Everybody’s Live Lands Another Late-Night Legend in Conan O’Brien

For the second week in a row, John Mulaney booked an appearance from one of his late-night comedic forebears.

Having David Letterman and now Conan O’Brien on his Everybody’s Live couch allows Mulaney to pay tribute to a pair of the closest inspirations his foray into the talk show genre can claim, with Dave and Conan representing two previous generations of very smart and original comic minds doing deliriously dumb stuff for our entertainment. (And their own.)

If you want to draw distinctions among these three late-night hosts, they come in the degree and quality of ironic goofing on the clichés of the format.

Letterman’s midwestern skepticism of the traditional celebrity-driven interview vehicle emerged straight from the heart of the late-night wars at their most powerful and ubiquitous.

Conan leapt into the fray as the cheeky Harvard kid who, after a rough start, forged his own singular absurdist offramp of Dave’s eccentrically blazed comic trail.

And now Mulaney, freed from his predecessors’ narrower network avenues, takes Netflix’s bottomless streaming cash as a chance to take the late-night chat show further into the wilds.

It’s not that these three didn’t each desperately want to succeed at what they were doing. It’s that they all viewed the late-night format as both foil and launching pad for the sort of idiosyncratic shenanigans they wanted to spring on the unsuspecting TV audience.

For Mulaney, those shenanigans are even less concerned with pleasing his corporate masters (and they are reportedly not all that pleased) or even his viewers. There’s an offhandedness to his riffs on the sort of absurd bits that Letterman and O”Brien regularly presented with their put-on version of show biz flourish that, you have to assume, is all part of Mulaney’s own deconstruction of network and audience expectations.

As tonight’s guest and Mulaney’s Big Mouth co-star Ayo Edibiri put it when reading out one of her popular Letterboxd reviews of Everybody’s Live, “This show indulges in falling between keen, deeply specific observational comedy and playful surrealism as it pleases. You can’t put your finger on which way it will go or why, other than he and the writers want to do it, haven’t seen it before, and think it’s funny.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself—though I wouldn’t have had it in me to do that Whitney Houston impression.

Everybody’s Live is, of course, live (it’s not just a clever name), meaning that even Mulaney’s loose plans for an episode can go off the rails.

Tonight, Mulaney waited until halfway through the show to explain the absence of other announced guest Rita Moreno (the iconic actress is apparently not feeling well), while he never addressed his missing other panelist, dinosaur expert Dr. Luis Chiappe, who was announced earlier this week.

Honestly, we could have used the good doctor tonight, as Mulaney’s long-gestating wiseass topic casting a skeptical eye at scientists’ true knowledge of the extinct lizards never quite achieved liftoff.

The show kicked off with a disclaimer assuring viewers that Everybody’s Live is not jumping on the current GOP anti-science bandwagon with all this cheeky shade at those “nerds” smugly asserting their hard-won scientific knowledge. (That whole “fringe scientific theories” disclaimer could basically cover the entire Trump administration’s approach to public health, science help us all.)

And while there’s plenty Mulaney could do with a well-calibrated puncture of scientific consensus concerning piles of scattered, millions-year-old bones, nobody watching was really going to come away from a John Mulaney set with some Joe Rogan-shaped conspiracy goggles.

Still, the recurring jokes about the supposed conspiracy essentially amounted to Mulaney shouting, “Dinos are birds now? C’mon!!,” without ever hooking into a satisfying groove. (Even Mulaney’s filmed visit to a museum full of delicate dino skulls merely saw him making the same joke to some increasingly unamused scientists.)

The best dinosaur bit was the silliest, as a museum’s recorded reconstruction of one dino skeleton’s supposed personality rambled into subjects ranging from dinosaur titties to his own cause of death (Google Michael Douglas’ similarly kooky theory on the root cause of throat cancer).

Which, to be fair, is part of the loose Everybody’s Live nature of things, especially since his callers tonight ranged from a couple of supposed paleontologists who couldn’t get over their own giggles and un-telegenic pauses, a little kid adorably talking about Santa, and a guy who apparently makes a comfortable living writing Hugo-nominated dinosaur erotica. Taking live calls is always hit-or-miss, and tonight neither Mulaney, Edibiri, O’Brien, nor last-second fill-in guest Tina Fey could do much with this crowd.

And to bring it back to Santa, Mulaney announced tonight’s time and temperature in L.A. (a cozy 62) while snow filtered past his studio windows, since this was his Christmas show.

Why? Because, as Mulaney explained, his show won’t be on in December and he feels like it. And so it was, complete with twinkling lights, tinsel, and a disheveled, white-bearded hobo (played with gusto by Mr. Show alum John Ennis) whose threadbare duds proclaim him to be none other than Kris Kringle—with a fentanyl problem.

It’s a lot of conceptual weight to stuff into Everybody’s Live‘s gift sack, the unwieldiness of which Mulaney handwaved by explaining, “Every week we got closer to figuring out what the deal with this show really is, and tonight we’re taking an enormous step backward together with Dinosaur Christmas Party.”

Fair enough, even if the end result was even less cohesive than usual. Maybe losing a show biz legend like Moreno at the last minute is enough to knock Mulaney’s dinosaur-bird-powered sleigh just enough off its course.

Which isn’t to say that this episode was without some seriously weird laughs. Sidekick Richard Kind continues to earn his keep, here launching into a profane attack on the sketchy Santa, warning, “You get him back on the needle, you f*ck this up for the rest of us, I will f*ck you up, man.”

Mulaney, too, kept things on the dark side by joking that the episode’s original theme had been “The pope is still alive,” and swerving into an analogy about the other recent death of Gene Hackman and his wife.

And a filmed focus group continued the trend of indulging some truly eccentric writers’ room ideas by bringing together an army of stunt players from Terminator 2 to share on-set anecdotes and do their impressions of Arnold Schwarzenegger getting in a jacuzzi. (Oh, and a couple of the Willy Lomans from a few episodes ago were there too, since, according to Mulaney, their rides never showed up.)

With Conan in the house, Mulaney did veer perilously close to actual sincerity at times. Calling O’Brien “an absolute hero of mine,” and reminiscing about a favorite bit involving Late Night‘s week-long pursuit of then 70-year-old Sanford and Son character actor Whitman Mayo for a guest spot, Mulaney, as he did with Letterman last week, allowed his ironic mask to slip just a bit.

He did defuse all that mushy stuff by having Ennis emerge with Mulaney’s gushing handwritten thank you note to O’Brien, which the scabrous Santa had swiped from the green room.

In the end, this was just another episode of Everybody’s Live—deceptively thrown together, slyly subversive, and intermittently hilarious and inspired. Hunting for clues as to Mulaney’s mission and method leads us to scan the host’s clear and amused enthusiasm for tonight’s typically outré musical guest, Candian punkers METZ .

Mulaney beams as he proclaims the band one of his favorites ever, their “one night only” reunion following their announced 2024 hiatus just another stunt John Mulany was able to pull together, just because he could. It’s that sort of show.