The anarchic spirit of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney continued this week, as the comic explained an elaborate bit that would’ve been on the show, but ultimately fell through. Mulaney had been hoping to book Bone Thugs-N-Harmony as part of a joke about comforting Richard Kind over the loss of his pet tortoise. (“I cannot overstate how popular [‘Tha Crossroads’] was with horned-up junior high kids at Catholic schools to grind with each other during the Clinton administration.”) Alas, things did not go exactly as planned.
You can hear the host tell the full tale in the video below, but to sum up: the Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney team reached out to who they thought was the manager of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, whose contact they found “online.” They believed the group had been booked as of early March, but Mulaney ran into some obstacles with this so-called manager in the ensuing weeks, including increasingly absurd financial demands that required him to get $2,800 cash from the bank (and due to safeguards for his sobriety, Mulaney had to ask his wife for the money). When the “manager” asked for $100k the week before they were scheduled to appear, the show pulled the plug. Mulaney then realized he probably wasn’t talking to the actual manager of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony: “In fact, several sites list a different person,” he admitted. And honestly, kudos to Mulaney for owning up to (almost) getting scammed on live television, rather than just writing about it for The Cut like everyone else.
Mulaney encouraged the real Bone Thugs-N-Harmony to call into the show to “clear this up.” Of course, later when he was taking phone calls, he hung up on one viewer immediately because he simply “didn’t like that energy at all.” But then: “Oh no, he might’ve been in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony!” Mulaney realized. “I gotta start asking.”
As a coda to the story, Stereogum‘s Scott Lapatine apparently sent a direct message to Bizzy Bone (whom the fake manager claimed would not appear with the rest of the Bones) on Instagram asking if the rapper had seen Mulaney’s shout-out. “Whose that?” Bizzy Bone responded. It’s hard to believe that in this saga no one from Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney thought to DM the group members themselves. “Can you get me his number?” Mulaney asked Lapatine on Twitter/X. Maybe they can still make this link up happen someday.
