Still, why the hell not, as Mulaney—there ostensibly to promote his scene-stealing supporting role as improbably porcine superhero Spider-Ham in the animated Marvel mash-up movie Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse—was as effortlessly hilarious as ever. Relating a recent outing to a concert by his beloved Steely Dan (“Hold for applause,” Mulaney quipped every time the venerable pop-jazz fusion outfit was mentioned), Mulaney explained pal Pete Davidson’s perhaps understandable bafflement over just what sort of aging Baby Boomer event the pair found themselves at, turning his anecdote of the evening into a funny little mini-masterpiece of exquisitely delivered incident. (The bored Davidson, irritated at the concertgoers’ grumpy prohibition on dancing, apparently fomented a rebellion of sorts.)

As to the pig portion of his burgeoning career, Mulaney similarly turned his top-secret audition for the part of a 30-year-old comic book parody character into a laughter-filled joyride, culminating in him showing the profanity-filled ad-libs he tried out before the filmmakers told him about the mandated PG rating. “We just wanted you to have fun,” is how Mulaney explained the filmmakers’ indulgence of the comic’s initial spate of irreverent improvs, explaining his own foul-mouthed choices on the nerves of being whisked away to the top-secret audition without any knowledge of just what he was trying out for. “Do you want to be in a movie? We can’t tell you anything about it, and we can’t send you a script,” is how Mulaney says the first contact with the Spider-Verse went, explaining, “Which is how a lot of kidnappings begin.” Sounds like a job for Spider-Ham, all right.