John Mulaney Was Wrong About Horses in Hospitals

It’s been a big week for John Mulaney, he just announced the birth of his second child, and before that, he made headlines for brutally roasting a conference full of tech bros at a lucrative corporate gig. Now Mulaney’s name has popped up on the internet in relation to a story that he has absolutely no direct involvement in.

As you may recall, one of Mulaney’s very best bits is the “There’s a Horse in the Hospital” routine from 2018’s Kid Gorgeous. The horse metaphor allowed Mulaney to craft the perfect comic encapsulation of what it was like to live through the Trump presidency, and he somehow did it without using the word “Trump” even once. Instead, Mulaney likened life under Trump to the presumed daily chaos one would get when a horse is running loose in a hospital: “It’s never happened before! No one knows what the horse is going to do next, least of all the horse!”

Well, this past weekend, The Nature Is Amazing account on Twitter/X posted a video of a “horse helping people in a hospital” complete with a full-sized equine visiting sick people, all set to vaguely unnerving New Age music.

Perhaps not surprisingly, pretty much every response to the video was Mulaney-related. 

Some people noticed that parts of the video seemed to specifically reflect lines from the stand-up routine. At one point Mulaney notes that not all “horse” updates are bad, necessarily: “The horse used the elevator? I didn’t know he knew how to do that!” Sure enough, in the video we get to see the horse riding in an elevator.

The horse in question (the real one, not the humorous metaphorical one) is named Peyo, and he regularly visits cancer patients in Calais, France. He’s even referred to as “Doctor Peyo,” not because he spent four years at horsey medical school, but because he was given the nickname by adoring hospital staff members.  

According to some reports, “Peyo’s comforting presence is so calming and reassuring that those suffering pain need less medication.” And Peyo isn’t just pulled around by his owner, he’s “free to go wherever he wants” and supposedly seems to be able to detect when people are the sickest. 

Peyo isn’t the only horse visiting hospitals, either, in Texas there’s a miniature therapy horse named Bambi similarly comforting patients. 

So there you go, Mulaney was 100 percent wrong, and downright slanderous. Horses in hospitals do not deserve this cultural stigma, John. 

So, as we rapidly hurdle toward another U.S. election, let’s refrain from comparing Trump to a horse in a hospital because, as you can see, horses in hospitals actually look after people other than themselves. 

You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter (if it still exists by the time you’re reading this).