John Mulaney Just Dropped A Weirdly Personal But Perfectly Accurate Roast of Neil deGrasse Tyson
John Mulaney isn’t a fan of pop science or pop scientists, and he’s not afraid to passive-aggressively say so on his bizarro late-night show while pushing borderline Evangelical dinosaur skepticism.
Tonight’s episode of Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney tackled the topic of paleontology, and, specifically, Mulaney’s question of, “Are dinosaurs put together correctly?” Sporting a pre-show trigger warning indicating that fringe conspiracy theories will feature heavily in the seventh episode of Mulaney’s ongoing live-show experiment, this week’s Everybody’s Live attempted to poke holes in paleontological theories about the dinosaurs’ actual appearance in their lifetimes as reconstructed by their scattered fossils millions of years later. Critically, Netflix streamed this week's Everybody's Live with John Mulaney without a single paleontologist or scientist of any kind present in the studio.
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In his opening monologue, Mulaney fully admitted that the mission statement of tonight’s Everybody’s Live is playfully anti-science, but he also specified that he is anti-scientist on a strangely personal level. Mulaney specifically targeted author and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, joking, “He dresses like he parks cars at the Magic Castle.”
While attempting to ease the audience’s concerns about his devotedly and proudly anti-science thesis for arguably one of the tamer installment’s of Everybody's Live, Mulaney clarified that his skepticism about the arrangement of dinosaur bones in museums isn’t remotely political, even if his acrimony toward the science community (and the very phrase “science community”) is deeply personal.
“Do you want to be less vulnerable, science? Get better messengers,” Mulaney advised the nerds who are undoubtedly seething at the entirety of tonight’s show. “The people they push out there like Bill Nye, and that — don’t get me started on that Neil deGrasse Tyson. He was rude to me once on a podcast, so it’s kinda personal. But, then again, everything’s personal. I just, I don’t know.”
Mulaney declared on Tyson, “Don’t make that guy your front-facing dude,” before destroying the internationally celebrated scientist’s mystical sense of style.
Mulaney seems to be referencing his 2022 appearance on Tyson’s podcast StarTalk Live! with his slight, but it’s unclear what exactly Tyson said to Mulaney during the taping that caused the comic to plot his revenge for the next three years. Maybe Tyson told Mulaney that the Tyrannosaurus Rex really did have tiny arms. Or maybe he just scratched Mulaney’s Chrysler when he went to see Penn & Teller.
