The Comeback Kid

John Mulaney steps onto the stage in a tailored blue suit, ready to talk about the mild humiliations of early adulthood. The posture is as erect and formal as ever, but the material leans into the quiet, weird friction of modern life. He spends a significant chunk of the set discussing his marriage to a woman who does not share his polite, passive Midwestern temperament, the absurdities of the Catholic Church’s updated liturgical phrasing, and a deeply strange pitch meeting that must have occurred before Back to the Future got made.

Filmed at the Chicago Theatre in May 2015, the show arrived shortly after Fox cancelled his self-titled network sitcom after a single, widely panned season. Mulaney uses the title of the hour as a nod to both that television failure and the special’s closing story: a childhood encounter with Bill Clinton at Chicago’s Palmer House hotel. He approaches his own setbacks with the same cheerfully pedantic energy he uses to critique wacky real estate agents and his high-maintenance French bulldog, Petunia.