John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s In LA, at times, felt like an all-human (+1 Saymo robot) version of The Muppet Show. One where Mulaney and his clipboard were channeling Kermit the Frog as the host/comedian tried to keep the beat amidst comedic chaos.
A contrast to the polished structure of modern late night, the show—with its fascinating, celebrity-filled panel conversations about palm trees, helicopters, and ghosts—allowed interesting moments to rise to the surface organically across the gauntlet run of six live shows in just eight days, with show writer Langston Kerman telling LateNighter that Mulaney and the writing team found ways to both gamify and steer those conversations and also let the magic happen organically.
“You put Luenell and Pete Davidson and all these big personalities on a couch, and they are going to do what they do. And you sort of have to be on your feet and malleable,” says Kerman. “[Mulaney] is the best at that—of just accepting whatever’s being offered to him, and figuring out a way to navigate it.”
Beyond the panel discussions, there were also some great bits, most notably Kerman’s Terrence Howard “Terryology” learning center recruitment ad—a pitch-perfect piece of satire.
While it may have been Mulaney’s name on the limited late-night series, Kerman shared that the writing process behind the scenes was entirely collaborative.
“Mulaney’s ask of us was not to write to him. It was to write things that we actually thought we wanted to try, or things that we thought could be really interesting that we would be able to take the helm on, because he hired a bunch of producer-level folks who he wanted to be able to activate and say, ‘Hey, go make that thing on your own, and with our money, and our cameras,'” Kerman tells LateNighter of Everybody’s in LA. Though it doesn’t sound like a sketch around Terrence Howard’s New Math was a hard sell, based on Kerman and Mulaney’s shared fascination.
Kerman co-hosts My Momma Told Me, a podcast on Black conspiracy theories, with fellow comic David Gborie where Kerman says they “talk about Terrence Howard almost every day.”
Mulaney, as Kerman points out, is “really into Terrence Howard’s New Math” as well and has crafted material around it before. While their unified desire was clear, the execution wasn’t—at least at first.
“I was going to go into a real L.A. classroom and teach Terrence Howard’s New Math to children,” says Kerman, “like basically take over for the day.”
I ask Kerman, a former teacher, if the intent was to f**k up these young learners with New Math. “Yeah, just ruin lives,” he says, before breaking down the production hurdles inherent with that approach. The solution, suggested by Mulaney—who referenced Sylvan Learning Center and Kumon ads as an inspiration—obviously worked quite well. But best of luck not feeling slightly robbed of the chance to see Kerman teaching a classroom’s worth of kids about the Flower Of Life.
Kerman has been in L.A. for a little less than a decade. It’s his latest stop after growing up in Chicago, moving to Boston and then New York. He earned an MFA in poetry before working as a teacher, comic, actor, and writer.
In his career thus far, the 37-year-old has experienced the high of writing for the 2016 Oscars (a gig that prompted him to quit his part-time job as an educator) and co-created his own show, Peacock’s Bust Down, with fellow comedians Jak Knight, Chris Redd, and Sam Jay. But the lows chase the highs sometimes.
Kerman didn’t get one joke on that aforementioned Oscars broadcast or find a windfall of other opportunities in the immediate aftermath, prompting him to cash in his pension and ponder whether he had quit teaching a little too soon after that $20,000 payday ran out. Bust Down, which debuted in 2022, lasted just one season—though it did come with the benefit of connecting him with Mulaney, who took notice of the show.
“John was so into it that at one point he had sort of reached out, basically being like, ‘Hey, if you guys end up doing a Season 2, I’d love to come on as a producer. Maybe even be your Danny DeVito fifth in an Always Sunny kind of vibe.’ We were like, ‘F**k yeah, that’d be awesome.’ Then Peacock was like, ‘We don’t give a f**k. We’re not doing this ever again.’”
Kerman’s work on Bad Poetry, his new stand-up special, came next—though you might not know it based on the timing. Despite his presence on several Best New Comic lists and his 2018 Comedy Central special Lightskinned Feelings, Kerman struggled to sell the new special to streamers.
In search of a little star power (which is, in and of itself, a sad comment on how hard it is for non-household name comics to become household names), Kerman reached out—cold—to Mulaney, his could’ve-been Bust Down co-star, asking him to produce the special. Mulaney was intrigued.
Eventually, they agreed on a plan: The two comedians would spend time together on the road during Mulaney’s tour. “It wasn’t as much of a deep analysis of my jokes or punching up or fixing as much as it was just hanging and him checking in to see the status of things,” Kerman explains.
When the time came to find a director for the special, Kerman floated some names, but Mulaney volunteered to do it himself (it’s the Emmy-winning comedian’s first time in a directorial role).
Bad Poetry was filmed at Chicago’s Green Mill with about 100 people in the audience and a stage set behind the bar. The look of the special is unique and intentional (and “ridiculously funny,” according to Mulaney). When asked about inspirations for the aesthetic, Kerman instead discusses the specials he did not want to emulate—particularly hyper-intimate, more confessional-type specials like Aziz Ansari’s Nightclub Comedian and Jerrod Carmichael’s Rothaniel. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with those, Kerman clarifies; they’re just not the vibe he was going for.
“I wanted to be able to pull from some of the intimacy without digging too deep into forcing the emotionality out of it,” he says.
Ultimately, the look of Bad Poetry fits the material perfectly and capitalizes on Kerman’s unique comedic voice and compelling backstory. It’s joyous and easy. You’d think that would be a given with a comedy special, but the term is loosely applied now, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s just nice to ride a rolling laugh through a whole special filled with surprising and smart material and a look that isn’t distracting or stale.
As with Mulaney’s comedy, and clearly influenced by Kerman’s past life as a poet, the language is drum-tight, perfected for maximum impact as he talks about heckling amateur softball players while on shrooms, IHOP icon encounters, hating his former students, and the unending glee he gets from screening dating site potentials for his mother-in-law.
Family and Kerman’s role as a father and husband are also recurring themes. But he slyly manages to evade cliché “family guy”-type jokes, mocking the idea that having a kid is the best thing that will ever happen to him. Again the material is personal, but not so much so that it feels invasive or overly intimate, a choice born from the similarities and differences between being a comic and a poet.
“I think that poetry and comedy in a lot of ways have functioned in very similar forms for me,” Kerman says. “It is a lot of narrative, like driving the story through myself, what I’ve experienced, what I’ve seen, what I feel, and then making those stories hyperbolic, and obviously, metaphorical and sort of expansive. What I found in poetry was that oftentimes hyperbole lent itself more toward reflection—and sometimes heaviness or sadness. That didn’t always leave me feeling good at the end of the day.”
All of this is not to say that Kerman’s material is devoid of cathartic moments or personal connections; he just has a very interesting escape hatch. “I think the catharsis of comedy is that I can end it with my dick,” he says, prompting a laugh while making a really good point. “I can kind of just twist all those emotional moments into a dick joke, and still have a lot of those same conversations, but not feel as much of an obligation to a serious important revelation at the end of it.”
What happens next for Kerman is an open question. He’s come this far through the fearlessness of quitting his job to go all-in on comedy, making his pitch to Mulaney, and putting out material that’s fresh and smart while still highly relatable.
Maybe there will be more Everybody’s in LA for Kerman to help write. Mulaney doesn’t seem necessarily opposed to the idea and his schedule is ostensibly clear.
Had Netflix asked for more than the original six episodes, Kerman jokes that he would have “wept” in front of his wife and child, alluding to the gauntlet of doing that much live TV in such a short window. But he believes they could find a way through again. Here’s hoping.
But after seeing Bad Poetry and getting some insight into the specificity of the comic’s storytelling and comedy, it seems just as likely that Kerman might wind up on the panel alongside David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Hader, and some of comedy’s other superstars this time around.
Langston Kerman’s Bad Poetry, directed by John Mulaney, arrives on Netflix on August 20, 2024.
