When John Mulaney and Anna Marie Tendler announced their separation in 2021, I was so sure that the comedian and former SNL writer would no longer making any Jewish jokes. Throughout his early comedy specials “New in Town,” “Comeback Kid” and “Kid Gorgeous,” John Mulaney often used his relationship with his then-wife for material. As Emily Burack wrote for Hey Alma in 2018, “Anna is Jewish, John is Catholic, hilarity ensues.”
No more would audiences get infinitely quotable lines like, “My wife is Jewish. She’s a New York Jew. I did it!” and “My wife is a bitch and I like her so much. She is a dynamite, five-foot Jewish bitch and she’s the best.”
Or so I thought! But on his new weekly late night talk show “Everybody’s Live,” John Mulaney has somehow found a way to continue making Jewish jokes.
In last week’s episode about funeral planning, Mulaney used the last bit of his monologue to rail against the reading of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “I didn’t trust diaries. I still don’t. I thought a diary was a thing that you leave behind for people to read after you die. And the reason I thought that was because the first diary I ever heard of in my life — yeah,” Mulaney paused to address the audience as they got wise to where he was going, “was ‘The Diary of Anne Frank.'”
He went on: “And the reason I heard of it was because every teenager in the world reads it in school. It is psychotic. Stop reading this little girl’s — it’s her diary! Anne Frank was murdered by the Nazis and I guarantee you she is more mad that teen boys everywhere are reading her diary every year.”
Mulaney then goes on to make a joke about how most books are about World War II and that parents should tell their kids to decry prying into Anne Frank’s business by holding up the book in school and saying, “This is bullshit!”
And on the second episode of “Everybody’s Live,” which is about cruises, the show inexplicably includes a bit in which Rabbi David Goldstein of Touro Synagogue in New Orleans begins to talk about God and then ultimately gets sidetracked into explaining the plot of the Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington movie “Crimson Tide.”
I have to be honest, the bits are funny and fit perfectly into John Mulaney’s post-rehab “fuck it, I’m going to do the weird bits I think are funny in spite of what audiences and network executives might want” attitude towards his career. But I know for some in the Jewish community this return to Jewish jokes won’t feel totally kosher. In Malkah Bressler’s 2021 article for Hey Alma entitled “John Mulaney’s Jokes About His Jewish Ex-Wife Suddenly Don’t Seem So Funny Anymore,” Bressler discusses how after Mulaney and Tendler’s split, the jokes he made about her in his stand-up feel to her more like exoticization than celebration. With that memory still fresh, I can understand why some would be wary of Mulaney returning to making Jewish jokes.
I’d like to lightly pushback on that perspective. So far, none of these jokes are at the expense of Jews. Perhaps they were even written or pitched by the shows Jewish writers Langston Kerman and Jeremy Levick, or Mulaney’s Jewish collaborator/sidekick on the show, Richard Kind! And particularly in the case of the Anne Frank joke, I think it implicitly points to the idea that “The Diary of Anne Frank” likely isn’t being taught well in most cases, which is a fair (and concerning) point to make. Sure, the premise that Anne Frank didn’t want her diary being read is purposefully obtuse, but so are a lot of Mulaney’s bits. (See: his bit basically saying going to college was a waste in “Kid Gorgeous” or saying he had “a star-studded” intervention in “Baby J.”)
Unless Mulaney really misses the mark or Saymo is revealed to have a wildly antisemitic past, I say: Give one of the most popular and astute comedians in the world a chance!
