“I have a girlfriend now myself, which is weird because I’m probably gay based on the way I act and behave and have walked and talked for twenty-eight years,” he says in his 2012 special. He is also thin, tidy, prim, and has joked about how his manner has sometimes been mistaken as gay. (It was hammered by critics and lasted just a season, on Fox, and the production was shuttered early.) Like Seinfeld when he broke through in the eighties, Mulaney is smart, self-assured, apparently well adjusted, and fluent in the vernacular of white middle-class American life. In 2014, Mulaney rather boldly-and, in retrospect, perhaps brazenly-starred in a multi-camera sitcom bearing just his last name, in which he played a standup comedian living in New York. Mulaney is often compared to Jerry Seinfeld, another perpetually fresh-looking and seemingly untroubled performer. “My wife said that walking around with me is like walking around with someone who’s running for the mayor of nothing,” he says. “I don’t look like someone who used to do anything,” he says, and, even when he tells stories of blacking out or ruining parties or mistaking a bottle of perfume for whiskey, the tales sound less squalid than jaunty. When he tells audiences that he used to have a drinking problem, he seems to realize that they are likely to doubt him. “I was hoping that by now I would look older, but it didn’t happen,” he says, in “New in Town,” his special from 2012. Indeed, Mulaney, who is thirty-five, often mocks his youthful appearance. “Thank you for coming to see me.” His politeness is self-effacing and charming, but it’s also part of a stage presence-back straight, eyes wide, head tilted slightly upward to project-that calls to mind a precocious m.c. “I am John Mulaney, nice to meet you,” he says, in a formal, unnecessary bit of introduction-it’s his name on the marquee, after all. He did it a decade ago, when the crowds were small, and does it now, in considerably larger venues, such as Radio City Music Hall, where he recorded his newest special, “Kid Gorgeous,” out this week on Netflix. The comedian John Mulaney makes a point of thanking his audiences several times for coming to see him perform.
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