Nick Kroll and John Mulaney have been indulging in too much tuna for decades now, but in 2020, Mulaney was deep in the throes of drug addiction, and Kroll was “deeply scared he was going to die.” Kroll “produced” the infamous intervention that Mulaney would call the “‘We Are The World’ of alternative comedians,” including Kroll, Seth Meyers, and Fred Armisen, which Kroll discussed on a recent episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.
Kroll opened up about the intervention he held for Mulaney in December 2020, organizing “a bunch of different people together, friends from college,” amid the pandemic to help his friend. He described it as “so scary and brutal to go through” because, at the time, Mulaney was “running around New York City like a true madman, and I was so deeply scared that he was gonna die.” At the time, Mulaney was using and misusing a litany of drugs, including cocaine, Adderall, Xanax, Klonopin, and Percocet, which Mulaney discussed in his 2023 special Baby J.
“You’re all of a sudden going back and being like, ‘Oh, that’s why I’ve had an inconsistent friend for the last X amount of time,'” Kroll told Shepard. “It gives you both empathy for them and also a tremendous amount of anger because they’ve been lying to you.” In that regard, Mulaney sounds like one of his bits about pop music: “I want to write songs for people in their 30s called ‘Tonight’s No Good. How About Wednesday? Oh, you’re in Dallas Wednesday? Let’s Not See Each Other for Eight Months and It Doesn’t Matter at All.'”
After Mulaney’s two months in rehab, Kroll said that the comic was “was still pretty fucking pissed about the intervention” and began making jokes about it on stage, most notably in Baby J. Ultimately, though, Kroll understood that that’s how Mulaney would get through this. “What he’s willing to share is what makes him so fucking funny and dynamic and intoxicating as a performer, that he’s giving you a written version of his life, but he’s giving you access to elements of himself.”
