The Top Part

John Mulaney arrived fully formed. The undisputed anchor of his debut album is a story about subjecting a Chicago diner to Tom Jones’s “What’s New Pussycat?” twenty-one times in a row. It is a tightly calibrated piece of narrative comedy that relies entirely on pacing, laying out the exact psychological toll a jukebox can inflict on a room full of strangers trying to eat lunch.

Released in 2009, The Top Part was recorded at the Punch Line in San Francisco the previous November. Mulaney was in his mid-twenties and working as a writer at Saturday Night Live, but his stage persona already felt like a throwback. The tracklist introduces early staples like a structural analysis of Law & Order: SVU, stories of blacking out while drinking, and a theory about Donald Trump being what a hobo imagines a rich person to be.