“There’s a dignity to this,” John Mulaney said in the penultimate episode of his talk show, “Everybody’s Live,” while preparing to fight three 14-year-olds live on Netflix.
Time will tell if there is dignity to be found in what occurred during the show’s teen-themed finale, but for the past month, Mulaney promised the world that he would fight three teenagers, and no one can say that he didn’t. Ben, Jacob, and Adarsh (last names withheld for legal reasons) could not have been more serious about the task at hand, and together they achieved something that should strike fear into the hearts of Hollywood.
“The worst part of fighting is knowing you gotta fight,” said guest Adam Sandler, and Mulaney quickly agreed, sharing that he was already thinking about the confrontation which would not occur for close to an hour. Indeed, for the rest of the episode, when there was even the slightest breath in conversation, viewers may have glimpsed a darkness in Mulaney’s eyes, as if part of him was somewhere else… (announcer Richard Kind’s lower third was changed to “soon-to-be murder witness”).
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The Opponents
Ben, 5’8″, 140 lbs.; thinks beating up John Mulaney would help his self esteem and popularity and said, “Comin’ for you, John” with a cool point to camera.
Jacob 5’6,” 226 lbs.; extremely confident and believes he is “simply better” than John.
Adarsh, 5’6″, 109 lbs.; trained in taekwondo, wants to prove his haters wrong.
A week prior to the fight, Mulaney’s writers arranged for him to be attacked by three stunt women approximately the size of young boys (but still on average not as big as his opponents). The trio jumped onto his arms and back and eventually dragged him down while shouting abuse like “pussy-ass bitch!” Later, Mulaney claimed to have been emboldened by the simulation, that he felt in control as he went down.
“When you’re fighting you’re not thinking about a thousand things; you’re only thinking about one thing,” he said. Survival.
The Stakes
At the top of the show, Mulaney announced that he would fight three teens “reputationally speaking.” Losing the fight would be a source of mass humiliation for his opponents, dooming their social standing while Mulaney himself can brush off a loss and continue his career unscathed (starting with the Emmys campaign for “Everybody’s Live”).
Stand-up comedy — and performance in general — makes the performer extremely vulnerable, to embarrassment as much as criticism or financial trouble. “I feel like I’ve been embarrassed enough on a large scale. I’m not that embarrassed by anything like this anymore,” he said.
But he had everything to lose, and they had nothing.
“John, I came here to warn you not to fight those three 14-year old boys,” his future self (Peter Gallagher) warned in the May 22 episode, calling it “the biggest mistake of our lives.” “Things get very, very bad for us when that happens.”
The Rules
No punching, no kicking, no biting, no gauging, no blood. Headlocks were legal only if an arm could lock around the head. If any one boy tapped out, Mulaney would win — a rule that prompted him to look directly into the eyes of his smallest opponent, Adarsh. Mulaney is a full-time performer, so the boys had to steer clear of his face out of respect — and not hit him in the balls out of, well, safety. As he told the audience at an FYC event in Los Angeles recently, this was meant to be a “brawl” — a messy pile-on with probably a lot of pulling at shirts and hair, but maybe not any long-term damage.
The Predictions
Ahead of the fight, we gathered IndieWire’s “Everybody’s Live” experts to weigh in, who were universally concerned about Mulaney’s safety. Senior Writer Proma Khosla agreed that it would be a pile on, while TV Critic Ben Travers postulated that the teens might form an actual attack plan. “They could be savage, brutal combatants who push the agreed-upon rules to their breaking point, or they could be goofballs who come in with one or two good ideas,” he wrote, probably from a plane somewhere. Editorial Director Kate Erbland shared a harrowing anecdote about the “vicious tendencies of pubescent boys” while stating point blank that the trio would best Mulaney, while Craft Editor Sarah Shachat offered this statement as a dignified abstention:
“Man, the more time passes, the more I come to believe ‘Sorry To Bother You’ wasn’t weird enough.”
Onward!
The Results
As Travers predicted, the fight itself was not the point of all this: It was the buildup, the debates, the speculation.
Kind gave Mulaney a lukewarm introduction before welcoming “the little fellas you came to see!” Ben, Jacob, and Adarsh entered the studio like rock stars, as the audience stood and cheered, greeted them with posters, and Adam Sandler hyped them up over the mic. Mulaney and the boys removed any jewelry ceremonially before entering the ring. All combatants were barefoot and wearing suits, perhaps as a final tribute to Mulaney’s signature stage look (the boys also had on headgear, to protect their developing brains).
Surprisingly, Mulaney’s first move was to run directly at Jacob, his largest opponent. This caused confusion, but freed up Adarsh to attack him from behind and Ben to immediately grab one of Mulaney’s legs. This is the key flaw in Mulaney’s pile-on plan; to control when you go down, you must first be up. He managed to wriggle out of Ben’s grasp while still held by the other two as the four of them rotated around the ring.
There was quite a bit of pushing — given the illegality of most other moves — and a few moments where you can see the boys hold themselves back from hits. Mulaney noted earlier that things happen in the throes of adrenaline, and even with rules in place they were all fighting primal instinct.
After consistently going for Mulaney’s legs, Ben succeeded — he had a plan! — and the trio was able to bring down their elder-millennial opponent, who spent a few seconds trying to crawl out of this predicament before realizing it was impossible. Mulaney tapped out to raucous applause before a final musical performance by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.
Congrats, teens!
“Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney” is now streaming on Netflix.
