Each night, John Mulaney’s Everybody’s in L.A. loosely organizes itself around a theme. Friday’s premiere of the six-episode Netflix live special was all about coyotes (well, mostly), while Monday’s follow-up tackled palm trees. Tuesday night might’ve been the cleverest theme work yet: While the episode ostensibly about helicopters, Mulaney’s real focus actually seemed to be the late O.J. Simpson, whose infamous Bronco chase was all captured by helicopter.
At first, it seemed like Mulaney would make only a passing reference to O.J. As with each previous episode, Mulaney welcomed a pair of guests after his opening monologue. (“The official bird of California is the quail,” the comedian declared during his solo introduction, “but the official bird of Los Angeles is a helicopter circling an STD billboard.”) Alongside comedian Nate Bargatze, who once faced a helicopter-related incident while taping a special, Mulaney’s second panel guest was Zoey Tur—the journalist-slash-helicopter pilot who captured O.J.’s slow-speed car chase from the sky. If that wasn’t enough, O.J. prosecutor Marcia Clark also showed up later on.
“I caught your criminal,” Zoey told Clark as she arrived.
“I really wish you had,” Clark replied.
“Well,” Mulaney quipped, “it’s all water under the bridge.”
Oh—and did I mention that everyone was wearing sunglasses while all of this was happening?
Our host announced early on during the episode (but certainly not at the very top) that Tuesday was “sunglasses night,” because as Mulaney put it, “everybody loves sunglasses. Even Snoopy wears sunglasses when he’s trying to big-time Charlie Brown and his piece-of-shit friends.” And so, each and every person in the episode was required to wear sunglasses throughout the night, further heightening the absurdity. Even Saymo, the snack robot that wheels around the stage each episode, wore a giant pair.
“David Lynch passed on doing this show,” Mulaney gleefully disclosed at one point, “because he didn’t understand what it was.”
Although O.J. seemed to be the glue holding this episode together, there were, of course, some major digressions. First came a pre-recorded gag modeled after Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show celebrity surprise videos, in which the show asked fans to explain their admiration for a particular A-lister before trotting them out for a heartwarming hug. In Mulaney’s version, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s biggest female fans professed their adoration to a series of cardboard cut-outs only to be surprised with two male comedy writers. To up the ante, the show then offered the fans a second “exciting” surprise, who turned out to be Patton Oswalt. While the women stammered in the face of a celebrity they don’t exactly idolize, on-screen text declared that the show had at least tried to empower women. “What did you do today?”
Oswalt later joined the panel on stage, where he declared upon arrival that there was “a real ‘waiting for the ayahuasca to hit’ energy going on.” Minutes into his appearance, he removed his sunglasses to reveal another pair of sunglasses underneath.
For the second recorded bit of the night, Mulaney enlisted Fred Armisen to conduct an “Old Punks Focus Group” that gathered folks like Fear guitarist Lee Ving, Johnny Ramone’s wife Linda Ramone, Trudie (of Trudie and the Plungers) and Kid Congo Powers to answer questions like “How often do you wash your jeans?” The group was also asked to react to a series of images, like a yacht (“fuck those things,” one member of the group declared) and a photo of Ronald Reagan, which naturally elicited a fair amount of booing.
On stage, the show was perhaps livelier than it’s ever been. (And that’s saying something.) The live call-ins about helicopters were as wild as the coyote anecdotes from last week, and as always, Mulaney made a show of only paying half attention to some of them before hanging up abruptly. Meanwhile, our announcer, Richard Kind, got some of the biggest laughs when he trotted out a “party-starter” card game with ice-breaking questions like “Have you ever gone down on a relative?”, “Do you think LL Cool J is self-conscious about being bald?” and “What is your order at Quiznos?”
And just when I thought I couldn’t be having any more fun, the show proved that I was wrong when I said yesterday that the musical performances are a bit of a drag. Maybe it was the excellent sound quality, or maybe it was the infectious energy of the crowd shots, or maybe it was simply my love for Joyce Manor that made the rock band’s performance so energizing. Whatever it was, their songs “Constant Headache” and “Catalina Fight Song” felt right at home.
If this show accurately reflects what waiting for ayahuasca to hit feels like, maybe that’s not such a bad thing to be.