The episode topics on Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney may seem random, but the comedian has been mulling over at least one of them for the better part of a decade.
As John Mulaney revealed at the end of last week’s show, this Wednesday’s episode will tackle “whether dinosaurs are put together correctly.”
The comic was first heard broaching the topic in character as George St. Geegland, his character from Oh, Hello, in a discussion with John Oliver with at New York City’s 92nd Street Y in 2017.
“Do you think dinosaurs are put together correctly?,” Mulaney’s Geegland asked Oliver. “You’re smart, what do you think?” Geegland took issue in particular with the T-Rex: “He’s this big f*cking stud, but then he’s got these little arms. I bet they found two arms in the hole after they put him together.”
But the dinosaur obsession extends beyond hia fictional character, to Mulaney’s real-life self (or at least his standup persona).
The comic also riffed on the topic during his 2022 “From Scratch” tour, as a review in The California Aggie recounted. “I imagine after the scientists have finished assembling a dinosaur skeleton, they discover two small bones that they missed and they just put it on a T.Rex,” the UC Davis newspaper quoted the comic saying. Mulaney, it said, joked that the fish arrangements of dinosaur skeletons has made him indifferent to science.
Mulaney’s not wrong. Experts say there’s no way to know whether paleontologists have reconstructed dinosaurs with 100% accuracy. Scientists have misinterpreted fossil evidence before, leading to incorrect depictions of how dinosaurs appeared. “Palaeoart images of dinosaurs are only ever as accurate as the fossil evidence available,” London’s Natural History Museum points out.
Thankfully, Mulaney will have an expert on hand to sort it all out. In addition to previously announced guests Conan O’Brien, Ayo Edebiri, and Rita Moreno, on Monday the Netflix show added paleontologist Dr. Luis Chiappe to the panel. Chiappe serves as curator of the Dinosaur Institute at Los Angeles’ Natural History Museum.
