a young age after watching I Love Lucy reruns (and wanting to be Ricky Ricardo) and he was even performing sketch comedy by the age of seven. That passion continued until he was an adult studying and improvising at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., where he met fellow future comedy stars Nick Kroll and Mike Birbiglia.

After graduating from Georgetown in 2004, Mulaney pursued a comedy career in New York City where he landed an office assistant job at the TV cable network Comedy Central. Around this time he also started gaining some stage experience touring with Birbiglia. Mulaney would later collaborate on stage with comedians like Pete Davidson, Jon Stewart and Fred Armisen but one of his most famous stage collaborations would be with Nick Kroll. Since the early 2000s, Mulaney and Kroll have been performing as the elderly New Yorkers George St. Geegland and Gil Faizon. These two characters were popularized on Kroll’s Comedy Central sketch series Kroll Show, and they eventually became best known for the 2016 Broadway play Oh, Hello. A recorded version of that show was released as a special on Netflix in 2017 and it featured a few guest appearances from celebrities like Steve Martin and Matthew Broderick. Plus George and Gil can be heard together in the eight-episode podcast Oh, Hello: The P’dcast (2020) and they have made appearances on MTV, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Comedy Bang! Bang!, Conan, Chelsea and Portlandia.

A performance on an episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien led to an opportunity to audition for Saturday Night Live in 2008, the same year that Nick Kroll, Donald Glover, Ellie Kemper, T.J. Miller and Bobby Moynihan also auditioned. While Moynihan was chosen to be a cast member, Mulaney was hired as an opening monologue writer, although his biggest claim to fame was definitely co-creating and co-writing for the recurring character Stefon with cast member Bill Hader. The New York clubgoer would end up becoming one of the most popular and also one of the most funny characters on the show.

During Mulaney’s period as a writer on SNL, which was from 2008 to 2013, the show’s writing staff was nominated for Emmys several times, and Mulaney even won an Emmy for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics in 2011 alongside Justin Timberlake, Seth Meyers and Katreese Barnes for co-writing the song Timberlake sings during his monologue in the Season 36 finale. Two years earlier in 2009, Mulaney and the rest of the writing staff had won a Peabody Award for the way they satirized the 2008 U.S. presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain. After leaving the show in 2013, Mulaney would return to host SNL six different times between 2018 and 2024 and become a fan favorite.

The same year that he was hired as a writer on SNL, Mulaney began performing stand-up comedy and headlining his own shows in the same amount of time. His stand-up success during this period led to two Comedy Central specials called The Top Part (2009) and New in Town (2012) and eventually a sitcom deal with FOX for the 2014-15 fall TV season. The show was called Mulaney but it only lasted 13 episodes and received poor reviews from TV critics, some of whom derided it as a less intelligent Seinfeld rip-off. Which is a shame for a show with a cast that included great people like Elliott Gould and Martin Short. It’s also a shame because this was literally my introduction to John Mulaney and it was not a good first impression.

But he redeemed himself the following year when Netflix released one of his biggest hits The Comeback Kid (2015), the critically acclaimed stand-up comedy special that introduced many viewers to Mulaney’s distinct humor and style. Two years after that, Mulaney began his Kid Gorgeous tour, which led to another Netflix special a year later called John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City (2018), another critically acclaimed comedy special which won Mulaney the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special. And a year after that, Mulaney and Netflix went in a more unique direction with John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch (2019), a children’s musical comedy special inspired by shows like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that features fifteen child actors as well as some celebrity cameos. Critics praised the special for the way it parodied educational children’s shows while at the same time being the perfect example of one.

John Mulaney also made guest appearances in TV shows like The Jim Gaffigan Show, Difficult People, Crashing, Dickinson, The Bear and Poker Face and he also voiced animated characters in Ugly Americans, Big Mouth, Animals, The Simpsons and Human Resources as well as voicing Spider-Ham in Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), Chip in the Disney+ film Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) and “Big” Jack Horner in DreamWorks Animation’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022).

Even through his screen stardom he continued to write on projects like the variety series Maya & Marty and the mockumentary anthology series Documentary Now!, for which he wrote many of that show’s best and most acclaimed episodes, also contributing songs with Seth Meyers to the 2019 episode “Original Cast Album: Co-Op” about a fictional 1970s Broadway musical.

One of his stand-up tours John Mulaney: From Scratch, which later morphed into the 2023 Netflix special John Mulaney: Baby J, was unique, not because it was wildly different from his previous comedy specials humor-wise but because the subject matter was so different. It all started in 2020 when Mulaney checked in to a drug rehabilitation facility for treatment for his prescription drug abuse and addiction to alcohol and cocaine, which got so bad that it led several of his comedian friends to stage an intervention. Mulaney jokes about all this in Baby J to typically hilarious but surprisingly forthright results, with some critics comparing it to Richard Pryor’s 1982 special Live on the Sunset Strip for the honesty and the details of his drug problems, which had been a struggle for Mulaney since before 2005, which is the year he first got sober before eventually relapsing in 2020 (regular readers of this blog may remember that I selected Baby J for my Best Entertainment of 2023 list, so you know I loved it).

As if his career wasn’t amazing enough, Mulaney once again teamed up with Netflix in 2024 for a six-episode talk show called John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A., which features monologues, guests, sketches, music and field pieces just like most American talk shows and it received positive reviews for its nonsensical but charming presentation, but it led to an even wilder talk show in 2025 called Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney which is a rare case of a Netflix series actually streaming live. The show has been compared to Conan O’Brien’s absurdist humor of the nineties but with a very Mulaney sensibility and often a heavy dose of chaotic but funny shenanigans that can only come from live television.

John Mulaney takes many familiar things about the talk show format but presents them in his own way, which is something that he does in stand-up as well. The fact that he sounds like some news reporter straight out of the early 20th century every time he talks is a bonus (although it definitely enhances the humor at times), but the simple thing I like about him the most is the fact that he makes me laugh so hard and so consistently. And I think irony might have something to do with that. Because the first thing I picture when I think about the funniest comedians is never “conventionally attractive guy in a suit.” But that’s kind of part of the joke.