A Ray Lewis Pep Talk Inspired John Mulaney to Pitch His Failed Sitcom
John Mulaney seems to be figuring something out on his anti-comedy talk show, Everybody’s Live. While refusing to do traditional bits seems to be one of the Netflix show’s meta jokes, the comedian has found a groove telling hilarious showbiz stories at the top of the show. After last week’s bonkers Bone Thugs-N-Harmony tale, Mulaney followed up with a story about a Hall of Fame linebacker giving him a pep talk about his mess of a sitcom.
It’s not a new story — I saw him do the bit in a club back in 2017 — but it delivered just the same. Mulaney told the crowd that after he left Saturday Night Live, he had a sitcom deal with NBC. The comedian shot a pilot for his new show — and the network passed.
What a bummer! Mulaney says he was “so sad” — 31 years old and out of a job. Things were so dire that he took a gig writing an ad for a Madden football video game. “Madden was the number one broadcaster-led video game,” Mulaney bragged, “just ahead of Al Michaels’ Crystal Cave of Secrets Book IV: The Stolen Pearl.”
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Mulaney didn’t know much about football or video games, but why let that stop him? “The ad starred Paul Rudd,” he said, “and a guy named Ray Lewis from the Baltimore Ravens.”
At the time, he confessed, he had no idea who Lewis was. The client wasn’t happy with Mulaney’s script, and the comic couldn’t figure out how to inject his style of humor into the ad. “At one point — this isn’t even a joke — Ray Lewis wins the video game and then he stands up and he dances. And a guy from the NFL ran up to me, and he goes, ‘We can’t have that. That’s a sexual motion,’ Mulaney recalled. “And I was like, ‘Have you had sex?’”
A depressed Mulaney wandered to the food table, “my head hung like a melancholy little Saudi prince who didn’t get Pink to play at his birthday party.” Lewis noticed that the comedian was down and asked him what was wrong. Mulaney told him the whole sad story about the failed comedy show.
“And Ray Lewis said, ‘You must win your crowd.’”
“What?”
“You must win your crowd. When I went through what I went through, I learned I must win my crowd. Goodbye.”
Mulaney had no idea what Lewis was talking about until his agent revealed that Lewis had been wrongfully charged with murder and fined $250,000 by the NFL. Okay, Mulaney got it — NBC rejected him, the NFL rejected Lewis. So the comic went back for more advice. “I was facing suspension,” Lewis explained. “I went out walking one night. I saw a movie marquee. It said Gladiator. I wandered into the theater. The movie told the story of Maximus, a general in the Roman army who was betrayed...”
Lewis went on to describe the entire plot of the movie before he got to his big finish. “Maximus could not defeat the Emperor, but if he won his crowd, he would become the most powerful man in Rome,” he explained. “So when I got back the next season, I played harder than I ever played before, and I took us to the Super Bowl and we won the Super Bowl.”
At that moment, Mulaney decided he needed to live life like Ray Lewis. He called his agents: “I must win my crowd! We have to sell the pilot.”
Reinvigorated, that’s exactly what Mulaney and his agents did, convincing Fox that Mulaney deserved a spot on their sitcom schedule.
“And it was a total fucking unmitigated disaster,” Mulaney concluded. “So if you ever meet Ray Lewis, don’t listen to him.”