John Mulaney’s Ex-Fans Still Can’t Get Over His Divorce
Three years after his divorce, the internet’s ex-boyfriend is, somehow, still in the doghouse.
Before John Mulaney checked into rehab for drug addiction in late 2020, the lauded Saturday Night Live veteran and stand-up superstar’s public image was that of a squeaky-clean, high-energy and impeccably dressed showman who merged the pageantry and formality of old-school Tonight Show comics with a contemporary boyishness that stole the hearts of the Tumblr generation.
Unlike the fandoms of any one of his comedy colleagues, Mulaney’s massive following included a large contingency of terminally online Millennial-to-Gen-Z women who had formed a parasocial relationship with his stand-up persona while missing many of the hints that Mulaney himself had dropped to indicate that the handsome, puckish performer’s personal life wasn’t nearly as cheery as his onstage demeanor. In early 2021, Mulaney divorced multimedia artist Anna Marie Tendler after years of mining their seemingly healthy relationship for material in his stand-up specials.
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On Tuesday, Tendler released her memoir, titled, Men Have Called Her Crazy, which coincided with the official Late Night with Seth Meyers YouTube account posting clips from Mulaney’s appearance on the previous night’s show. Apparently, that completely innocuous coincidence was a little too suspicious for many of Mulaney’s former fans who quickly took to Twitter to cry “conspiracy!” over the comedian daring to tell Meyers that he and his wife Olivia Munn shop at H Mart.
According to the reviews of Men Have Called Her Crazy, Tendler's “tell-all” is decidedly light on dirty details about Mulaney’s personal life or his potential misdeeds during their separation and divorce. In fact, Tendler barely makes mention of her famous ex-husband at all in the memoir, much to the disappointment of Mulaney’s scorned female fans who had hoped that Men Have Called Her Crazy would offer more opportunities for them to project their own past relationship problems onto their former celebrity crush’s personal life.
Meanwhile, Mulaney's appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers the night before Tendler’s book release was similarly undramatic. The two old friends simply riffed on the differences between Mulaney’s stiff, repressed, Irish-Catholic upbringing and Munn’s more blunt Vietnamese-Chinese family, with Mulaney noting that he wouldn’t be able to perform his pitch-perfect impression of his new mother-in-law on NBC without ending his career.
Clearly, there’s no secret connection between the release date of Men Have Called Her Crazy and Mulaney making his umpteenth appearance on Late Night the previous evening, but that’s not stopping a subsection of Twitter from digging even further into their stance on Mulaney’s first marriage. Of course, the majority of Twitter users who pay close attention to Mulaney’s life and career are not in that group, and they continue to defend the New in Town comedian in his new chapter despite the frankly insane insistence from some that Mulaney “will not be seeing heaven!”
Ultimately, all online conversations about Mulaney’s private life — especially threads concerning his family — seem needless and invasive considering the fact that absolutely nobody who is currently arguing about his divorce on Twitter has ever met Mulaney or Tendler in real life. But for all the brilliant specials and hilarious scripts Mulaney continues to produce, there is an inextricable part of Mulaney’s public image that the parasocial relationships formed by a startling number of women and girls in the mid-2010s will always influence.
Thankfully, the tabloids’ second-favorite stand-up behind Pete Davidson seems utterly unphased. After all, Mulaney once bought a brand-new Rolex, pawned it for a $9,000 loss, used the remaining cash on cocaine and then told Netflix the entire story. A couple mean tweets can’t ruin his day, unlike how a slightly boring Late Night interview seemed to derail his haters’.
