John Mulaney is on something of a comeback tour at the moment, having just launched a new Netflix stand-up special, Baby J—his first, since drawing about a billion headlines with his rehab/divorce/new baby triple act back in 2021. (Which, we remind ourselves, he followed with the fun encore of bringing Dave Chappelle out as a surprise guest at one of his stand-up shows, in the midst of Chappelle’s ongoing criticisms for transphobic material; not a particularly fun time to be a John Mulaney fan, these last couple of years.) Said comeback tour includes doing press for Baby J, obviously, which brought out this weird little tidbit that’s going to be kicking around in our heads for at least a minute: It sounds like John Mulaney was almost the host of The Daily Show in the aftermath of Jon Stewart’s departure from the Comedy Central series.
This is per a podcast interview Mulaney did this week, telling Doug Herzog and Jen Chaney’s Basic! podcast that he was considered for, but ultimately turned down, the job that eventually went to Trevor Noah. Or, as Herzog, who used to run big chunks of Comedy Central parent company Viacom back in the day, put it, “I think we were floating your interest in that and you were very lukewarm.”
Mulaney says that he largely passed on the show because he’d just gotten his ass kicked with Mulaney, his single-season Fox sitcom, now mostly notable for its persistent inability to make John Mulaney or Martin Short seem funny. “I was extremely flattered that y’all were asking me about it,” Mulaney says in the interview, noting that the job was floated to him by then-Comedy Central president Kent Alterman. “It wasn’t the right thing at the moment. I remember saying to Kent, ‘I wish it was five years from now.’ He went ‘Yeah, but it’s not.’”
Mostly, we’re just trying to wrap our heads around what the world would have looked like after seven or eight years of The Daily Show With John Mulaney. Mulaney’s not a political comic, for one thing; it’s hard to imagine what the perspective of his version of the show would have been. (Sillier, certainly, not that Noah couldn’t get pretty silly at times.) Seeing him pointing his observational material in a more topical direction would have been pretty fascinating, true, while seeing him interview political figures and other typical Daily Show guests would just have been weird. (Mulaney can gab, but he’s not necessarily a “give focus to the other participant” type.) In any case, it’s a bizarre counter-factual that we’re (mostly) glad to have missed out on—but one we’re going to be thinking about all day, nevertheless.
