John Mulaney Thanks His ‘Fans’ for Being Less Weird About His Second Kid
Having a baby with your committed life partner shouldn’t be “controversial,” but the second one is always a safer bet.
Much more so than most every other stand-up comedian in pop-culture history, the relationships of John Mulaney, both personal and parasocial, are the subject of intense public criticism from a shocking number of complete strangers to the comic. At times, online discussion about Mulaney’s much-publicized divorce from multimedia artist Anna Marie Tendler and his current marriage to actress Olivia Munn overshadows the actual comedy that Mulaney performs onstage and on Netflix shows like tonight’s inaugural episode of Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, the live talk show adaptation of the comic’s one-off Netflix Is a Joke special from last year, John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s In LA.
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In Mulaney’s opening monologue during tonight’s premiere, Netflix’s first live talk show host acknowledged the invasive scrutiny he receives from current and former fans while introducing himself and his current family life, cracking, “I have two children now. One was controversial, the other you all seem to be cool with, so thank you for that.”
In the same monologue, Mulaney also gave his followers an update on the health of his wife and the mother of his children, Munn, detailing how she has already undergone five surgeries in her fight against breast cancer. Mulaney mixed painful accounts of Munn’s hardships with facetious jokes about “cancer brain,” which, as Mulaney clarified, is very different from brain cancer. In a handful of awkwardly funny anecdotes, Mulaney detailed how cancer treatment has affected Munn’s ability to think clearly, leading to some hilarious miscommunications and momentary lapses.
Mulaney’s jokes about his significant others both former and current have been central in his detractors’ attacks on his character, as some former fans retroactively took issue with how he used to make “playfully anti-Semitic” jokes about Tendler, in his own words. Then, when Mulaney commented on the dynamics of Munn’s Vietnamese-Chinese family during a 2024 appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, some online critics accused Mulaney of using his now-wife as an excuse to make racist jokes that he otherwise wouldn’t have been “allowed” to tell.
While Mulaney’s hilarious acknowledgement of the “controversy” that was his first-born child got the biggest laugh of the first night of Everybody's Live with John Mulaney, the host’s playfully indelicate approach to relationship humor will likely continue to incense his sizable hate-following who still haven’t forgiven him for going from Tumblr’s boyfriend to Twitter’s least favorite ex.
