John Mulaney: “If you don’t seem like you care, why should they care?”
Get in touch with your exasperation, explain why you're talking about a subject, and show the crowd you truly care about it.
What advice does John Mulaney have on writing jokes?
Find things you have strong takes on (even if they’re stupid or random).
Get in touch with that exasperation onstage.
Clearly explain why you’re talking about the subject.
Show the crowd you’re white-hot mad about it.
We’ll get to that, but first, some backstory: The recent hubbub about Don’t Worry Darling had me thinking about Mulaney because 1) Nick Kroll is involved and 2) it reminds me of Mulaney’s great bit on big action movies (from The Top Part).
It's funny to me over the summer when these big Blockbuster Action movies come out, and you read about one movie, one of these movies, and it'll say that it cost something like 100 million dollars, because whenever I read that, I think like, "Yeah, you didn't need to make a movie with that money. I would have bought a ticket just to see 100 million dollars." Like, I am at a point in my life where I would wait on a line just to look at that much cash. Like you could just stack it up in a motel room and line us up down the hall. You put some guy out front in a straw hat that's like, "It is 8 dollars to see the 100 million, or 10 dollars to have your money added to the 100 million." Ooh, very luxurious!
But think about it. That would be entertaining, you know? You'd go into this room and there'd be like stacks of hundred dollar bills, and jewelry, and gold coins spilling out of a pirate chest, because pirates never bring a big enough chest. In pictures, their gold coins are always overflowing, and they can't get the lid closed. Why is that? I think that maybe with the eye patches, they have poor depth perception.
Love the pirate/depth perception twist at the end.
Mulaney actually talked about cracking the code of his movie bit on the Good One podcast. The problem with his original approach? It was too conceptual:
When I started it, it was phrased much more conceptually. Like, “You know how movies cost a hundred million? What if you could see the money?” I know it seems like a small difference, but it was like, “Here’s a premise”…It was about just getting back to why I first thought of it: “Aren’t people just impressed by the feat of getting that much money together?” Which is where it came from. The way I used to deliver it was like, “What if instead of a movie you saw the money?” It’s a small difference, but I just like getting in touch with a little bit of exasperation I had of like when a big movie would get a bad review. It’s like, “Aren’t you just impressed that they did it? And they made a fake spaceship and stuff and had helmets on?”…It made a big difference laying that groundwork so people know what I mean, and then I can get into like, a carnival barker and a pirate chest joke…“This is why we’re here” is a big thing to learn for jokes because you can have great tags to jokes, they can finish strong, they can have like little bits of texture and cleverness in them, but if people don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re just done.
He goes on to explain the importance of showing the crowd how much you care:
They perceive it as, “For better or worse, this gentleman is super worked up about this, so we will listen.” Like, “At this moment, in this club, this is very important to this young man, and he seems to be very exasperated about it, so I’ll listen.” Like, if someone’s screaming on the street, you just pay attention because, “What is he so worked up about?” Even if it’s that someone tied up a bike in front of his house…Everything I had done since then, I thought, “If you don’t care, or if you don’t seem like you care, why should they care?” You know, you’re the one with the microphone for some reason, and they’re sitting there in chairs listening to you for some reason, so you better act like you care about this. I started to pick things that I had more strong takes on, as stupid or random as they may be…It’s like, “Yeah, it’s all the same person who’s weirdly angry about certain things.” It just maybe comes out more and more or shows itself in laughing at how absurd things are or just still being white-hot mad about it.
Right on.
P.S. This is such a great Mulaney line from earlier in that track:
I don't like people lumping in Scarface with better movies. I have friends that'll be like "Yeah, I love movies that are like The Godfather and Scarface." "Oh yeah? Well my favorite foods are lobster and skittles. Those are equal in my eyes."
Related: Jesse David Fox’ Good One Podcast.