When John Mulaney entered an ad hoc boxing ring on Wednesday night, you could be forgiven for sporting a goosebump or two: The world’s foremost elder millennial stand-up comedian was about to battle three 14-year-old boys.
Not because it seemed like he wanted to. (Though it did definitely seem like the kids wanted to.) Not even, really, because it seemed like it would make for good television. Instead, the battle royale during the season finale of Netflix’s Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney was the capstone to three months of Mulaney’s bizarre and oft-entertaining quest to recapture the spontaneity of late night—the way it was before the genre got sanded down into a tidy network TV format.
If you squint, Everybody’s Live looks like classic late night: an opening monologue, a musical act, a quippy sidekick in Richard Kind, celebrities who conscientiously scoot down the couch as their time bantering with Mulaney elapses. But throughout the season—a reboot of sorts of Mulaney’s 2024 six-part special, Everybody's in L.A.—the comedian seemed hell-bent on making the show just about as strange as he could. The result is far more “Conan O’Brien in 1996” than Seth Meyers at any point in the past decade. Mulaney prominently featured a delivery robot that he at one point attempted to get to jump his Mini Cooper, only for it to crash through the window and shower broken glass over an actor sitting inside. He booked guests, including an anesthesiologist and a funeral director, whose obscurity seemed to be an elaborate nose-thumbing toward Netflix corporate. (Even Joan Baez drew the streamer’s wrath: “This is not the show we sold,” a Netflix exec said in response to the season premiere bookings, according to Mulaney himself.) Proclaiming that one episode would be “sunglasses night,” he and the audience donned dark specs throughout the show. He featured an extended musical act by an actor purporting to be Mr. T’s long-suffering wife. He pulled increasingly bizarre stunts like doing an entire episode blindfolded, leaving the main drama to whether he might accidentally step off the edge of the stage even as he snapped at a production assistant that he knew what he was doing. Was any of this explained? No. Of course not.
Then there were the 14-year-olds. If you remember the online discourse from a few weeks back—it’s fine; I don’t either—you might recall a pervasive debate prompt: Could 100 men take down a single gorilla? It was of a kind with other thought exercises turned digital earworms: Could you defeat a bear in hand-to-hand combat (women, collectively: of course not, are you insane? Men, collectively: absolutely yes), say, or would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?
Mulaney has, perhaps, never seen something weird that he didn’t think he could make weirder. And so he pledged to battle a trio of teenage boys, unveiling them—huge smiles, hints of mustaches, promises to take Mulaney down—one by one over the course of several weeks of shows. A week before the fight, Mulaney fought—that is, was roundly defeated by—three petite stunt actors dressed as teens, who interrupted their takedown to shout things like “pussy ass bitch.” He beseeched interested parties, or at least their legal guardians, to make their case in a dedicated inbox: iwanttofightjohnmulaney@gmail.com.
On Wednesday, Mulaney lasted less than a minute before he was pinned to the mat in an unequivocal victory for the youths. The kids, who were dressed in Mulaney’s de facto uniform—a slim-cut dark suit over a dress shirt—for the occasion, looked positively giddy as they wrestled a man nearly three decades their elder. (It is probably telling that culturally we are in a place where Mulaney battling a gorilla would be unconscionable, but Mulaney taking on human children was A-OK. I digress.)
It was outlandish TV that would have stood out as such even if the show weren’t an outlier among other late-night offerings. These days, the late-night hour is more likely to feature Jimmy Fallon playing anodyne party games than it is a petrified host being threatened by a monkey in a dress. As recently as five years ago, Mulaney would have seemed like a shoo-in for the former model: a straight-laced comic with family-friendly jokes and throwback attire. Then came his much-publicized—by Mulaney—descent into addiction, capped by a star-studded 2020 intervention. That episode, and his subsequent stay in rehab and sobriety, were the source material of his last major special, Baby J (released by Netflix, if you’re wondering why the suits have let him go feral on his talk show), and is a regular reference point on Everybody’s Live; in the season’s penultimate episode, he introduced Natasha Lyonne as “the closer at my intervention.”
The fight was a stunt, sure, and one that borrowed more than a little from Andy Kaufman. But Mulaney vs. three kids was undeniably interesting, like so much of what he brought to Netflix throughout the course of the season. It was something that just wouldn’t happen on any other late-night offering, an approach that increasingly made the vehicle appointment viewing: Whatever awkwardness came about from the format, or lack thereof, it was never clear how far Mulaney would take a bit.
After Mulaney lay pinned to a mat while three giggling teenagers swarmed him, it was clear the line, if there is one, has yet to be located.
