Comedian John Mulaney has had a chaotic past couple of years, having spectacularly fallen apart in the public eye via his rehabilitation for drug and alcohol abuse, the collapse of his marriage to now-ex-wife Anna Marie Tendler and his resurrection, of sorts, via the excellent Netflix comedy special Baby J (2023), in which he dives deeply into his issues with drugs—but stays away from touching the ex-wife stuff.
On the latest episode of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, the talk show launched by David Letterman years after the conclusion of his legendary run of the Late Show, Mulaney shared how a well-timed phone call from Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels kept him in line as he worked towards recovery while in rehab.
Mulaney said that Michaels told him: “I knew John Belushi for seven years. I’ve been talking about him for 48 years. That’s the shrapnel that happens when someone goes down like that. John didn’t want to die. He didn’t plan to. Just because it’s a story, just because it’s set in stone like history, people don’t want to die from this.”
Did Michaels’ speech affect Mulaney, Letterman asked? “Thinking about the shrapnel you leave behind that way, yeah,” the comic replied.
“I wrote [Baby J] from a place that would have been helpful to me then [in rehab], which is, ‘This is infuriating,’” Mulaney, describing his own experience, told Letterman. “It’s not immediately great nights of sleep and serenity, not at all. I didn’t wanna hear anything about how…‘Oh, I hit bottom and immediately my friends were there and I was so grateful.’ I had zero gratitude.”
“Was it embarrassing because you had been caught? You had been found out?” Letterman asked.
“Oh yeah, if you tried to hide a drug habit for years successfully, getting found out is quite embarrassing,” Mulaney said. “And then, you’re totally powerless at an intervention… any anti-authority streak in you will come out very hard.”
“Do they try to just knock this out of you [at rehab]?” Letterman asked. “Emotionally, psychologically, intellectually? ‘OK, stop it wise guy. Stop it.’”
“Yeah, the actual detox from drugs was very physically uncomfortable, and I’d been on a lot of benzodiazepine like Xanax and Klonopin and stuff,” Mulaney explained, as the audience listened raptly. “Getting off those can be very rough. So I was in the detox hospital room, and I was grinding my teeth so much that a molar cracked, and I went in to see the doctor. I had been there about four days, and I said to him, ‘I know, but I’m going. I’ve heard every argument you guys have, but I’m going back to New York City.’”
The doctor simply told him, “John, we both know how this movie ends.”
“And that was it,” Mulaney said. “I… just kind of nodded… and went back to my room and stayed.”
