In his uncharacteristically outstanding Season 52 outing, Mulaney played the top-hatted, whip-wielding proprietor of one of NYC’s about-to-go-belatedly-extinct Central Park horse-drawn carriages. Ushering a pair of tourists into his roving death and torture machine after griping that his livelihood has been cut off just because of “animal cruelty and human murder,” Mulaney threw to a succession of show tunes, all cheekily adapted to the experience of a stroll through Central Park. (As Kam Patterson’s New Jersey rider states, “We just want to travel at the speed of walking but the entire time smell horse poop.”)
Three mangy squirrels/raccoons sang about the “Little Park of Horrors,” while Tommy Brennan’s suddenly triumphant pedicab driver sang an Annie Get Your Gun duet with Mulaney about both conveyances’ equal ability to run down pedestrians. James Austin Johnson’s happy Strand bookshop-toted “Park Slope cuck” and Jeremy Culhane’s irate billionaire sang conflicting versions of “A Boy Named Mamdani” (damn that pied-à-terre tax!), while Kenan’s crooning cloud of weed smoke serenaded the riders and a truly impressive Veronika Slowikoska pulled off some Streisand as the last straggling New York Marathon runner.
The show-stopper (at least when it comes to rapturous, flow-clogging audience applause) was the visiting Bowen Yang’s appearance as Oh, Mary!‘s “Mary Tood Lincoln Tunnel,” manically singing about how difficult she’s going to make it for those poor out-of-staters to get through her, um, petticoats. As ever, it’s a hoot to watch Saturday Night Live lay out the musical red carpet for former writer Mulaney, throwing exorbitant money at his latest Broadway paean to the little stuff around town that pisses him off.
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