John Mulaney’s free-wheeling, ongoing Netflix special Everybody’s in L.A. might want to start informing their guests that they’re being recorded live. On Monday night, Mulaney’s guest Jon Stewart seemed to forget that little detail before possibly defaming the loud-dressing millionaire and Lakers superfan Jimmy Goldstein on stage. Or was it all a bit?
Just like the series premiere on Friday, Monday’s sophomore episode welcomed a beloved comedian to play a notorious Angeleno. First, it was Will Ferrell playing record producer and beret aficionado Lou Adler, and on Monday night, we got Andy Samberg in a long gray wig and a fully bedazzled cowboy get-up that’s a pretty spot-on match for Goldstein’s usual court side attire.
“I know I’m unconventionally handsome,” Samberg-as-Goldstein told his hosts. “Some people might even say I look like a lascivious side character in an Oliver Stone film that gets cross-cut with night footage of a snarling wolf. And people can say their jokes about me, but I think it takes great courage to dress this way.”
ADVERTISEMENT
If that wasn’t harsh enough, Stewart did Samberg one better.
“You know how he made his money?” the former, semi-returned Daily Show host asked Mulaney. “Buying up mobile home parks and jacking the rent up.” Addressing Samberg’s character, he added, “Nothing personal—it’s just, you’re a robber baron.”
Mulaney grinned as he quipped, “Well, as our legal team scrambles… not sure if we’ll get sued by Jimmy Goldstein!”
“Is this live right now?” Stewart asked. “Oops!”
“That’s OK,” Mulaney replied without missing a beat. “You got the coin.”
That’s the kind of unpredictable energy viewers can expect from this comedy special slash weird pseudo-talk show. One minute, Mulaney is pulling down a rolling screen to show us the hot topic behind the episode of the day—in this case, palm trees—and seconds later, he’s letting people phone in live to tell their own stories on the subject. (Last week’s premiere on coyotes featured some harrowing sounding first-hand encounters, all of which Mulaney and Seinfeld addressed with the kind of ironic detachment only seasoned comedians can muster.)
But before we got to any of that, this week opened with an extended sketch that followed announcer Richard Kind to a Mulaney show, in which all he wanted to do was score some acid. His outfit was classic: a tie-dye jacket over a clashing tie-dye shirt. “I hallucinated for seven hours,” Kind told Mulaney of his (I think) fictional high. “I got separated from my friends, and when I came to today, I was doing the SmartLess podcast totally naked.” That’s one way to start the week!
Returning to the palm trees, our host informed the crowd that apparently, these plants are not native to Los Angeles. They were imported more than 100 years ago, and now, they’re dying just in time for the city to host the 2028 Olympics. (“I think the city put in a bid a few years ago to host the ’28 games after exhausting all other ways to make the city unlivable,” Mulaney said.) This week, like last, he welcomed another panel of experts and “experts”—in this case, Stewart and Amanda Begley, who works as the watershed program manager for TreePeople—and conducted some more humorous call-ins, all of which ended with the comedian asking his callers what kind of car they drive before abruptly hanging up.
After the manic high of last week’s premiere, the sophomore episode fell into a slightly less surprising groove. A sketch in which a trio of mental health professionals diagnose comedians with various disorders was a little shaggy and lasted a few beats too long; another gag in which Mulaney tuned into feeds of Everybody’s in L.A. watch parties all over the world seemed to fall completely flat, unless that was the (not very effective) joke.
“It’s not their fault their rooms didn’t look like cartoon versions of their countries,” Mulaney said after hanging up on Zoom calls from internet cafes all over the world, including France, South Africa, and India. If the failure of this bit was the joke, the punchline never quite landed.
That said, other less-than-stellar gambits from last week have started to pay off. The robotic Saymo snack cart that was wheeling around Mulaney’s set last week felt like a half-hearted distraction, but this week, as he and comedians raided it for canned ginger ales in the middle of people’s call-ins, I found myself laughing at the camera’s commitment to framing the distraction as the main attraction.
Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias, this week’s interview subject, was more entertaining than Ray J. was on Friday—probably because he, too, is a comedian. And the show’s brief visit to the Leonardo DiCaprio Computer Center in the The Los Feliz Branch Library is a perfect showcase of L.A.’s (and DiCaprio’s) eccentricity. The one aspect of this show that continues to feel out of place is the musical performance segment; as fun as it was to watch St. Vincent play “Flea” last week and Warren G perform “Regulate” this week, the numbers tend to slow episodes down.
This week’s crown jewel, however, might’ve been a sketch about a fictional new school founded by Terrence Howard—the Terryology Institute for Universal Equations, aka “TIFUQ.” Anyone familiar with Howard’s rant about how straight lines don’t exist and his belief that 1x1=2 likely knows exactly where this is going. For parents who want to set their kids apart academically, why not enroll them at TIFUQ?
“We here at TIFUQ challenge any mathematician, any physicist, any cosmetologist to prove our findings wrong,” says actor Langston Kerman in the sketch, dressed just like Howard at the 2019 Emmys, where he first broke Straight Line-gate. “You can’t because we have an intern who filters out the negative emails.” In conclusion, “your child is never the problem—math is.”
Who will Mulaney’s next victim be? Shaquille O’Neal and the flat-earthers better watch their backs.
