UPROXX Interview: John Mulaney On ‘Mulaney,’ Louis C.K.’s Advice, And ‘SNL’

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Of all the new shows to premiere this fall, the one that we most want to succeed is Mulaney, which premieres this Sunday on Fox at 9:30 p.m. A large part of that has to do with the show’s star and creator, standup comedian John Mulaney, who you might have noticed we’re pretty big fans of. I spoke to Mulaney in June at the Austin Television Festival about his show, the advice he received from Louis C.K., and his favorite SNL sketches.

UPROXX: Obviously, the show is named after you, so how happy are you that you have a nice last name like Mulaney, and not something like Mulgeech?

Mulaney: I’ve never thought about it as a nice last name.

UPROXX: It could be much worse.

Mulaney: I wonder if I would have changed it. Probably not, because no one really changes their name anymore.

UPROXX: Was it always the plan for the show to be called Mulaney?

Mulaney: There were other names bandied about, but they all had my name in them.

UPROXX: Were they all puns? Or Mulaney’s World?

Mulaney: I was talking to [Andy] Samberg about one called Mulaney Can’t Hang. It’s so lame, but also kind of funny. They were all like that, I guess all titular. What a fun word. I only know it from that Upright Citizens Brigade sketch.

UPROXX: The show was originally going to air on NBC, and when they passed, Fox snagged it. But was it always going to be a multi-cam?

Mulaney: I always wanted it to be multi-cam from the beginning. In the first seeds of the idea, I wanted a live audience, multi-cam show. That was very important for me.

UPROXX: How come?

Mulaney: I really, really liked them. I have such fond memories of watching them, like Cheers and The Cosby Show. They were huge for me. The Golden Girls and Family Ties. I watched every show on TV, and I just love those live-audience moments. I watched a lot of Nick at Nite when I was a kid, and I just really took to it. I like single-cam comedies that have come out in the past 12-15 years, and I just thought it would be cool to try to go back to that with my sensibilities. This might sound like a lofty goal, but I did want fans of my standup, fans of my contemporaries, fans of SNL to see that this type of show maybe could be kind of cool, but also a throwback to the shows I grew up with.

UPROXX: When did you start talking to Lorne about your post-SNL career, leading to this?

Mulaney: I had a couple of offers to do things on cable channels. I had done a special for Comedy Central in 2012, and I had been at SNL, I was in my fourth year. I had so much fun there, but I was thinking about what I’d do next, though, and I was talking to him about some of these table opportunities. I didn’t talk about this with him, but internally, I kind of knew that…I was doing a lot of, and I’m putting this in quotes, “alternative rooms.” I was always the squarest person in the cool room, and alternatively, sometimes the weirder person at the mainstream table. So I thought rather than go to a place to do a show that’s more curated and nuanced, or something, where I don’t think I could make a show like Portlandia that’s anywhere as good as Portlandia, but I did think I would maybe be good at something that was a live performance show, like this sitcom. So I kind of thought, wouldn’t it be funny to take a swing at being on the weird side of mainstream?