Nick Kroll Explains Why He Wasn’t Laughing at John Mulaney’s Intervention Jokes
John Mulaney has itted that he’s only alive and sober because his closest friends convinced him to go to rehab, but, apparently, he doesn’t feel compelled to clear new jokes about his life-saving intervention with them — even over Zoom.
Lost in the Mulaney fandom’s obsession with the comic’s formerly chaotic personal life is the impact that Mulaney’s past drug addiction issues had on the people who actually know him, and who didn’t just form a parasocial attachment to the former Tumblr darling based on his clean-cut, cocaine-driven stage presence. As TikTokers continue to debate whether Mulaney deserves eternal damnation for divorcing multimedia artist Anna Marie Tendler after making jokes about her in his hit specials, Mulaney’s closest friends and family still feel the fresh wounds from his tumultuous journey to sobriety that started in 2020, and Mulaney’s decision to incorporate his intervention into a lauded stand-up special didn’t immediately earn any big laughs from the people who were there.
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During a recent appearance on the Baby J, itting that he disliked some of Mulaney’s post-rehab material that came at his expense. As for some of the other intervention participants, I’m sure they weren’t too shocked by Baby J, since it wasn’t the first time they lived through those tense moments on their laptops.
“It was so scary and brutal to go through,” Kroll explained of Mulaney’s intervention to Armchair Expert host Dax Shephard. “He was in New York. I was in L.A. It was at the height of the pandemic. So it was incredibly stressful to be in the midst of that, trying to literally coordinate and produce an intervention, bringing a bunch of people together, friends from college, other close friends.”
Kroll recalled of Mulaney’s behavior in 2020, shortly before the confrontation that would later become comedy gold for the recovering stand-up star, “John was running around New York City like a true man. And I was so deeply scared that he was gonna die.”
As for the intervention itself, Kroll described an obviously tense scene where he grew a deeper understanding of Mulaney’s troubles. “You’re all of a sudden going back and being like, ‘Oh, that’s why I’ve had an inconsistent friend for the last X amount of time,’” Kroll explained. “It gives you both empathy for them and also a tremendous amount of anger because they’ve been lying to you.”
Thankfully, the intervention imparted the importance of recovery on Mulaney, who went straight to rehab from the “friend’s dinner” for which he famously got so dressed up. And, when Mulaney returned from the recovery center, sobriety stuck — but so did some hard feelings. “When he started doing stand-up again, and all of it was about the intervention, he was still pretty fucking pissed,” Kroll said of Mulaney's post-rehab material. “He came back clean, but he was mad at us. And I was like, ‘Oh… I don’t know if I love that joke about me.’”
While he wasn’t crazy about Mulaney name-dropping him in some angry routines, Kroll knew how his friend’s mind works, and he understood that Mulaney had to express his true feelings about the intervention onstage if he wanted to keep making comedy. “Everyone’s process and art is different,” said Kroll. “What makes (Mulaney) so funny and dynamic and intoxicating as a performer is that he’s giving you a written version of his life, access to elements of himself.”
However, Kroll clarified, Mulaney’s Emmy-winning of the intervention isn’t the only side of the story, nor is Mulaney the only one still coming to with the lowest point in his life. “I don’t think people hear enough from the folks who are terrified during these things,” Kroll said of his role in Mulaney’s intervention and recovery. “Addicts talk about their experiences, often in brilliant, stand-up-ready ways. But there are also people in their lives who are just trying to keep them alive. That’s part of the story, too.”
